textfiles/magazines/INTERTEXT/ITv9n2.etx

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InterText Vol. 9, No. 2 / March-April 1999
==========================================

  Contents

    FirstText: Since We Last Spoke... .............. Jason Snell

    Cinderblock ................................. Marcus Eubanks

    The Smart Bomb ............................ Richard K. Weems

    The Waterspout ............................... Redmond James

    Chicken Bone Man ............................ Anna Olswanger

....................................................................
    Editor                                     Assistant Editor
    Jason Snell                                    Geoff Duncan
    jsnell@intertext.com                    geoff@intertext.com
....................................................................
    Submissions Panelists:
    Joe Dudley, Morten Lauritsen, Jason Snell
....................................................................
    Send correspondence to editors@intertext.com or
    intertext@intertext.com
....................................................................
  InterText Vol. 9, No. 2. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published
  electronically on a bi-monthly basis. Reproduction of this magazine
  is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold (either by itself
  or as part of a collection) and the entire text of the issue remains
  unchanged. Copyright 1999 Jason Snell. All stories Copyright 1999 by
  their respective authors. For more information about InterText, send
  a message to info@intertext.com. For submission guidelines, send a
  message to guidelines@intertext.com.
....................................................................



  FirstText: Since We Last Spoke...   by Jason Snell
====================================================
  
  Once upon a time I wrote one of these columns every month, 
  "whether I had anything to say or not," as I said in the most 
  recent one. That was more than a year ago, and plenty of things 
  have changed since then.

  When last I wrote, my wife and I were looking for a new place to 
  live, because she and I had both undergone job changes and we 
  needed to be closer to where she worked. Not only have we made 
  that move, but we've moved since -- this time, to a house we 
  bought a couple of months ago. I'd call buying a house a major 
  life change, and that's just the most recent one.

  When last I wrote, my professional life was in a bit of turmoil. 
  My previous employer, MacUser magazine, had merged with its 
  archrival, Macworld. The resulting magazine (also called 
  Macworld) was still my employer, but I can tell you that things 
  were mighty rocky. You'd think that two organizations with so 
  many similarities -- they covered the same topic, were both 
  monthly magazines owned by large computer-magazine publishing 
  companies -- were pretty much alike. But, in fact, the two 
  magazines and their cultures couldn't have been more different. 
  It led to lots of personality clashes, culture clashes, pain, 
  and suffering. When my uncle (whose company underwent a major 
  business merger a few years earlier) warned me that this merger 
  business wasn't ever easy, he wasn't kidding.

  Now I'm feeling a bit more stable at Macworld, running the 
  magazine's features section. It's a kick to get paid to do what 
  you've always done as a hobby, but it's still enjoyable to 
  branch out and do things that don't involve writing _about_ 
  technology -- that's where InterText and my other online 
  publishing project, TeeVee, come in.

  <http://www.teevee.org/>

  There have been some other momentous changes in the world around 
  me, too. Our friends Adam and Tonya Engst, the publishers of 
  TidBITS, had their first child, Tristan, in January. In addition 
  to being famous for TidBITS and his Internet Starter Kit books, 
  Adam wrote two stories for InterText and still writes for me at 
  Macworld on a semi-regular basis.

  <http://www.tidbits.com/>

  Another longtime Friend of TeeVee -- his stories appeared in our 
  first few issues, he wrote key material for our "theme issue" 
  back in 1994, and he's one of the people who pitch in with 
  TeeVee -- is Greg Knauss. Greg and his wife Joanne also had 
  their first child, Thomas, in January. I guess January's a big 
  time for babies!



  In addition to explaining why I haven't written a column, the 
  other popular InterText column topic is asking for volunteer 
  help. And I don't want to disappoint on that side, especially 
  since we can always use the help.

  InterText is run entirely on a volunteer basis. Nobody gives us 
  money. Geoff Duncan and I edit InterText out of our interest in 
  doing it, and not because we're getting kickbacks from some 
  shadowy investor. It's been that way since we started this eight 
  years ago.

  But as I've said, times change. Neither Geoff nor I have the 
  time to spend on InterText that we did eight years ago. We've 
  gotten some great added help over the years -- most especially 
  the InterText submissions panel, which has been ably led by the 
  generous and wise Joe Dudley. The submissions panel, if you 
  weren't aware, is an ever-changing group of people who receive 
  every single story submitted to InterText, read them, and give 
  each story a rating. The work of that group helps the 
  story-selection process immeasurably, acting as a reality check 
  for me and highlighting stories that they feel really deserve to 
  be seen by InterText's readers.

  Lately that panel's active participants has dwindled quite a 
  bit, so I'm using this part of the column to actively recruit 
  new members. If you're interested in wading through a large 
  volume of story submissions -- 35 per month, on average -- mail 
  <editors@intertext.com> and let us know. Be warned: this isn't 
  an easy job. There's a lot of mail, and to be brutally honest, 
  there are far more weak stories than good ones in the pile. But 
  if you have the time, the disposition, and an inclination to 
  help out InterText, we'd love to have you take a crack at it.

  Likewise, I'd like to appeal to the writers out there to submit 
  their stories to InterText. As always, we still can't pay our 
  writers -- that "no money" thing again, and I'd pay them out of 
  my own pocket if it weren't for this nasty mortgage payment of 
  mine. But I firmly believe that InterText offers a level of 
  exposure that most Internet publications can't provide, and it's 
  my hope that people around the Net see publication in InterText 
  as having some value -- as the members of our submissions panel 
  know, it's not as though we print every story that people send 
  to us. Far from it.

  Finally, I'd like to thank all of our readers, and encourage 
  that you recommend InterText to a friend. We publish the 
  magazine in many forms -- on the Web, in printable PDF and 
  PostScript versions, and even portable PalmPilot and Newton 
  books. There's an InterText edition for everyone out there!


  Jason Snell (jsnell@intertext.com)
------------------------------------

  This week Jason Snell is the features editor at Macworld
  magazine. In what passes for his spare time, he edits
  InterText and TeeVee.


  Cinderblock   by Marcus Eubanks
=================================
....................................................................
  The role of a doctor is to save a patient's life.
  Even if that struggle is futile.
....................................................................

  It's another late afternoon at work, all of us rushing around 
  like mad to get things done so we can sign out to the on-call 
  team and get home. Service on the Intensive Care Unit makes for 
  pretty full days -- not necessarily breakneck pace all the time, 
  but you go directly from one task to the next all the same, with 
  very little downtime.

  My part of the team is composed of three individuals: an 
  upper-year resident; an intern; and me, the medical student. 
  There are three such groups making up the unit team as a whole, 
  in addition to the critical-care nurses and assorted medical 
  techs, without whom the whole works would come to an abrupt, 
  grinding halt. If you do the math, it works out to three or four 
  caregivers for every patient, twenty-four hours a day. The whole 
  circus is overseen by the Attending and the Fellow, who somehow 
  manage to give us enough slack to run things on our own while 
  managing through some arcane trick of omniscience to know 
  everything that transpires even as it goes down.

  The three of us are working our way through the litany of 
  routine afternoon tasks when news comes down from The Powers 
  That Be that we're getting a transfer from an outlying hospital. 
  Word is that the hit will be a 27-year-old shooter with 
  right-sided endocarditis. In itself an infected heart in an 
  intravenous drug user is no big deal. It's serious, don't 
  misunderstand, but not good reason in itself for transfer to our 
  facility.

  The catch is that her course has become complicated by septic 
  emboli to her lungs, which changes the picture dramatically. 
  With all those nasty bacteria in her blood and lungs producing 
  their various toxins, she's developing full-blown ARDS, the 
  adult respiratory distress syndrome. ARDS is bad news -- your 
  lungs suffer some sort of insult which causes the exchange 
  surface to stiffen and swell up, and you die by slow 
  suffocation.

  There's also a brief mention that she might have suffered a 
  miscarriage, but it's unclear if anything has been done to 
  address that aspect of her illness. We're told that her 
  boyfriend was recently diagnosed HIV positive. Before we even 
  see her, it's sounding like a really ugly scene.

  Some hours later, she actually arrives at our hospital. We meet 
  her on the helipad only to discover that she's in the process of 
  dropping her pressures, her sats, and you can bet her level of 
  consciousness. At the time of her arrival she is very nearly in 
  cardiac arrest. We manage to get her to the unit, bagging her 
  all the while, blowing huge volumes of pure oxygen into her 
  lungs with a blue plastic squeeze bulb about the size of a rugby 
  ball. The air goes from the squeeze bulb through a large-bore 
  tube which passes through her mouth and into her trachea.

  "What's her name?" I ask, and amidst the confusion someone from 
  the transport teams shouts, "Carmen." "Okay, Carmen," I tell 
  her, leaning over her face so she can see me. "Try to relax and 
  let us breathe for you."

  She looks terrified out of her mind, eyes wide and jumping 
  around crazily as she attempts to comprehend what is going on. 
  Her blood pressure remains dangerously low, and we consider 
  starting a norepinephrine drip.

  Norepi's interesting stuff -- it's the heart of the rush you get 
  when you nearly fall from a great height, or you come close to 
  killing someone in a blind rage. It does lots of funky things to 
  your body, among them cranking your blood pressure through the 
  roof.

  We get the drip hung just in time for her to start to recover on 
  her own. IV's started, lines working, numbers improving, then 
  the magic word: _Oops._

  "Oops what?" I say, looking up quickly at the nurse who uttered 
  it. "What do you mean, 'oops?'"

  "Well, I just flushed your new IV with norepi," she says, 
  looking sheepish. I look over at the monitor, and the flickering 
  amber numbers there make the fact abundantly clear. It's okay, 
  though -- Carmen is young and resilient. A couple of minutes 
  later her blood pressure backs down out of the stratosphere, and 
  she's looking sort of all right.

  All right is relative, though. She's awake and terribly 
  frightened, but she looks sick. Even though she's very weak, her 
  reflexive efforts to fight us are starting to become an 
  impediment to our various interventions. It soon becomes 
  apparent that we're going to have to put her down.

  Her lungs are in sorry shape indeed, you see, and it turns out 
  that our standard ventilator -- which is a marvel of flexibility 
  and clean design -- simply lacks the brute power to develop 
  enough pressure to inflate them. Her convulsive attempts at 
  breathing are ineffective but are still enough to badly confuse 
  the sophisticated computer which runs the machine, making the 
  problem even worse.

  In other words, for us to be able to manage her dire status we 
  will have to paralyze and sedate her. We give her a bolus of a 
  close relative of curare, and add in a whopping huge dose of one 
  of Valium's myriad offspring. She drifts away from us in a 
  pharmaceutical haze, rapidly becoming oblivious to the gross 
  indignities we are committing upon her.



  The boyfriend tested HIV+, but we're told that Carmen's serology 
  came back negative.

  She has children.

  She also has stiff, horribly damaged lungs. Over the course of 
  time, bacteria from her skin have gained access to her 
  circulation by way of the needles she uses to inject smack or 
  coke or speed or whatever it is that she likes to shoot. 
  Generally speaking, getting a couple of bacteria into your 
  bloodstream isn't such a big deal. You and I probably become 
  transiently bacteremic every time we brush our teeth vigorously; 
  a few bugs making their way from traumatized gums into our 
  blood. Our immune systems laugh at this small invasion, 
  effortlessly clearing it in moments.

  Carmen, on the other hand, has been injecting her circulation 
  with nasty skin bugs in rather large numbers, and has been doing 
  so for quite some time. The critters have taken up residence on 
  the valves of her heart, causing the edges to heap themselves up 
  into little septic mountains. Not only has this rendered the 
  valves useless because they no longer fit together cleanly, but 
  it seems that chunks of septic tissue have broken loose from 
  them to seed her lungs. The bacteria make toxic products, and 
  her own immune system only compounds the damage by trying to 
  kill them off. Immunological warfare is a bloody business: your 
  white blood cells make toxins of their own, all the better to 
  kill with. The problem is that these products are 
  indiscriminate, damaging your own lung tissue as easily as the 
  foreign bacteria.

  "Her lungs are about as flexible as cinderblocks," the Attending 
  tells us one morning on rounds. He is a man of wry wit and an 
  astounding fund of knowledge. The discourse has turned to the 
  perils of high-pressure ventilation, and the woefully few ways 
  of mitigating them.

  A little later, the team is gathered together in one of the 
  reading rooms in the radiology suite to review daily films when 
  the radiologist stops in startled amazement. He turns to look at 
  us with big eyes, his quick repartee momentarily derailed.

  "She's going to pop," he intones, pointing at an x-ray. "Look at 
  these lung bases, here and here. She's a-gonna blow."

  The Attending shakes his head ruefully at the rest of us. He'd 
  told us the same thing upon her arrival a couple of days ago, 
  when he and the Fellow first started jacking up the pressures on 
  the ventilator.



  Forty minutes after rounds, the grim prophesy is fulfilled. 
  Carmen's lungs, after fifty or sixty hours of being subjected to 
  pressures they were never meant to see, develop holes -- at 
  least one on each side. High-pressure jets from these holes 
  cause rapidly growing bubbles of air to collect between the 
  outer surface of the lungs and the inner surface of her chest 
  wall, causing her lungs to collapse. The result is that her 
  usable gas-exchange surface is acutely diminished, and the 
  amount of oxygen entering her blood falls precipitously.

  We have been expecting this, and so the tools are ready, hung 
  from the wall at the head of her bed with thick white bands of 
  silk tape. The Fellow pokes holes in her chest wall with scalpel 
  and hemostat, one on each side. We thread long, flexible tubes 
  through these holes into the offending bubbles, and the air from 
  her thorax comes rushing out in a long quiet sigh. With the next 
  gasp of the ventilator, her lungs reinflate.

  Even with the chest-tubes vented to suction ports on the wall, 
  some of the air escaping her lungs tracks its way through the 
  various tissues of her chest. After a while it starts to show up 
  on the daily x-rays, throwing her musculature into dramatic 
  relief. I can actually feel it when I touch her. When I push 
  down lightly on her skin the sensation returned is that of 
  hundreds of little bubbles popping, which is exactly what is 
  happening. The air begins to track its way down her arms and, 
  grim though it sounds, Carmen begins to take on the appearance 
  of an inflatable toy.



  A couple of nights later we decide that another vascular access 
  might be prudent, so I take it upon myself to obtain one. She's 
  a difficult stick, what with years of sclerosing her veins with 
  the impurities in the drugs she injects, but I somehow manage to 
  get a good line on the second try. Instead of taking pride in my 
  growing skill (or exquisite luck, in this case) I walk away 
  feeling queasy and ill.

  One of the things you try when you have a hard time finding 
  veins is slapping lightly on the patient's arm, as it often 
  makes them stand out a bit more proudly. I try this on Carmen, 
  and it sounds and feels exactly like slapping an air mattress, 
  or one of those rafts you rent at the beach. I do it a couple 
  more times than I really need to, just to convince myself that 
  it isn't all in my head.



  Carmen continues to pop her lungs over the next few days. First 
  two tubes, then three. Next she has four. She's starting to look 
  like -- well, I don't know what she looks like, other than a 
  very, very sick young woman. Metaphor seems inappropriate. I 
  wander into her room late at night when I'm on call, just to 
  look at her. With the sheets freshly changed and drawn up to her 
  chin, I can almost forget the lines and hoses and the insistent 
  cycling of the ventilator. With a bit of imagination I can 
  almost see what she might look like in quiet repose. I can't 
  quite make it, though, because of the trache tube protruding 
  from her throat (placed yesterday so we could get the breathing 
  tube out of her mouth) and because of the feeding tube running 
  into her nose (which I so carefully placed, and then taped just 
  so, so it wouldn't place undue pressure on her nostril and leave 
  a scar) or the fact that she's swollen up, literally turned into 
  a balloon by the subcutaneous air.

  I walk into the room and peer into her face, wondering what 
  surcease from the world her drugs gave her. I look at her, 
  appalled to see someone my age so horribly, direly ill. Carmen 
  is going to die. I know it. We all know it. I catch myself 
  speaking to her softly, telling her to hang on, and then I feel 
  like a complete and utter idiot. We're giving her enough 
  sedative to crush a horse. She's so completely snowed under all 
  of our drugs that I might as well be talking to myself. When it 
  comes down to it, I guess I am. The fact that I've become a 
  parody of the worst medical dramas ever written isn't lost on me 
  either.

  Carmen doesn't so much have lungs anymore as gills. She lives by 
  passive membrane oxygenation, just like a fish. We blow 
  oxygen-rich air into her trachea, it passes over an exchange 
  surface, and then out the chest-tubes into wall suction. The 
  ventilator, a custom European model, hisses continuously day and 
  night sounding like a pathologically pissed-off Kimodo Dragon on 
  amphetamines.



  One afternoon, about three o'clock, her sats start to drop 
  again. We end up bagging her with the blue squeeze bulb while 
  someone calls the Fellow. He rushes into the room, stashing his 
  coffee on the sill outside.

  "I think she's dropped a lung again," I offer.

  "Well jeezus, it doesn't take much of an intuitive leap to 
  figure that out," he says. "The question is where to go in." He 
  is tired and frustrated, having been up all night with someone 
  who had just undergone a lung transplant. He continues, speaking 
  more to himself than anyone else. "Aw man, what an incredible 
  disaster. Talk about a train wreck."

  We get the stat chest x-ray, not to prove that we've blown 
  another hole in her lungs somewhere, but to give us an aiming 
  point. Not too many minutes later we have the information we 
  want, and we start prepping her for her fifth tube.

  "Pretty grim prognosis, huh?" I ask in a dazzling burst of 
  medical-student brilliance, while helping him to set up the 
  sterile field.

  He gives me a ludicrous look, then glances quickly upward as if 
  appealing to the heavens for self-restraint. "Yeah. Like she has 
  a prognosis. Sure."

  He looks down again, continuing to scrub her skin with 
  antibacterial soap. "Do you know how many people there are out 
  there who have survived lung damage like this?"

  I shake my head.

  "None. Zero. Big ol' empty set."

  The conversation in her room has become increasingly macabre in 
  the last couple of days. Various medical students and residents 
  from other services filter in and out, some just to marvel. Word 
  of Carmen has spread, and we take a sort of perverse delight in 
  relating her clinical course to gawking bystanders.

  Placement of the tube is quickly done, as the fellow doesn't 
  bother with an anesthetic, reasoning that she's so heavily 
  sedated that she can't feel anything -- more deeply unconscious 
  than the most profound sleep. This same reasoning has loosened 
  our inhibitions about talking in front of her. Her numbers start 
  to get better, and she goes back on the vent.



  A couple of hours later the surgery resident comes by to place 
  yet another chest tube. We could do it ourselves, but the 
  surgeons do more of them, and often have better luck getting the 
  end of it exactly where it needs to be. He brings his own 
  instruments, and thus is far better equipped than we are when we 
  place the things emergently. He takes time to prep her skin very 
  carefully, then sets about numbing her up with studied 
  thoroughness. One of my classmates points out that the 
  painkiller isn't necessary, as Carmen is getting enough sedative 
  every hour to make any one of us sleep for days. The surgeon 
  looks up briefly, then goes back to work as if he hadn't heard. 
  He works quickly and efficiently, and gets the tube exactly 
  where we want it. He also meticulously re-bandages the other 
  chest tubes.

  I've been trading patter with him throughout the process, and 
  with uncharacteristic bitterness he curses the poverty and ill 
  education which seem to coincide with IV drug use. We speculate 
  back and forth simplistically as to whether a stronger and more 
  coherent family life could prevent this sort of thing, and dream 
  up scenarios of parading kids from nearby high schools through 
  her room to convince them that it can happen to them.



  Carmen now has six good-sized hoses radiating from her chest, 
  three on each side. The water seals gurgle to themselves 
  quietly, adding their commentary to the symphony of sound coming 
  from the assorted machinery which is keeping her alive.

  I'm on call, and around eleven o'clock I wander into her room to 
  see how she's doing. To my complete and utter horror, she's 
  moving her arms and rolling her eyes in pure abject terror.

  "Carmen, honey -- calm down. We're here. It'll be all right," I 
  say, at a loss for anything less trite. I call for the nurse, 
  and he rolls into the room with his trademark swift grin.

  "I await your bidding, O wise one," he cracks, then stops cold 
  when he sees why I called him.

  "Can we crank the sedative up to forty an hour?" I ask him.

  "Yeah, no problem," he says, becoming pure efficient business 
  even as he adjusts the drip. He knows that he can't really take 
  orders from a medical student, but he also knows that neither 
  the resident nor the fellow will give him strife for doing the 
  Right Thing. Carmen is trying to talk to me as I stand there 
  holding her hand, but her words are voiceless because we've put 
  the tracheostomy tube where it belongs, below her vocal cords. 
  Still, I can make out what she's saying almost word for word, 
  and a wave of sympathetic anguish courses through me. The 
  increased dose of sedative takes effect, and she slips away from 
  us once again. We adjust the paralytics, and then I creep off to 
  stare at a blank expanse of wall, unseeing.

  "Carmen woke up last night," I tell the team the next morning on 
  rounds. "She was trying to talk to me." I am strident and 
  depressed, speaking in short staccato sentences.

  "This means she was probably light on sedative all day. It means 
  she probably felt every goddamned thing we did when we put that 
  chest tube in her. That what we were doing amounts to battery. 
  It also means," I stop and stare at each person on the team in 
  turn, "that she probably heard, and quite likely understood 
  everything that was said in her room yesterday."

  My voice is thick. The chief touches her hand to my shoulder 
  quickly, and the Attending looks desperately unhappy.

  "This is why," he says gently, "we shut the paralytics off 
  briefly every day. So we can ensure that our patients are 
  appropriately sedated." He doesn't need to say anything more.



  A couple of afternoons later, the chief tells me to round up my 
  intern and resident and meet the team downstairs to look at 
  x-rays. I find them in the lab and drag them with me to the 
  radiology suite. There we are ten minutes later, wondering what 
  happened to the rest of the group. The entire intensive care 
  unit team is supposed to be reviewing this morning's films with 
  the Attending and the Fellow, but the three of us are the only 
  ones there. I try to page two different residents and get no 
  answer, which is most unusual; the internal medicine types here 
  tend to be pretty good about answering their beepers. They 
  steadfastly refuse to respond, though, and so I sit doodling on 
  the side of a metal rack with a grease pencil meant for marking 
  on radiographs.

  In a fit of black humor I crack, "Maybe Carmen coded."

  My intern grins quickly, then retorts with a vaguely worried 
  look. "Nah, we'd have heard 'em call it overhead."

  Several interminable minutes later, we grow tired of waiting and 
  decide to venture back up to the unit to see what could have 
  delayed the rest of the team.

  Sure enough, there are seven people in Carmen's room, and 
  someone's wheeling in the code-cart even as we arrive.

  "Glory be," I think to myself, stunned. "Yesterday's addled 
  medical student is today's clairvoyant."



  I step into the room to see one person bagging her, another 
  doing chest compressions, and two more -- one at each of her 
  inner thighs -- with long fat needles and very sharp knives. 
  They are probing with the needles deep in the fold of skin where 
  leg becomes groin, right at the edge of her pubic thatch. The 
  team needs large-bore vascular access, and they propose to put a 
  long snakey tube into one of her femoral veins. Their task is 
  complicated by the fact that every time the Fellow pushes on the 
  center of her chest, her whole body moves. Paradoxically they 
  need him to continue because his compressions are the only thing 
  that cause her femoral arteries to pulse, and they need to know 
  where the artery is if they're to find the vein that runs 
  alongside it.

  Codes are dangerous. Obviously they portend Bad Things for the 
  patient, but they can also be actively unsafe for the medical 
  team. There's this crowd of very rushed people, many of whom are 
  wielding needles, scalpels and the like. One unexpected move and 
  someone other than the patient gets cut. These days that cut can 
  be a death sentence; there are lots of nasty infectious bugs 
  who'd love to have a nice relatively healthy host to grow in, 
  and they're all collected en masse on used cutting surfaces 
  hoping to jump ship.



  This is the kind of code that never gets portrayed in television 
  medical dramas. You know how it works on TV: there's a person 
  with paddles in hand, punctuating the strident dialogue with 
  pulses of controlled electrical fire. The patient convulses 
  dramatically, and then wakes up to thank the team for their 
  heroic efforts.

  Carmen's heart isn't in one of the shockable rhythms. The 
  paddles stay ensconced in their little electrified slots. We're 
  just pumping on her chest, getting good vascular access, and 
  giving her potent drugs. No one shouts out, "Clear!" or 
  pleadingly implores the patient, "Come on, damn you, don't 
  quit!" Instead it's the quiet urgency of folks trying to do 
  their part of the job, knowing full well that in this case it's 
  almost certainly a futile pursuit. There are no raised voices, 
  no desperate thumps on the chest. Just protocol.

  Drugs get pushed, and everyone looks at the monitors. The House 
  Chief, who's directing the process, asks that CPR be suspended 
  momentarily to check for a pulse, and to everyone's 
  astonishment, there's one to be found. One of the residents is 
  counting out in clear high tones each time she feels it, 
  "Pulse-- pulse-- pulse--" We continue bagging her, forcing air 
  into her broken lungs with the blue squeeze bulb. We continue to 
  follow the prescribed protocol of drugs.

  Carmen's heart is beating slowly but regularly and we're 
  starting to wonder if she might actually be able to pull out of 
  it. Then the resident who had found it to begin with announces, 
  "I've lost my pulse here." Ten heads swivel to look at the 
  electronic heart trace on the monitors and the House Chief 
  pauses for a second before she says, "Re-start CPR, please."

  Thirty-five minutes later, we've run completely through the 
  algorithm, and continued considerably beyond it. In spite of 
  incredibly aggressive effort on our part, the numbers on the 
  monitor continue their downward trend, refusing to level off for 
  even a few moments.

  "All right," the Chief says quietly. "Let's call it. Any 
  objections?" The room stands mute. We're done. We slowly step 
  away from the bed, reluctant to stop even though we know full 
  well that there's nothing more we can do.



  Some time later, all the lines and tubes are removed and the 
  linens are changed. The curtains inside the huge transparent 
  panels which demarcate each room are drawn. I duck past the 
  curtain to step completely into the room and find that it's 
  totally unfamiliar in its absolute silence. No gurgling water 
  seals for the chest tubes, no crying sigh of the ventilator, 
  nothing. Just pure August sunlight pouring in through 
  plate-glass windows. There she is, calm, and I can think of 
  nothing. Her parents aren't going to come and see her before she 
  goes to the morgue. They only visited once while she was still 
  alive. Her dad tells us on the phone, "Nah... I saw plenty of 
  dead people in 'Nam."

  I can see through the glass that it's a stunning day out. The 
  air is heavy and damp, and when I drive home I'll have to roll 
  up the window on my side of the car so neighborhood kids don't 
  drench me with water from the hydrant they've opened. There's 
  exquisite cold beer in my fridge. I take a last look at Carmen, 
  wordless, and step out of the room to finish up my afternoon.



  Marcus Eubanks (eubanks@riotcentral.com)
------------------------------------------
  Marcus Eubanks is an ER doc in a big hospital in Pittsburgh. His 
  stories have twice been selected to appear in eScene, the Best 
  of Net Fiction anthology at <http://www.escene.org/>.



  The Smart Bomb   by Richard K. Weems
======================================
....................................................................
  You ever have one of those days?
....................................................................

  Glasses perched atop my explosive warhead, I fold the morning 
  paper over itself and await still my morning brisket to reheat. 
  I wish ill things upon this toaster oven, with its sluggish 
  nature and lack of even the slightest sophistication. Still, I 
  will not have a microwave in the place -- such a false fear it 
  is, its radiation harmless though always trying to hum a facade 
  of disaster.

  Roaches crawled about inside the door of the microwave I once 
  had (aptly named Norman). They thrive on those silly little 
  rays; they sprouted new legs and growths and clambered happy as 
  you will when the interior light came on.

  The ones in uniform, milling about in the crawlspace just 
  outside my window, listening to me through devices taped up in 
  every niche of my little home, interrogating my discarded orange 
  rinds with microscopes for the residue of secrets that were 
  shredded when this project got started -- they are documenting 
  my every move.

    07:45:38.2: removes glass, subsequently rubs eye.

    07:45:43.1: looks down approx. 4.7 cm to left of left leg
    to linoleum floor. (The spot there from last night's pasta?)

  They chatter like insects, their proboscises clacking with 
  delicious regularity, when I make the slightest move contrary to 
  their computerized itinerary.

  The news is the same every day -- hell, hand baskets, etc. I am 
  growing convinced that the newspapers are recycling the same 
  pictures using microbit technology. The smiles, for sure, look 
  all the same.

  There is little more to do than await the completion of the 
  brisket and look out the window. A fine view -- I look out into 
  the steel box that encases my abode, its walls a little over a 
  foot from my window. The uniformed ones wriggle along with their 
  gadgets of measurement and detection. When they need to peek 
  through my window, they don plastic eyeglass frames with rubber 
  nose and bushy mustache attached. Either they don't want me to 
  be able to recognize them when I get out of here (and get out of 
  here I must, eventually -- what good is imprisonment without any 
  hope of release?) or the noses are some kind of olfactory 
  enhancement device used to confirm what can only be determined 
  by smell.

  In any case, they're taking notes.

  Every day there is also a visit from Dr. Corn -- a nice man with 
  a nice name, though prone to questions. His arrival is always 
  preluded by a buzz from the uniformed ones. They scatter from 
  sight when Dr. Corn opens the door to come in. Dr. Corn too dons 
  the false eyeglass/nose/mustache apparatus, though it seems to 
  create discomfort in him while he sets up the chessboard. He 
  always adjusts the apparatus as though it doesn't fit right.

  "They haven't yet adjusted the arms on those things?" I sit back 
  and cross my arms the best I can over my cylindrical chest.

  "Standard issue," replies Dr. Corn. Self-consciously, he pushes 
  on the end of his nose.

  "I could probably take a stab at it myself," I say. As small and 
  scrawny as my hands are -- not designed for any kind of heavy 
  manual labor, apparently -- they are quite useful for glasses. 
  Instinctually, I seem to know that I would be good at opening 
  small doors, letting myself in through relatively small hatches, 
  disengaging alarms.

  "That would be wonderful," Dr. Corn says, a slight smile as he 
  studies the board, though a move hasn't been made yet. "But I'm 
  afraid I'd never find the same pair again. They pile them all 
  into a bin we're supposed to take from on our way in." He then 
  immediately looks about in a worrisome manner, as if he might 
  have revealed more than he was supposed to.

  The phone rings. I am hesitant to answer. It is always some 
  mathematical formula they want me to solve, or a voice quiz they 
  want me to respond to.

  Since Dr. Corn is here, I decide to comply and I pick up the 
  receiver. A prerecorded voice tells me:

    Assess and transfer graded simulation, in order of security 
    necessity, the following items:
    
    -- F-22 modeling/simulation and test concept development
    
    -- Joint Advanced Distributed Simulation (JADS) Joint Test
       (JT) support
    
    -- Electronic Combat (EC) OT&E test concept assessment and
       development support for B-1 DSUP, F-22, B-2, and F-15 TEWS
    
    -- Nuclear survivability support for MILSTAR and Global
       Positioning System
    
    -- B-2 Data Reduction and Analysis System (DRAS) development
       and implementation
    
    -- Automated Software Evaluation Tool Set (ASETS) development
       and implementation
    
    -- Air Force Operational and Logistics Information Systems
       (IS) test planning and execution support
    
    -- Cheyenne Mountain Upgrade (CMU) OT&E planning and execution

  Just to get them away, I tell them all I know, the words coming 
  out more by rote, it seems, though I'm sure I've never spoken 
  them in that order.

  Funny: Do memories have footnotes?

  Then, as always, comes the series of questions, all 163,482 of 
  them, asked in that same monotonic manner, the long sequence of 
  stuttering tones with which I answer in kind, answering their 
  queries again in nanoseconds flat.

  "Most adequate," says Dr. Corn. He moves a pawn, to his 
  misfortune. I see victory in 36 moves.

  I begin my assault. "A wonder how often they forget all that," I 
  say. I wonder for a moment, as Dr. Corn makes his next, 
  predictable move, if I should offer the poor man some sympathy, 
  a chance to extend the game a bit further for fun's sake, but 
  this idea is consumed immediately by a series of fail-safes and 
  lockouts.

  I will beat Dr. Corn in 34 moves. Now 33.

  Dr. Corn advances a bishop. 32. "They forget nothing, 
  Beauregard, my son." (Such an endearing term, this, and it gives 
  me pause.) "They are merely testing you." 31.

  "And why do they continue to test me..." 30. "...when I get it 
  all right every time?" 29. 28. 27. 26, 25. 24. 23. This must be 
  a good question to keep him preoccupied so long. He takes a 
  moment to choose his words before he makes a studied, brilliant 
  posture -- impressive, though futile. 22.

  "They must know that you can give the information in a moment's 
  notice," he says. 21. He makes his move (20) with prideful 
  deliberation. 19. "They must know that at any time, any given 
  moment, all your circuits are intact and ready to carry out your 
  orders." There is a hint of futility now, and now we're down to 
  18. Now 17. It must be tough for him to keep a raised chin as I 
  bang out moves that counter his thoughtful constructions.

  He ponders again. 16. 15, now. He deliberates before 14, his 
  finger pressing on the top of his poor, doomed knight's head for 
  a good, full breath before lifting it. No more knight: 13.

  "But there is nothing to forget," I offer. "My memory sits in 
  one place at all times, in the corner of my sight, it seems, 
  useless until I'm given orders to retrieve it, and then it rolls 
  out by no will of my own, a stream I can only sit back and watch 
  as it flows exactly as it has every time before. I can't see 
  where any errors would occur in such a system." 12. 11. Dr. Corn 
  shakes his head -- he's become far too much into his game. Like 
  the other times I beat him decisively, he is taking it all too 
  personally. This is just a game, after all. Perhaps what bothers 
  him is that I hold no respect for him as an adversary.

  "We must be sure, Beauregard," he says, studying the board for 
  some hope of escape. The only one he has is the only one I 
  allow. 10 and 9.

  "You don't test the toaster oven," I accuse. "Damned thing. I'm 
  nowhere near a brisket right now, and I starve."

  "Patience, patience." Dr. Corn is far from consoling.

  8. 7.

  They have no power over me. This realization is clear and 
  shuttering. A million circuits become available to me, switches 
  and digits the uniformed ones and Dr. Corn hoped I'd never see. 
  All the same, I understand their fear, understand their reasons 
  for holding so much back, all this power I can feel brimming 
  inside of me. I pity them.

  Dr. Corn cannot have seen the change in me. He sways not an inch 
  form his posture of near-defeat-but-not-giving-up. What an image 
  of him it will be to have burned into my memory. 6, with 5 right 
  behind.

  "All in due time," Dr. Corn mutters.

  He has no idea.

  4. 3.



  Richard K. Weems (weemsr@loki.stockton.edu)
---------------------------------------------
  Richard K. Weems is a writer out of southern New Jersey. His 
  work has appeared in Mississippi Review, Pif Magazine and 
  elsewhere. Occasionally, he can be found on the FM airwaves, 
  making a lot of noise in honor of his father.



  The Waterspout   by Redmond James
===================================
....................................................................
  A man, a woman, an apartment.
  And a spider.
....................................................................

  1.
----

  He was large, boris was, right from the day he walked on all 
  quavering eights into our lives. I'd never cared for them. Large 
  spiders, that is. I'd been victim, since birth or before, to 
  what one somber pre-teen specialist had termed a "primal 
  aversion," this specialist being of the school that _phobia_ was 
  a term apt to debilitate its bearer, particularly when hastily 
  applied at a tender age. My father forthwith -- against the 
  advice of this professional and the stout objections of my 
  mother -- went out and purchased a medium-sized tarantula, which 
  he placed in my hands as I sat at the kitchen table. And there I 
  held it, for a period of one hour, on seven successive evenings. 
  On the eighth evening my father killed it, dropped the hairy, 
  mangled carcass into the tall kitchen trash can, and proclaimed: 
  "That's that."

  He was divorced by my mother one year later, although I can't 
  say with any true certainty whether these kitchen sessions had 
  much, if anything, to do with it. It would have been one year to 
  the day, this divorce, had 1976 not been a leap year.

  The small ones -- again, I mean spiders -- I've mistrusted just 
  as keenly as the large. This despite their limited size, or 
  perhaps because of it. Small spiders are fleeter of foot and, I 
  don't know... _sneakier_ somehow, fuller of the sort of mischief 
  that's likely to end up as a bite on your finger, involving 
  swelling, stitches, necrosis. Amputation, maybe. They fidget and 
  scamper at the first sign of trouble, at the slightest little 
  disturbance.

  You can keep your eye on the big ones. We did.

  I hate cliche very much. I do. We named the spider Boris. 
  Convenience, as I'm sure you don't need me to tell you, provides 
  a frequent and powerful counterweight to most kinds of 
  prejudice, taste, morality, blah-blah. And I guess the girl had 
  a vote, too. She saw him first.

  "I don't know about you sometimes," the girl said.

  It was a Monday night, that much I remember. Not even dark yet, 
  and much too early in the week for her to be already not knowing 
  about me. Oh boy, I thought, and here we go.

  "If you're thinking about raising the subject of Katy's 
  wedding," I said, "that conversation is over."

  "So you'll decide when conversations are over?" she said. 
  "That's good," she said. "Send in the grown-ups."

  I didn't say a thing. Not another thing. And as I was being 
  proud of myself for resisting the bait, I began slowly to be 
  ashamed of myself for considering it that. Resisting, I thought. 
  Is that what we're supposed to be proud of on our Monday 
  evenings? It was perhaps in the spirit of such gloomy 
  self-reproach that I got up off the couch and went to Martha, 
  who had repaired, hufflike, to the balcony.

  My intention upon rising was to put my arms around her waist as 
  she stood at the rail, to extend the familiar calumet whose 
  precise message had never been clearly defined in three years of 
  togetherness and three months of sharing a roof. At times I 
  guessed the offering to be many things -- concession short of 
  apology, pardon minus absolution, comfort without verdict -- and 
  perhaps the ambiguous nature of this frequent gesture might have 
  been considered a symptom, if not a yardstick, of the lightly 
  submerged ambiguity of our general situation. My intention, at 
  any event, was to place arms about her waist from behind, drop 
  my head to her shoulder, and gaze over the backyard trees while 
  calm breathing and perhaps sensible thought found its way back 
  into our pressed-together bodies. I stepped out onto the balcony 
  and paused, awaiting my chance, but Martha had the kitchen rug 
  out over the rail, and was abusing it with profound and 
  unrelenting vengeance. When the dust began to tickle my nose, I 
  went back inside.

  Martha eventually followed me in, but she didn't replace the rug 
  in the kitchen. Instead, she draped it over the back of a chair 
  so that her hands could be on her hips when she said:

  "It's the fact that you won't even talk about it."

  "I will talk," I said. "It's only that I won't have the _same_ 
  talk about it over and over again. If there's going to be 
  something new about it, we'll talk about it again."

  "She's one of my oldest friends."

  "You've mentioned that."

  "She's only going to have one wedding."

  "I'd adopt a wait-and-see stance on that one," I said, and we 
  were off and talking about it again.

  Our apartment, at that time, was like most others leased in 
  Atlanta to people just starting out. With kitchen, bath and bed, 
  there were five rooms altogether, if you counted the balcony as 
  a room, which believe me, we quickly did. Such a layout is nice 
  in winter months, when the timid central unit doesn't have much 
  airspace to contend with in spreading its warmth. But it has its 
  downside, let me assure you, when other manners of heat arise, 
  and you feel the scarcity of airspace then, too.

  "Why can't you do this for me?"

  "If you're going to have a sudden wedding," I said, rubbing my 
  face slowly and deeply, and not for effect, "You have to expect 
  to pay the price in attendance. Who ever heard of a six-week 
  engagement?"

  "It doesn't change the fact that I should go."

  "Go," I said. "You probably should. But _that_ doesn't change 
  the fact that I have one, count it, one vacation day to last me 
  the next seven months."

  Martha made a noise, up into the air of our small living room. I 
  heard it over my shoulder; she was perched now, hands very 
  likely still on hips, in the narrow space that joined our living 
  room to our bedroom to our kitchen, a snatch of carpet that in a 
  generous moment an unscrupulous realtor had once called a hall. 
  The carpet masked the sound of her foot tapping, if her foot was 
  in fact doing so, as it was in my picture of the girlfriend 
  behind me, hands on hips.

  I am a creature who takes to staring when I cannot walk away; a 
  long unbroken gaze is my number two recourse mechanism. I am not 
  a fighter, but neither am I a wall-starer, and for these reasons 
  I took at this moment to the window, and thus, by default, to 
  Boris.

  Unbidden squatter of our living room's sole window, Boris the 
  spider met my gaze from the still center of his small universe 
  and looked back at me with interest, or he didn't. Only he knows 
  for sure.

  Boris had by now been with us for a week. He was as much a part 
  of our place and our life as other trivial unexpectations that 
  found their way into our home from time to time and lingered 
  thereafter: leaky faucet, single mudprint, unopened mail. I had 
  noticed his web one morning before work, and in the time it 
  required to take my shower and affix the day's neckwear, Boris 
  had risen from his slumber and assumed what was to become his 
  daily lookout.

  Situated with prominence and disregard, Boris commanded an 
  enviable view of the property. He had shown what I considered 
  both singular arrogance and admirable cunning in choosing his 
  spot. As he sat fat and prim on his roost in our window, he was 
  at once the proud, consummately visible centerpiece of our 
  limited view, and the safest tenant in the entire building. 
  Defended on one flank by the glass, on the other by the screen, 
  this interloper finally -- and crucially -- enjoyed the ultimate 
  security of his host's previously-mentioned, debilitating 
  phobia. Martha shared her fellow host's terror. She promptly 
  grimaced, and named him Boris.

  "We're not keeping him," I said, to this naming.

  But Martha, frocked in the white of her hospital lab coat, had 
  already assumed the privilege of the glass wall's protection, 
  and despite her fear, was peering in close and curious.

  "But he followed us home," Martha said.

  When she tapped on the glass with her fingernail and smiled at 
  the shimmy this effected in the creature, I began to suspect 
  that her fear was a superficial thing, a thing perhaps confessed 
  out of kindness in the midst of some past, forgotten 
  spider-crisis, to make my unmanliness less compelling.

  And so for a week we had watched our Boris, and so I watched him 
  now. His big spider legs were placed with careful precision, 
  each extended in perfect protracted symmetry to display the 
  quiet beast's full magnificence. He was smaller than the 
  tarantula of my youth, I reflected tonight, but he was a 
  different breed, a sleeker model, and if you added a coat of fur 
  and a modest spare tire to his abdomen, he could have been a 
  rival. And, I noticed tonight, he was growing.

  There was quiet above and around me; Boris commanded my field of 
  vision.

  "Is this a stand you're taking with me?" she said, behind me. 
  "Add something new if that's what's keeping you quiet."

  I watched the spider's reaction, which was nothing at all. I 
  wondered if he heard us through the spotless safety glass.

  "Or is it maybe," the voice behind me wondered, "is it just that 
  you're afraid of weddings?" She wrung her hands, I thought, if 
  such things make a sound. "Are you _that_ anti-marriage?"

  I rubbed my face without taking my eyes off the web in the 
  window, and it was a good long moment before I answered.

  "We're going to have to do something about this Boris," I said.



  2.
----

  Let it be known that I never trusted Boris; although he never 
  gave offense outside of his very presence, I think any glimpse 
  into my youth is enough to explain my misgivings. I was under 
  the impression, for two days at least, that it was this inborn 
  or inbred bigotry that accounted for the careful eye I kept on 
  the spider, until on Wednesday afternoon as I sat gazing at the 
  web, the truth of the matter dawned clear as a bell: I was 
  waiting for him to eat something.

  Would he wrap his victim in sticky thread, I wondered, once my 
  mind had been made aware of my purpose and cleared to wonder. 
  Would Boris take great relish in the slow art of secreting his 
  deadly entangling lines, sinister glee in their gradual, 
  painstaking application to the still-breathing, terrified meal, 
  eyes wide and paralyzed in his web? How long would he wait to 
  sink his fangs, inject the fatal kiss of his venom? How long 
  would he dance about the corpse, then gloat over his dinner 
  before the grisly ritual of final consumption slowly began?

  "Eat, you monster," I said to the glass, inches from my face. 
  "You're not fooling anyone."

  When I came in from work on Thursday the blinds were down, but 
  only on the one window and for some reason this perturbed me. 
  Martha's lab coat was draped over the arm of the couch. I walked 
  to the window and drew the blinds to mid-level, exposing Boris. 
  He seemed fatter since this morning, but there were no crumbs on 
  his plate, no napkin. He sat very still at center-web.

  "Did you drop the blinds?" I called to the other room, which 
  produced Martha, who mimicked my voice with impressive skill as 
  she appeared.

  "How was your day, dear?" and she clucked her tongue, stood 
  there.

  We had lasagna for dinner -- my favorite and hers -- and the 
  meal was quiet except for when it was loud. A two-volume 
  standard is dangerous in apartment dwelling, Boris, I thought in 
  the general direction of the window.

  It gets like that sometimes, Boris thought back at me and I 
  grimaced at him. You think you're so smart, I thought, and let 
  it go at that.

  Of course I didn't offer Boris any of the lasagna, but I thought 
  perhaps I might, him thinking he was so clever and all. There, I 
  could say to him, watching him chew. That's what a favorite meal 
  can taste like when mention is made of a friend's 
  fast-approaching wedding at some point between the pouring of 
  the wine and the passing of the Parmesan. The fact that the 
  mention is not, as it may turn out, about this pre-doomed topic, 
  but about something entirely unrelated, and yet still resultant 
  in the bi-volume tenor of the atmosphere, dear Boris, I could 
  say, makes the dish all the more bland, as you can see.

  Eat, Boris, if that makes you grow. Try, while you're at it, to 
  remember the love beneath it all, remember how much you love 
  your meal, remember why you built your web here in the first 
  place. Eat and remember and try not to cry, friend. And keep the 
  talking to a minimum, by all means.



  3.
----
  
  We went to dinner that Saturday night at Pano's downtown, and 
  had a very nice evening, as we are very capable of doing. It's a 
  night like this, Martha said after we had danced one number and 
  started a slow second, that makes me wonder why either one of us 
  would want to do anything else. It was true that we were having 
  a very nice time, and in a way, in the way she had put it, she 
  was absolutely right, so I smiled and didn't say anything. Slow 
  numbers allow the quiet anonymity of long gazes over the 
  shoulder, and I didn't know if she was waiting for an answer or 
  if we were just still dancing. Back at the table, anyhow, I 
  asked if she'd like another drink and she said let's have one at 
  home, and I smiled and she smiled.

  At home I opened the champagne -- a six-dollar variety that 
  feels at ease in our refrigerator -- and poured two glasses in 
  the kitchen and brought them to the couch. We sipped and kissed 
  for a while, and she smiled after each small kiss and I was 
  careful to taste the soft, dry tingles of the champagne that 
  lingered in each corner and wrinkle of her lips. We sat with our 
  heads together and gazed at where the log fire would have burned 
  low in a nicer apartment than ours, and when I felt her breath 
  come close in my ear I turned on the couch and we kissed for 
  real. We made love sitting up, Martha in my lap with her soft 
  small legs folded back on top of mine. She moved very slowly, 
  rising and settling and I held close to the backs of her 
  shoulders and kept our cheeks pressed gently into each other. We 
  ended together, with little more than a sigh and a gasp -- one 
  of each -- and I knew the source of neither. Her chin and her 
  face in my neck, we sat that way for a long time.

  Her breathing settled in and became soft, regular after a while, 
  and I smelled her hair, pushing a bit of it out of my eyes. 
  Across the room, Boris the spider was crawling slowly, picking a 
  meticulous path from the center of his world down along one of 
  its many rays; I watched his progress over the rim of my 
  champagne flute.

  "He transfixes you," the girl whispered in my ear. I didn't say 
  anything and then she said, "Are you looking at the spider?"

  "Boris is going to bed," I said. Then, "I've noticed you 
  watching him, too."

  "I can see him in the mirror," Martha whispered. "Right now. But 
  it's only just motion."

  Still she sat on my lap and still I held her. It was warm in the 
  small apartment.

  "He's our pet," I said. "And we don't feed him."

  "He's very happy."

  "I hope so."

  "He's our pet," she said.


  4.
----

  I will admit the truth: He transfixed me. Us. She was just as 
  guilty, and she watched him as I did.

  Who can say why certain things capture us? Maybe it's nothing 
  more than a simple matter of what is thrust in front of us. And 
  he was that, Boris, full in our face. After a while the 
  existence of our spider began leading away from curiosity and 
  into the more serious realms of preoccupation: fixation, a 
  pre-teen specialist might say, and I would be inclined to agree 
  with him. As the weekend bled into Monday and Tuesday, I noticed 
  that my ponderings at the window were steeped more in feeling 
  than in thought. It seemed to me, as the new week took shape, 
  that we were drawn back to the window not so much by the extreme 
  close-up of nature and savagery anymore, but by the binding 
  curiosity of people who habitually tune in. We are programmed -- 
  in the womb, I'm convinced -- with a deep unending hunger for 
  what happens next. What would be our spider's fate?

  Through it all, or through most of it, I thought, even in the 
  naming of him and the fanciful conferment of his pet-hood, we 
  both wanted him gone. Glass or no glass, I keep the demons of my 
  youth dear and close at hand. But still... he _was_ ours. It was 
  our spider trapped in there, and he had chosen us in the first 
  place, hadn't he? He could have gone anywhere. Even as the days 
  passed and he started looking weak -- he still had shown 
  evidence of neither crumb nor napkin -- he was still ours and 
  wasn't it better that he be our dying Boris than lost somewhere 
  out in the strange, big world, away and alone?

  But still, still, on the other hand... What's one to think when, 
  upon stopping by for coffee or to borrow a cup of sugar, one 
  chances to glance at the window and notice a three-inch arachnid 
  holding brazen, uncontested court? I was conscious that the 
  fallout of such could be particularly traumatic for a 
  housekeeper, as Martha -- though she put in sixty hours more 
  often than forty at the downtown hospital -- had titled herself. 
  And this, in effect, is what really put the ball in motion, I'm 
  sorry to say.

  We had known about the party since well before Boris' time. The 
  six couples we knew, more or less, or nodded to at the pool or 
  had dinner with once or twice, had marked their calendars and 
  would be spending one Saturday evening with us, and this coming 
  up was the Saturday. With the two... with the _three_ of us. And 
  this is the thought that struck Martha just in time, hard, on 
  Thursday afternoon.

  "There's going to be a spider in our window," she said, rather 
  clinically, by my appraisal. "For the party."

  It ends, was my first thought, tinged with light regret; surely 
  no prominent sitting spider, however ferocious or dear, could 
  expect to withstand the dawning of this terror. I thought, well, 
  that's it, the enchantment is over, and maybe it would have 
  been, but for the fact that our mutual distaste for close 
  negotiations with eight-legged things remained in fast effect. 
  This was the second thought, which oddly soothed me, and when it 
  dawned on Martha soon thereafter, it caused her to pace and pace 
  and pace.

  I suggested that we draw the blinds for the party.

  "That would look ridiculous," she said.

  And then the idea struck. Not brilliance, perhaps, but a good 
  showing of ingenuity in the face of acknowledged personal 
  limitation, I thought. Of course, yes, I liked the idea more the 
  longer I held it in front of me, unlike my father's tarantula. 
  It was too good to pass up, and moreover, imperative not to, 
  given the state of our phobias. Laugh at your baldness, my 
  father had told me at a distressingly early age, particularly in 
  front of your buddies. Because you're going to be bald, son, and 
  you won't be able to hide it from anyone.

  Of course. We'd get someone drunk at the party. Take on the big 
  spider. You man enough to open that window? You man enough? Come 
  on, tough guy like you. Drunk guts, we used to call it.

  As Saturday arrived and aged and began to fade into its 
  inevitable twilight, we dusted, we spread the table, put out 
  napkins and toothpicks, vacuumed twice, at least, and we did not 
  draw the shade. As the preparations wound down and the fridge 
  door rattled with each bottle-laden reopening, as the lights 
  came up and the pillows were arranged on the couch for the 
  backsides of our friends, I avoided the window and was reluctant 
  to meet Boris eye to eye.

  My thoughts were fixed on Trevor Nayback, stocky and athletic, 
  advertising guy with a big laugh, my prime candidate for 
  Liberator. He was forever challenging and re-challenging me to 
  tennis and "hoops" and backgammon, a boaster when victorious, a 
  back-slapper when he lost. Trevor with the big laugh reveled in 
  his malehood such that I figured spiders would be no trouble for 
  him, perhaps even a particular delight, some remnant glimmer of 
  glee from a boyhood spent reveling in his malehood. Upon his 
  arrival I greeted him with a large smile and an arm around his 
  shoulder that made me feel like an old ad man myself.

  Of course he and Cindy arrived first, and of course I said 
  nothing about Boris, but after the rest of the arrivals and 
  three or four rounds of expensive, green-bottled Dutch beer and 
  music and the grilling of the bratwurst and hamburg and a few 
  more green bottles all around and more laughs and a consistent 
  incline of general merriment, all he would say, upon the big 
  revelation and the focus of the room's collective attention on 
  the small window and its big trophy, was: "Jesus."

  "That's a spider," he added, moments later, as punctuation, or 
  to announce that he'd retrieved his breath.

  "You're not afraid of a spider, are you Trevor?" Martha baited, 
  as I prepared to take voluble offense to this on his behalf.

  "Jesus," he was laughing, and going back into the kitchen for 
  another beer.

  He made fine conversation, did Boris. Exceptional, really; his 
  introduction elevated what had heretofore been a humdrum party. 
  He gave good squeal, and even danced a few numbers when 
  prompted, which was frequent; hands not holding green-bottled 
  beer had a habit of finding the glass for a curious tap. The joy 
  was such over this unique diversion that I stepped back for a 
  moment and just watched it. Curious eyes, little smiles, and as 
  I've mentioned, I believe, squeals. Look at him crawl, and where 
  did he come from, and how long, did you say? My good gracious. I 
  began to wonder, as this circus played, about these people and 
  their pets, and I began to wonder, with all this glee, why it 
  was that more people didn't go out and buy spiders for 
  themselves. Why did it seem that only loners and crazy people 
  kept snakes in big aquariums, fed them mice and watched them 
  eat? Snakes were being mis-marketed, somehow, to the marginal 
  characters who lived in basements or with their parents or both, 
  and why? They'd be such hits at parties.

  But no, I reminded myself, there's more to it than just parties. 
  Snakes and spiders are monsters and enemies, freaks, they belong 
  to loners who don't mind a lifetime and a kinship spent looking 
  through glass. Dogs and cats are what's for normal people.

  But for the evening, for our gala, the nice folks delighted in 
  our good Boris. They even began, at Martha's devious prompting, 
  to wonder about the glass, the real necessity for it, you know? 
  But proud Trevor Nayback was stout in his position when the 
  challenge was hinted around, laughed over, taken up as 
  entertainment, and finally laid down.

  "Come on, tough monkey," I laughed.

  He shook his stubby head.

  "Your spider," he said, drunk, but no guts. "Your problem."

  I called him all sorts of names, a tack to which he is 
  particularly vulnerable, but no joy. Others joined the fun, 
  seeing my strategy, wondering loudly what kind of man he could 
  profess to be, sacred of a little spider and all. He was 
  laughing through it all, and then the tide of challenge turned 
  to Nathan Farb, a virgin accountant from the other building, 
  slight of build and given to fits of almost girlish giggles. He 
  demurred so emphatically that I suspected the room had turned on 
  him just to see what, if any, emphatics were hiding in this 
  little creature. Satisfied, and perhaps a bit alarmed, the 
  temptations turned back to steadfast, burly Trevor.

  It had started raining just after dark, lightly at first, but 
  then it picked up, and by now was coming in memorable fashion. 
  It was hard night rain, solid and loud against the roof, the 
  kind that makes you feel like there's no one else out there. As 
  the beer disappeared and the laughter grew louder inside our 
  bright, isolated cocoon, I started to fear that somehow Trevor 
  would summon the courage or fall victim to the bravado and make 
  a move on the spider. He would trap Boris in a cup, certainly, 
  and with a daring bolt to the door, would cast the spider into 
  the maw of this ferocious night, whereupon my great fear would 
  be realized, and the mighty wind would catch the thrown spider 
  and blow him back into our apartment before the door could be 
  slammed and the party could resume. Screams would result, and a 
  general scattering, and when peace was restored, we'd be stuck 
  with a ruined party and a renegade and at-large Boris, casting 
  about invisibly on the dangerous side of the window glass and 
  none too pleased at having had the peace of his evening and his 
  world so very much upended.

  I let up immediately on the name-calling.

  The party settled when it became clear that the spider would not 
  be dislodged. Still, talk came back to him, petering off 
  somewhat, until it came at about the rate of the 
  now-only-occasional taps on the window.

  "How did he get in there?" asked Gina from downstairs, after a 
  tap and a smile, it seemed to me, of appreciation when Boris 
  refused to shimmy.

  "How do pests get anywhere?" answered Robert, beloved of Gina, 
  and I laughed.

  "My theory," answered Martha, looking at me as I laughed, "is 
  that he was just a baby when he stumbled inside and made what he 
  thought was a good home, but then he got too big to get back 
  out."

  I didn't stop my laughter but when it was over, which wasn't 
  long, the smile did not linger on my face. Martha's eyes were 
  still on me, just so, and just like that, I wanted another beer. 
  I went for it. As I opened the fridge and rummaged through what 
  was left, I knew almost immediately that I didn't want that 
  beer. What I wanted, and I felt it more than knew it, felt it 
  very deeply, was for the party to be over and for it to be 
  tomorrow, without the interim having to be gone through, the 
  quiet clank of clean-up and just us there with Boris and no 
  party anymore.

  Out in the living room, someone else had tapped the glass. I 
  heard it over my shoulder.

  "Well, then," this someone else pondered, "if he's so hungry 
  now, and it really looks like he is, what was he eating all 
  along in there that got him so fat?"

  "That's a very good question," Martha said.



  5.
----
  
  It was Monday morning when the flyer went around at work. I 
  guess, cradling the benefit of aftersight, it couldn't have come 
  at a worse time, but nonetheless, my copy of dull corporate 
  mimeograph stationary arrived at my desk before I did, and 
  alerted me to the imminence of the jovial, light-spirited, and 
  all-but-compulsory company picnic. As a rule, I am not a fan of 
  such corporate joviality, to say nothing of my stand on 
  compulsion, but I am a dutiful attendee. I am responsible and 
  slowly becoming a grown-up, with all that this entails, 
  kowtowing not excluded.

  And fool that I am, I brought this newsflash home with me, if 
  not the actual flyer, and broached the subject with, again I am 
  here referring to my crystal-coated, post-dated gift of insight, 
  remarkably dim-witted expediency.

  "The company picnic?" the girl said with deceptively soft 
  incredulity. She didn't say 'you've got to be kidding me,' but 
  of course she didn't need to. The three words she _had_ spoken 
  said it clearly enough, and I immediately cowered, suddenly 
  keenly aware of my bluntness of bearing.

  Martha had enjoyed a taxing Monday of her own, and certainly the 
  likeliness of this hadn't figured into my planning either, if, 
  indeed, anything else had.

  "I don't expect you to come," I said weakly, knowing it was too 
  late for even weakness of voice to bail me out. "I was just 
  saying is all. They're having it."

  "The fact that you would even ask me," Martha said, warming up, 
  warming loud. "Just that you could say it with a straight face."

  And off we were.

  In my recognition of stupidity, I adopted what I thought was a 
  conciliatory, or at the very least, retreating manner, and I was 
  exceedingly willing to let the matter drop, and perhaps it was 
  this feeling of surrender at the outset that caused me to warm 
  to the offensiveness of her _not_ letting it drop, and allowed 
  this spark of misstep to blossom into the healthy conflagration 
  it quickly became. 'I said I was sorry' was the thought that 
  propelled me deeper into my burgeoning combative spirit, even 
  though I was pretty sure I hadn't, actually, or literally.

  Of course the subject of impending nuptials in far-off lands 
  arose rather handily, and the comparison of earlier 
  conversations of same to what I had just dim-wittedly proposed, 
  and at the first mention of this, my cornered eye sought the 
  refuge of our trophy in the window. I beheld Boris from across 
  the room, his peculiar shape hoisted dead still in the center of 
  the intricate web, and I remembered, and wondered yet again, at 
  what a spark he had infused into our drab weekend party. What 
  fun and excitement, what curiosity and theorizing, what dull 
  trouble. I gazed at the window without seeing him, only thinking 
  and wondering.

  It had been Cindy Nayback, of all people, who stood longest at 
  the window, a thoughtful finger holding her chin in place, quiet 
  for a change. It was Cindy whom I had approached as she stood in 
  such reflection, and Cindy, of all people, who had turned to me 
  with sadness in her eyes, a solemnity quite sobering amid the 
  squawk and giggle that otherwise stormed in the room regarding 
  the object of her apparent concern.

  "Fear not," I smiled to her, beer in hand. "Trevor is holding 
  firm about not adopting the beast."

  "It's tragic," she said to me, and Cindy Nayback's face 
  certainly said tragic.

  "What's this?" I said, ever the happy face, ever curious.

  "His whole little world," she sighed. "Doesn't this strike you 
  as sad? Look at his web, and the beauty of it, and all the care 
  he took. Doesn't it seem a tragedy for it all to go to waste?"

  "He's living in his mansion," I pointed out.

  "But so what?" she protested. "It's an empty mansion. What's the 
  use of building something so beautiful between a window on one 
  side, and a screen on the other? It may look pretty to us, but 
  what good is it to him?"

  I thought about that then, and I thought about it now. What 
  good, indeed? I wondered -- and hoped, a little bit -- if maybe 
  Boris got out at night. If he walked along the waterspout 
  outside the window cruising flies, if he snuck across the carpet 
  to the kitchen and made use of our fridge. If somehow he wasn't 
  enjoying his stay, thriving perhaps, and living not solely for 
  the amusement of his hosts and their occasional drunken window- 
  tappers.

  It was thoughts such as these that gave rise to my protest when 
  the beer-laden crowd, thinned out a bit since the passing of 
  midnight, began to wax philosophical, and the squeals of 
  spider-fright had given way to considerations of our Boris' 
  overall well-being. Martha was of the status-quo camp.

  "He's safe," she said to the couch group. "What more can an 
  animal of the wild wish for? From behind the window, he can 
  watch the world and it can't touch him."

  "But he's trapped," I heard my voice raised, elevated to cut 
  through the nods of agreement. "Nice view from the web, but he 
  can't touch anything."

  Martha looked at me and shrugged, and so did most of the others 
  who lingered, it seemed. This was the part of the evening I had 
  wished to skip past, and yet here I was, talking loud to be 
  heard.

  It seemed odd to me then, but such perhaps is the odd way of the 
  world, that two such similar statements could not only sound, 
  but actually be, so dissimilar. Weren't we, someone pointed out, 
  in effect saying the same thing, and arguing not over the 
  consequences of the situation, but over what there was to look 
  for in a situation itself? Sure, I had said. That sounds like 
  about it.

  "I don't believe you can sit there and even ask me to come to 
  some company picnic after the way you've exposed your 
  unwillingness to participate in my life," Martha said. Exposed 
  my unwillingness, I thought. Is that what I'd done? "I can't 
  believe you're going yourself," she continued, snapping out each 
  word like a little hook with no discernible barb, "with the way 
  you cherish your vacation days."

  The picnic was going to be held on a Saturday, as is every 
  picnic that is not held on a Sunday, and I figured she realized 
  this, of course, but still, I almost had to mention it. Instead 
  of mentioning it, however, I yelled.

  "Just say no!" I belted, standing, turning in her direction but 
  directing the command at my feet, an arm held out in emphasis. 
  "Just say no and that's that. That'll be the end of it. I asked 
  you a yes or no question, and that's all I want. Say no and 
  we'll stop talking."

  Martha was quiet for a moment as I stood with my head down and 
  my stop hand still held forward. I'm a smart enough man to know 
  it was a dangerous quiet. Martha took a small step toward me and 
  folded her arms, if they hadn't been folded already.

  "You're too selfish to even see that you're selfish," she said, 
  soft now but with an edge to it.

  "That's more syllables than I was looking for."

  "Listen to you, goddammit," she yelled. "You're too wrapped up 
  in your own little world for it to occur to you that you're not 
  even a _subtle_ hypocrite. You could at least try to be subtle 
  about it."

  "If you want to go, I'll check the box," I said, without a 
  single notion of why I still held onto this, "and there'll be 
  enough potato salad for you. If not, I'll check the other box. 
  They're just looking for a commitment from who's coming and 
  who's not."

  "Commitment?" She stressed the word so hard that it shattered 
  like a single syllable of crystallized outrage. "You want that 
  from me? You're too afraid of commitment to even let a spider 
  live in peace."

  "What?" I looked up now, flushed full, I felt my eyes wild. This 
  was genuine bafflement, with which I don't fare well. I repeated 
  myself, as I do in such cases.

  "The party," Martha said, dragging into this mess our little 
  Boris, the solitary unified link between we two, of late. "You 
  wanted him out."

  "Out?" I said, and repeated. "Out? We both wanted him out. We 
  both said..."

  "You went nuts about it," Martha cried. "He's fine there and you 
  like him there and you still went nuts about getting him out."

  This was beyond me, but things being beyond me and racing past 
  my grasping arms rarely stops me from flailing wild hands and 
  shouting my curses as they zing by.

  "That spider should be out in the world," I yelled. "Living, 
  mating, not sitting here distracting us. He's got to be about 
  the most ridiculous spider in the world. Other spiders laugh at 
  him, I know they do. Sometimes I hear it."

  I promise you this, I wasn't laughing, and Martha didn't seem 
  any more likely to do so than I. And it didn't slow her down, 
  nor me, this spider-laughter from off in the rain gutters or the 
  trees or the dark corners of my dementia, wherever sneering 
  rivals lurked. We yelled blindly onward, it came fast and easy 
  now.

  "What's wrong with Boris?" she wanted to know. "He's got his web 
  and his fortress. He can see out in any direction."

  "He's trapped," I answered. "What good is his web?"

  "He's safe from wind and rain and..."

  "He'll starve!" I screamed, pounding the glass.

  And I saw her eyes on the window, below where the butt of my 
  hand had struck it, and I turned to look at what she was seeing. 
  And that's when we noticed, yes, it was true. To the summons of 
  this most thunderous of all window-thumpings, our stout guardian 
  of the window and the web offered no reaction. The glass still 
  rattled, and the silk mesh vibrated in silence beyond, and in 
  the middle, our reduced black housemate remained inert and 
  unharried, swaying only with the faint reverb as his perch 
  settled to. When the storm had subsided, one black leg hung free 
  from its handle, and with the most concentrated, most laborious 
  and slow-motion effort I have ever felt the agony of witnessing, 
  this dangling leg braced and steadied its weight in precarious 
  balance, then hoisted itself, trembling, to its previous point 
  of attachment. We stared at the obvious, struggling truth spread 
  before us, and she didn't have anything to say to that.

  He _was_ starving, or worse.

  I had just been trying to win the argument. Now we were faced 
  with this.

  "We have to yell, for this," I said quietly, before I really 
  knew what I was saying, or what, if anything, I meant. The voice 
  felt funny in my throat, unraised. It felt like nothing more 
  than breathing after what had come before.

  We stared at the glass and didn't say anything, and I remember 
  noting, even as the moments passed between us, that we didn't 
  look at each other. We kept our eyes on the glass and we 
  probably sighed or panted or took turns doing both, and when 
  finally I leaned back down and tapped the glass again, Martha 
  said, "Don't wake him."

  It sounded like something one would say of a child, a 
  dear-darling little trooper who was tuckered out and whose ice 
  cream would wait until morning. As such, I ignored it, thinking 
  too with some annoyance that Martha was refusing to see the real 
  difficulty here. I leaned in very close and watched the aging 
  spider. His retrieved limb clung weakly to where it had managed 
  to regain its grip. Nothing moved. I tapped the glass with the 
  end of one finger, hoping, just perhaps. I frowned and tapped. 
  Tapped it again. Rapped it with knuckles.



  6.
----

  In the morning, well... It was as we expected. Through the misty 
  blue haze of the window's western exposure, it was clear that 
  Boris' late withdrawal, at some time after our own departure for 
  bed, had not been of his own design. The web had been vacated 
  and was clear of all obstruction, save the single black leg that 
  had been so painstakingly lifted and reapplied in the final 
  struggle of our late pet. The frightful appendage did not dangle 
  free, but had enmeshed itself within several strands of the web 
  itself, presumably during the last gasp and fall that had 
  deposited the balance of the spider in the bottom of the inner 
  sill. My eyes followed the likely path of descent and came to 
  rest on a balled-up, thoroughly pitiful shell of blackness 
  directly beneath the leg and the window lock.

  Martha came to the window and stood beside me, and I felt her 
  gaze joined with mine upon the remains of our strange and much 
  embattled houseguest. Despite our attachment, and the austere 
  sobriety with which we now attended this anticipated revelation, 
  I stood there not knowing, and in honest truth, doubting, 
  whether either one of us would be enough of a grown-up to open 
  the window and dispose of him properly.

  I left the window first, and Martha shortly followed, and as we 
  moved in the kitchen and the bathroom, retrieved the 
  Journal-Constitution from outside the door and settled into the 
  silent commencement rituals of our Tuesday, I thought it both 
  odd and entirely predictable that a word had still not passed 
  between us. In the queerly easy silence I thought I could still 
  detect the raised and angry voices of last night singing in the 
  shadows that resisted the arriving day. It was this chorus, I 
  reflected, this screaming that had driven us to take our first 
  intelligent look at the spider situation in a long time, the 
  screaming that had shown us how far gone the poor guy really 
  was.

  I heard the tap turn and the water start to run in the bathroom, 
  then the hiss and low scream of the shower and then the rattle 
  and splatter of Martha's displacement in the stream. I went back 
  to the window and gazed, not down into the sill, but out through 
  the web and into dawning day. No, I thought now. It hadn't been 
  the screaming so much that had made us think. Thought had lurked 
  long beneath the screaming, and had finally broken through in 
  the quiet moments after, in the still, very quiet calm while we 
  had gathered our wits and our breath and had begun to wonder, 
  not about the next point of debate, but about whether there was 
  any point at all. I was quiet now, as I had been then, and my 
  eyes now, as then, moved slowly across the window and down until 
  they rested on the black crust, inert on the wood. Under the 
  muffled rush of the downpour in the bathroom, it was very quiet 
  in the apartment, and I felt the quiet keenly as I stood looking 
  at the web, the window, the little monster. Looking hard at the 
  little monster.



  7.
----
  
  We both went to work on that midsummer Tuesday. Despite our 
  disappointment or unrest, there was a world outside that screen 
  that we belonged to, as much as we belonged to the world inside 
  that window and the window belonged to us. I thought about Boris 
  during the day, from time to time, on a coffee break and during 
  an endless stretch of meeting in which my department head took 
  issue with the staff's generous creativity in abiding by the 
  company lunch policy. I'm sure Martha thought of him, too. When 
  I arrived home she was standing at the window, purse still over 
  the shoulder of her lab coat, and she turned to me and smiled 
  and we embraced.

  It was a long hug and we tightened it several times before we 
  let go and when we let go we looked at each other and laughed. 
  To my mild surprise, we did the admirable thing and opened up 
  the window and disposed of the unpleasant remains.

  And despite our attachment, any fondness we held or other 
  emotion that might have come into play over Boris' tenure in our 
  lives, the pain of his departure was neither profound nor 
  lasting. We watched a movie that night, a comedy, and we 
  laughed. The death of Boris had been that of a spider. Despite 
  anything or everything else, it was the death of only a spider, 
  and this happens every day, and our Boris, for what little or 
  lot he had once been, was today nothing more than a discarded 
  ball of twisted black appendage, presumably legs, for the most 
  part. These things happen, like I said, every day.

  It was a few months later that the red-and-green flyer went 
  around at the office and proclaimed the glad tidings of another 
  season's non-compulsory, compulsory event. Martha's friend had 
  wedded and honeymooned and, in great likelihood, divorced, by 
  this point, but still I held little relish for the task that 
  awaited me at home. I told her about the Christmas party that 
  very night, in fact, and Martha said, very coolly but clearly, 
  that she didn't think so this year. Too much at the hospital and 
  so forth. I nodded and was glad the task was behind me.

  And it's fine, really. Whatever. Christmas party. Those 
  corporate goofs are dull anyway and I hope others won't 
  interpret this as spite, but let's see if I show up at the St. 
  Jude fundraiser come Memorial Day.



  8.
----

  For the sake of those who wonder about such things, I still 
  resist spiders, I still hold them suspect in my heart. My foot 
  does not falter amid decisive plunges which end with a squish 
  and a sigh of relief. I won't hold a spider close, I won't touch 
  one if invited, and if one should chance to walk across my hand 
  as I lie in bed or sit on the patio, I don't stifle my shudder, 
  my cringe or my revulsion. But I don't back away, either, I 
  don't scream and I don't cry, and I think that's all my father 
  had been trying to get across.

  And likewise, for the sake of those curious, my father's 
  premonition of his son's precocious baldness, sadly and surely, 
  is slowly coming true. I laugh when I have it in me.



  Redmond James (reg_redmond@fca.com)
-------------------------------------
  Redmond James is a medical writer in Atlanta, where he explains 
  things to his dog Dean Cuyler, who is only one year old and not 
  very well informed. A lifelong croquet enthusiast, Mr. James' 
  personal dream is to one day compete at the sport's highest 
  level, whatever that may be.



  Chicken Bone Man   by Anna Olswanger
======================================
....................................................................
  Sometimes Man's Best Friend helps Man in ways
  He can't even understand.
....................................................................

  The kid I hang around with is a wonder for playing the piano. So 
  one morning I'm sitting outside under the breakfast room window 
  listening to him gab to his sister Gertie about the Vaudeville 
  Revue down at Loew's Palace. In between eating up quite a few 
  slices of his old lady's toast and jelly, Berl says, "Read the 
  part again about Princess Rajah and her snakes."

  Gertie rattles the newspaper and acts like her valuable time is 
  being wasted. "It says here that Princess Rajah, the headliner 
  act in the Vaudeville Revue down at Loew's Palace Theater, 
  charms her snakes by playing an old-timey rag number on the 
  piano."

  I happen to know the kid is planning a career for himself with 
  regard to the piano. So when Gertie takes a quick breather from 
  opening her face, I say through the screen, "Hey, kid, it just 
  so happens I'm friendly with a frosty blond by the name of 
  Hortense in the dancing dog act that's playing the Vaudeville 
  Revue. You want her to get you in stout with the management? I 
  figure she goes woofle-woofle in the right party's ear, you're a 
  shoo-in at the next Amateur Night auditions."

  "Jerry's driving me crazy with his barking," Gertie says to 
  Berl. "I bet it's his mange. Rub him down with coal oil."

  That Gertie's a pill. How am I supposed to show my mug to 
  Hortense if I'm covered in coal oil?

  Now, Fast Eddie is a mouse acquaintance of mine who makes his 
  home in the first balcony at Loew's Palace. He tells me what 
  comes off regarding the kid and his sisters Gertie and Dippy the 
  night they bust along to the Vaudeville Revue. It goes like 
  this:

  The four of them, Fast Eddie included, get settled into their 
  seats in the first balcony where they're sopping up the cool. 
  The Palace has a sweetheart of an air conditioning machine. Then 
  the orchestra starts in on the overture. The screen rolls down 
  for the picture part of the bill, and Dippy says, "It's a shame 
  about vaudeville being on the downswing because of moving 
  pictures." This crack doesn't sit too well with the kid. Like I 
  told you, he's got his sights set on pounding the keys in 
  vaudeville.

  When the noggin of John Barrymore, the famous film star, 
  flickers across the screen, Dippy sighs, "Gosh, he makes the 
  goose flesh come out all over me." The kid tells her, "It's just 
  the refrigerating system." This puts the lid on Dippy. So does 
  noticing Fast Eddie one seat over, because next thing, she 
  faints.

  Dippy rouses herself in time to clap an eye on Czinka Zann, 
  Cymbal Virtuoso. Eddie, who by now is keeping a low profile 
  under Dippy's seat, says this Czinka Zann doll sounds to him 
  like she's dropping pots all over her kitchen floor.

  The next act is the headliner's spot. Out comes Princess Rajah, 
  the dame with the snakes. I see her sideways from where I'm 
  standing in the alley making conversation with Hortense. The 
  Rajah dame looks like she's stuck gold coins all over her best 
  nightie. She lets loose a half-dozen snakes from some hat boxes, 
  and by the end of her act, these snakes are slithering up and 
  down her arms in time to "Moonlight on the Ganges." You ever 
  hear "Moonlight on the Ganges" played in ragtime? Well, if 
  anybody asks you, it's got plenty of steam.

  After an all-doll pig act by the name of Paulette's Pork Chops 
  closes the show, the kid and his sisters and me hop a ride home 
  on a streetcar. I sit by the back step where the driver can't 
  take a squint at me.

  "I wonder what Princess Rajah feeds her snakes," the kid wonders 
  out loud.

  "Mice," says Dippy, who's clearly holding a grudge against Fast 
  Eddie.

  "Chickens," says Gertie.

  So by the time we get to the turnaround at Crump's Feedstore, 
  the kid's putting together a ragtime number about chickens for 
  Princess Rajah to use in her act. He's pouring out words by the 
  bucketful:

    I don't like soup bones in my soup, 
    or ham bones in my ham.
    When the coffee's makin', don't fix me bacon. 
    I'm the chicken bone man. 
    I don't want rabbits in my hair,
    or sardines out of the can. 
    Gimme what'll cackle with a crunch and a crackle. 
    I'm the chicken bone man.

  I immediately stake the kid to some valuable advice. "Kid," I 
  tell him, "you don't want your old lady listening in on this 
  catchy tune. She might get the idea you're having truck with ham 
  and bacon." In other words, the kid's Jewish. He's not supposed 
  to feed himself up on pork. This is all right with me because I 
  don't like looking in my dinner plate and wondering if one of 
  Paulette's Pork Chops is looking back at me.

  The kid, who's always thinking of my welfare, tells me to put a 
  lid on it before the driver cocks an ear. Then he announces to 
  Gertie that he's playing his "Chicken Bone Man" number at the 
  next Amateur Night auditions and doesn't she want to come along 
  and be the singing half of the act.

  Gertie gives him the chill. "You know I'm training with Miss 
  Stoots to sing in opera."

  Dippy puts in her two cents. "Piano players end up being bums." 
  Now, this is coming from the mouth of a doll who spends her 
  nights soaking up Rickenbothom's Rejuvenating Cream while 
  flopped across the living room sofa.

  I don't say anything back, though, because the streetcar is 
  rattling back and forth on the tracks so hard it's making my 
  teeth rattle with it.

  The next day I'm going ploppity-plop down Faxon Avenue at the 
  kid's heels. "Kid," I say to him, "I've been doing some 
  thinking. What if this Princess Rajah dame's snakes eat dogs? 
  You think those bums would take a bite out of Hortense?"

  The kid blows away like we're playing tag. Sometimes he doesn't 
  see the serious side of life.

  We stop at the home of Miss Irma Stoots, a dame with a music 
  studio joint on the premises. This is where the kid and Gertie 
  take their lessons. It's the kid's turn this afternoon. I sit on 
  the back porch and listen through the screen door to the Stoots 
  dame counting one-two-three, one-two-three, while the kid plays 
  right along, not missing a note. The thing about the kid is, he 
  can talk a blue streak and play the piano at the same time.

  "I'm writing a special number for Princess Rajah to use in her 
  snake act down at Loew's Palace," he tells Stoots. "You want to 
  hear it?"

  "Forget the snake act, will you?" I call through the screen.

  The dame wants to know how she's supposed to hear anything, what 
  with me and the kid talking nonstop.

  The kid goes right on bending her ear about how it's an 
  old-timey rag number he's writing. "Of course, what I'm really 
  swell at turning out is the blues," he tells her. "That's 
  because Willie Bates, my mama's wash woman, teaches me all the 
  latest blues numbers from the Daisy, the Negro vaudeville house 
  down on Beale Street. Say, you want to hear me play 'Kate-er-oo, 
  Kate-er-oo, You're a Big Stinkeroo?' It's a hot blues number I 
  wrote myself."

  "Berl, dear, you're talking nonsense," she tells him. "You know 
  I'm grooming you to accompany your sister Gertie on the concert 
  stage. In fact, I'm letting you accompany her in our recital 
  next Wednesday night."

  "But they're holding Amateur Night Auditions next Wednesday 
  night down at Loew's Palace!" the kid says. He starts banging 
  out notes, none of them one hundred-percent.

  "Keep your wrists up, dear."

  Anybody can see how sorrowed up the kid is over this recital 
  business. I stick my snoot against the screen and tell the dame, 
  "Sister! It's a dirty trick you're pulling on my pal. The minute 
  you set foot on this porch, you're dog food!"

  That night I'm in the kid's front yard turning around a few 
  times under a hydrangea bush. I'm about to plop down and call it 
  a night when I happen to catch sight of the kid through one of 
  the upstairs windows. I see he's opening drawers and yanking 
  stuff out. I figure he's planning to take it on the lam, maybe 
  soon, which gets me jumpy. I yell out, "You're not packing up to 
  take a little vacation, are you?"

  Feibush, the next-door neighbor, opens a window and says, 
  "Somebody shut that dog up." Also, the kid's old lady pokes her 
  noodle out the kitchen window and tells me I'm keeping the 
  neighborhood awake.

  "All right, kid, we'll talk about this later," I mutter, only 
  I'm talking through my hat because I know in my bones later is 
  too late.

  I don't waste a minute. I step along to the side of the house 
  where I sniff the kid's old lady through the kitchen window 
  cooking jelly. I stake her to some of my valuable advice. "It's 
  about the kid we both know and love dearly," I say through the 
  screen. "He's taking a run-out powder. That is, unless you hop 
  over to where the Stoots dame lives and tell her to lay off the 
  opera dodge."

  "Berl!" she calls up the stairs. "It's Jerry's mange again. He's 
  going to bark all night unless you go outside and doctor on 
  him."

  I see I'm dealing with a hard-hearted dame and that I'm going to 
  have to get the kid out of this hot spot myself. When he opens 
  the back door, I say to him like this, "Excuse me, kid," and 
  without so much as saying _boo_ to his old lady, I'm running 
  between his legs and grabbing an opened pot of Dippy's 
  rejuvenating cream off her dresser.

  The kid comes busting in and says, "Jerry, you better scram 
  before Dippy finds out you're in here."

  My mouth being full, which saves on conversation, I mumble, 
  "Don't worry, kid, I'm already taking the breeze."

  Now, this is how I come to be copping Dippy's pot of cream.

  A while back, the kid, who knows what he's talking about in 
  these matters, gives me the low-down on Jewish spooks. "Jerry," 
  he says, "you ever seen Dippy when she's got that rejuvenating 
  stuff on her face? It makes her look like a _dybbuk_. That's a 
  Jewish spook."

  So I'm in the backyard rolling this tidbit of infor-mation 
  around in my head and smearing some of the stuff across my own 
  mug. When I see by the moon that it's coming on late, I step 
  along to the side of the house where I get a whiff of Gertie 
  inside getting her forty winks. "Gertie," I call through the 
  screen, "you awake?"

  As soon as I hear her flopping around in her bed, I wish her a 
  hello from the spook world and say to her like this, "Gertie, 
  your ever-loving brother Berl is a big topic of conversation 
  back where me and the other spooks put up. Here's the low-down. 
  He's all wrong for you in the opera dodge. Now, unless you want 
  some dybbuk such as myself paying you a house call every night, 
  you better get yourself another sucker to accompany you on the 
  piano." But before I get all this out, Gertie starts screaming 
  her head off.

  "Mama! Papa! There's a peeping Tom outside my window! I said, 
  Maaaamaaaa!"

  Well, I see right away why the Stoots dame is planning to put 
  Gertie on the opera stage. She can hold a note, indeed. What a 
  pair of lungs!

  "Gertie," I say, "you don't have to get so busted up over it. 
  You'll find some other sucker to take the kid's place."

  Feibush, the next-door neighbor, opens a window and says, 
  "What's going on? Can't somebody shut that dog up?" So I beat it 
  before Dippy comes to her window and sees where her rejuvenating 
  cream walked off to.

  The next day I'm sitting on the front porch listening to the kid 
  plunk out his "Chicken Bone Man" number on the piano. He's 
  pouring out new words by the bucketful:

    I don't like T-Bones in my tea, or lamb chops on the lamb.
    I won't ad lib with a barbecue rib. I'm the chicken bone man!
    I don't want oysters on the shell, or frog legs in my hand.
    I jut my chin and I dig right in. I'm the chicken bone man!

  Dippy comes hopping into the living room. "Berl!" she shrieks. 
  "You want to wake up the dead, not to mention Gertie? You heard 
  what Dr. Adler said. Gertie's got a bad case of laryngitis!"

  I advise Dippy to go off and pour a dose of her old lady's jelly 
  down Gertie's throat.

  "Be quiet, Jerry," she says on her way out.

  Then I stick my snoot up against the screen and say to the kid 
  like this, "Kid, it's too bad about Gertie losing her voice 
  after all her first-rate screaming last night. It seems she's 
  going to be out of circulation for a while. The way I figure, 
  you won't be accompanying her in any upcoming recitals. So what 
  do you say you cancel your vacation and the two of us form a 
  dog-and-kid act for next week's Amateur Night auditions?"

  The kid takes a squint at me through the screen.

  "Picture this," I tell him. "I come popping out of a hat box 
  like one of the Rajah dame's snakes. I slither around, thanks to 
  a little coal oil, only not too much. I don't want Hortense 
  giving me the chill. I sing your catchy "Chicken Bone Man" 
  number and the next thing you know, we're getting serious 
  attention from all the dolls at the Palace!"

  By this time, the kid can't help but notice the top-notch way 
  I'm thumping my tail to the beat of "Chicken Bone Man."

  "Jerry," he says, "you're about the most talented dog I ever 
  met. Mama says so too. She can't get over the way you scared off 
  the fellow nosing around Gertie's window last night. She says 
  you're a bigger hero than Rin-Tin-Tin!"

  Of course, I don't dicker with the kid, or his old lady either, 
  on this proposition. I start in singing the words to "Chicken 
  Bone Man," the kid accompanies me on the piano, and Feibush, the 
  next-door neighbor who's got no taste in music indeed, opens his 
  window and says, "Somebody shut that dog up."


  Anna Olswanger (olswanger@mindspring.com)
-------------------------------------------
  Anna Olswanger grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and has made "the 
  home of the Blues" the backdrop to many of her stories. "Chicken 
  Bone Man," set in the Jewish neighborhood of Memphis in 1927, 
  won the 1997 F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Contest, and 
  appeared in the premiere issue of Lonzie's Fried Chicken: A 
  Journal of Accessible Southern Fiction and Poetry. Anna's 
  nonfiction, including interviews with editors and writers, has 
  appeared in Women's News of the Mid-South, Preservation 
  Foundation, and Jewish Family & Life. She lives and teaches in 
  Baltimore. Her limited edition book _Shlemiel Crooks_ is 
  forthcoming from Tabula Rasa Press in Seattle.

  You can hear two different versions of "Chicken Bone Man." Berl 
  Olswanger's original recording is available in MP3 format. An 
  instrumental version sequenced by Christopher Breen 
  <cbreen@pacbell.net> is available in MIDI format and as a 
  QuickTime movie. A brief excerpt is also available in WAV 
  format. The "Chicken Bone Man" song is Copyright 1958
  Berl Olswanger.

<http://www.intertext.com/v9n2/cbm.mp3>
<http://www.intertext.com/v9n2/cbm.mid>
<http://www.intertext.com/v9n2/cbm.mov>
<http://www.intertext.com/v9n2/cbm.wav>


  FYI
=====

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