Glos Is

((((A literary, artistic, communicative happening in Brooklyn. I just talked to Mr. Daniel Grossman today and apparently things are starting to kick with the thing. Along with displaying the talents of many of my friends, they have one of my college short stories up (The Kenzaburo Oe-inspired "I Fear Gooks Metal), and hopefully will have some more soon--I still edit things I wrote in college. The story's 6 web pages long (I don't know why it couldn't just be one) and you have to click "Next" on the left side of the screen to continue reading. I still look for that link to be on the lower right of the text, but other than that, it's a great site.)))
Link


"If I had the language then, to add my own entry into the "The World of Knowledge" it would have said that the skin is spongy and changing, like a beach at high tide. The body is plastic. The sinews are cantaloupe. We grow ourselves up in fits and starts, and if an object draws too close while we grow, the skin will overtake it, carrying it into the thick layers, the way weeds grew over Grandmother's car after she quit driving--the chrome and cracked vinyl vanishing into the gradual layers of dirt and geology. The body expands, then shrinks, churning up the things absorbed in youth and coughing them up in later years. Thus, all history renders into sweat and defecation. We grow old, our shells harden; become a mixture of wax and stone. Silts clean their way in, dripping deep to the marrow, hollowing out tracks and blooming, years later, when uncovered by one attentive, young scientist."
____________________________________________________________

"In muffled darkness, I imagined a gookworm digging inside my leg with hooks, weaving a fibril sack in between bone and the cantaloupe stuff. My teacher had brought a cocoon into class and we passed it around so that each of us could press the delicate silk to our ears and hear the sound of what seemed like ancient baby teeth inside when we rattled it. Someday it would be a butterfly. Now the cocoon lay dormant in my own leg, inherited from my father, respiring slowly and clicking its new, wet mandibles. It would bide time for years to pass and for my body to grow tough and strange to myself; when I grew so far off the floor that my head would fear my feet. When so much would be asked of me, I would return home at the end of each day, sun-burned and aching, too wasted to do anything but fall half-asleep to the drone of the newsman just talking. It was my curse. Some terrible day, when I was pocked with hair and scars and my breath was like steel wool and rotten beef. On that day the gooks metal would chew its way towards daylight and emerge through the birthmark on my leg."