The Keyhole Opera Read online

  “Everything in the hallowed five traditions.”

  “Meaning?”

  “True experience, speculation, amusing anecdote, dream narratives, and poetic story.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Metamorphoses, fairy tales, stories illustrating a scientific principle, mysteries, stories that pull a ‘faces-into-vase’ trick.”

  “What differences exist between poetic short-shorts and prose poems?”

  “In stories, something changes. Lyric poems, whether verse or prose, can remain static.”

  “Whaddayamean, ‘something changes’?”

  “A narrative moves us from state A to state Z—or sometimes only to state B.”

  “Yeah, vignettes. What else?”

  “Insurrections.”

  “What do your ‘insurrections’ rise up against?”

  “The reader’s expectations. My insurrections say, No, I won’t give you what you expect when you think ‘story.’”

  “Isn’t that mean?”

  “You’re the sort of person who likes to get to the bottom of stuff, aren’t you?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I’m the sort of writer who likes to write the sort of story I haven’t written lately.”

  “Okay. Thanks. Sayonara.”

  8. Fictional Self-Improvement

  You want something spiffy and invigorating to read, and you remember that story in The Sun, or Polyphony, or the online magazine Flashquake, and so you order Bruce Holland Rogers’s collection Flaming Arrows.

  You take its twenty-seven off-the-wall arrows right to the heart, and, full of their fiery savor, you order Thirteen Ways to Water, an anthology featuring “The Dead Boy at Your Window,” and, last but not least, The Keyhole Opera.

  Result: You get happier and lots, lots smarter.

  9. My Closing to the Jury

  Bruce Holland Rogers is a one-man story-writing revolution.

  Who else emails three stories a month to over 500 subscribers?

  Who else has devised a fixed prose-fiction form of the lovely versatility of the symmetrina?

  Who else—?

  But I rest my case.

  Michael Bishop

  Pine Mountain, Georgia

  July 27-29, 2005

  I. Stories

  Avery’s Story

  I STILL DON’T KNOW ANYTHING about her. I was standing across the street, near the intersection, waiting for a bus. She carried an armload of boxes wrapped with green paper and decorated with red and silver ribbons. But I don’t think I noticed those packages. I’m sure I didn’t. Not then. I hardly noticed her at all at first.

  Maybe a hundred feet from the intersection, she started across the street. The driver must have been trying to beat the yellow. He should have been able to see her in time.

  I understood what was about to happen a moment before she did. The instant she knew, I saw it in her eyes. Somehow the distance between us contracted. I could see her face so clearly. It couldn’t have taken a second. First, she recognized her peril, and for an instant she thought she would spring away, but her legs betrayed her and in the next moment her eyes—they were gray eyes—in the next moment her eyes filled with resignation and she shifted her gaze slightly beyond the car and onto me. The tires were squealing in that slow half second, and her gaze reached me in time to say, please, and I answered, yes, and just before she passed from this loneliness into another, neither of us was alone.

  The sound—I could hear it beneath the tire squeal—was innocent as a line drive kissing the glove. The Christmas presents bounced off the windshield.

  I could have gone to the driver while he knelt beside her with his head in his hands. But the poor bastard was too complicated. I could never give him what I had given her.

  The Last Unseen Window in the Last Unseen Car

  I TAKE IT ALL BACK. NO PHONE call woke me at two in the morning. No stranger’s voice told me to be at the train station no later than three fifteen to meet the father I had never known.

  It isn’t true that I fumbled with my shirt buttons, dressing in the dark, or that my face felt slack with the Novocain of sleep. Did I say I gasped at the shock of January air? Not so.

  No cab came for me, and I didn’t shiver in the back seat as street light shadows marched forward through the cab, one after another. If the street was particularly dark and particularly still that night, I didn’t see it. I wasn’t there to see the traffic light flashing yellow or red.

  If I ever said that I stood on the platform watching the clouds of my breathing rise toward the stars, forgive me. I am not comfortable with lies. Let me be clear about this: no trains came at all. No freight train with cars that said Chelsea or Rio Grande or Pacific or Burlington Northern thundered by. No Amtrak train rolled by without stopping. Or if it did, I wasn’t there for it, didn’t stand under the defective platform light that snapped suddenly off, hummed as it turned blue, burned into orange brilliance, and snapped off again one, two, three, four times before the last car rolled by.

  If there was a man’s shadow, a silhouette, framed in the last window of the last car, I don’t know anything about it.

  I didn’t walk all the way home. I didn’t tell myself that it was better this way, that the man I imagined couldn’t disappoint me when I could see no trace of myself in him.

  No snow crunched beneath my boots.

  Lydia’s Orange Bread

  WASH FOUR ORANGES, UNLESS you have just broken up with Jamil Becker, in which case to hell with washing them. Peel them. Set aside the sections to eat while you’re cooking. Put the peels in a sauce pan with one teaspoon of baking soda and enough water to cover. Boil the peels for ten minutes.

  Drain, and rinse in cold water. Scrape away the white part of the peel. Cut the orange peel into slivers, unless you have just broken up with Jamil Becker, who has very long eyelashes for a man, dark eyes, and a mouth made—as other women have said about the mouths of other such men—for kissing and lying. In that case, think about the woman you saw him with last weekend and keep cutting the peel until the slivers are reduced to specks and the specks are reduced to mush.

  Pre-heat the oven to three hundred and fifty degrees.

  Candy the orange peel by boiling in one cup of sugar and one cup of water until reduced to about one third of the original volume. If you’re using a candy thermometer, what you want is the hard ball stage, but candy thermometers, like some men, can’t always be relied on. One-third of the original volume is a better guide. Trust your eyes.

  Set aside the candied peel.

  Mix two tablespoons of melted butter, two eggs, one cup of sugar and one cup of milk. You can use an electric mixer, but if you have just broken up with Jamil Becker, do this step by hand. Vigorously.

  Sift together a pinch of salt, three tablespoons of baking powder, three and one-quarter cups of flour. Add the wet mixture to the dry. If you’ve broken up with Jamil Becker, pause here to cry, then get angry and tell yourself to get over it already. Remind yourself that baking something complicated always makes you feel better. Add the orange peels and one cup of chopped pecans.

  Spoon into two greased bread pans and bake for one hour.

  When the loaves have cooled, slice them and you’re done, unless you have just broken up with Jamil Becker, who has apparently forgotten that he gave you a set of keys to his apartment. In which case, put the sliced loaves in a paper bag along with four softened sticks of butter, drive to his apartment while he’s at work, and let yourself in.

  Step over the clothes on the living room floor. Pet the cat.

  Go to his closet and take out the cream-colored silk shirt that you bought him for his birthday and lay it on the bed. Butter a slice of orange bread and put it butter-side down on the shirt pocket. Butter some more slices and put one in the breast pocket of each of his suits. Put a slice and an extra pat of butter under his pillow.

  Open the drawers of his dresser, leaving a buttered slice under his socks, under his under
shorts. Close the drawers. Hide a slice inside a lampshade, where the light will warm it and melt the butter onto the bulb.

  Open the sealed but un-mailed letter on his kitchen table, addressed to his college buddy, Randy. Read the sentence where Jamil complains about his girlfriend. Re-read it to be sure he means you. Find a pen, scratch out the word “paranoid” and write above it the word, “prescient.” Scratch out “a little spooky” and write above it “dangerous.” Put the letter back into the envelope, along with the apartment keys. Put the envelope inside your purse to mail on your way home.

  Leave buttered slices between CD cases, behind the refrigerator, in the fireplace, on top of the television. Make a butter sandwich with two slices and push it into the slot of the VCR.

  Pet the cat again. Mash orange bread and butter into many little balls and put them in her food dish. Watch her gulp these down too fast. She won’t be able to keep them down for long. Carry her to the sofa and pet her until she’s good and settled there.

  On your way out, collect your iron and your blender, which he had said he would return. Remember that he had also said, “Lydia, I wouldn’t look at another woman,” which was your first clue because what man can honestly say he wouldn’t even look?

  One last time before you leave, pet the cat. Her tongue is sticking out a little. She doesn’t look good, but she’ll feel better soon. You both will.

  Stallion

  BEFORE CALDERON WALKED HOME to his own ranch, he drank coffee. A lot of coffee. He could tell Palmer’s wife wanted him gone. She was moving things on the stove that didn’t need moving. But he was tired and kept asking for another cup. He drank the pot dry, and then regretted it because that would be the end. Now he’d really have to go.

  Palmer sat across from him at the table, staring out the window past Calderon’s shoulder. Toward the corrals. Maybe Palmer was thinking about the stallion, and maybe he was only looking that direction because he was too tired to look anywhere else. The sun was going down, shining in Palmer’s face.

  Without shifting his gaze, Palmer said, “You want some more?” Meaning coffee, Calderon supposed. He said some more would be nice, but they had drunk the last. Palmer had no answer for that. He just kept looking out the window.

  The stallion had never shown any sign of tiring. It threw them just as hard in the afternoon as it had in the morning. The way things looked to Calderon, the horse might break them before they could break it. And maybe that was good. Maybe once in your life, it was good to find a horse you couldn’t break.

  Palmer wouldn’t feel that way, of course. He had paid money for the stallion.

  Mrs. Palmer came to collect the coffee pot. She put it in the sink and filled it with water. She left it there. Then she went back to moving things around in the kitchen.

  Ordinarily they wouldn’t have quit until it was too dark to go on, but that horse had taken it out of them. They’d stopped when there was still a good hour and a half of light.

  Calderon had heard stories about a certain kind of horse, a horse that might break eventually but would kill a man first. In those stories, the horse always had something wild in its eyes, something that people remarked when they saw it.

  This stallion wasn’t like that. He’d let you touch his neck and flanks, let you saddle him. There wasn’t any madness in his eyes, or meanness. He just knew he wasn’t for riding, and he didn’t care to be convinced otherwise. After he’d throw you, he’d look at you like he was sorry that you couldn’t get such a simple thing into your head.

  Palmer’s wife got fed up and went to another part of the house. Palmer hadn’t moved.

  The room was getting dark. It would be a long walk home in the night, Calderon thought, and there would be no moon. He really ought to get up and go, he really should. The longer he sat here the more he felt every bruise, every ache in his bones.

  “I ought to shoot that damn horse,” Palmer said.

  “Sell him.”

  “Can’t. I have a conscience.”

  Calderon didn’t answer. In a moment he would get up. He would. He would stand and walk away from the pleasure of sitting in the dark and aching and thinking of a horse that wouldn’t be broken.

  He could buy the horse himself, but that would be a waste. It would be money spent to hold on to something that can’t be held. Not in the ordinary sense, anyway.

  Outside, the crickets were starting up. “Well,” he said, taking his leave, and as he pushed back from the table, Palmer asked him, “Tomorrow?”

  Calderon stood up, went to the door. He heard the stallion nicker. The first stars burned. “Be just the same tomorrow,” he said, letting the words take whichever shape they would.

  And he stepped outside to inhale the cooling, horse-scented air.

  As Far East

  I OWE IT TO MY FATHER TO BEGIN this story with the real ending, the part that comes after I’ve told what I want to tell. He’d insist on it because—notwithstanding the opinions of his creditors—he was a realist.

  So I’ll say right now that this story ends in three days of May rain, the heaviest rain in northern Colorado that year. It ends with everything we had—the old furniture, the encyclopedia samples, my mother’s dresses and my father’s two suits, my sister’s stuffed animals and my Hardy Boys books—everything, soaking on the sidewalk where the Larimer County Sheriff’s deputy and our landlord had stacked it days before. There were new tenants in the house already, and my father used their phone to call a friend who owned a truck.

  This wasn’t the first time we were put out, but it was the first time we weren’t there to see it happen. I felt cheated.

  The story begins with the night my father shook me awake in the dark and told me to get dressed. The hall light was yellow and wincingly bright behind him, and the sky outside my window was black. That’s how it was going to be every day of our journey, getting up before there was any hint of morning. My mother, my sister and I were always dull and slow when we woke up, and that’s what my father counted on, getting us on our feet and out the door before we were awake enough to ask questions.

  By the time I was really awake, we were passing through a town called Ault. I rolled my window down. When we halted for a stop light that was still flashing red, I could hear the wind moving through the dark leaves of a cottonwood tree. My sister slept in the seat beside me.

  My mother said, “Where are we going?”

  My father just pointed through the windshield. Ahead of us the sky was beginning to gray.

  She said, “Will we be back in time for you to open?”

  “Indoor putt-putt was a pretty stupid idea. Don’t you think it was a stupid idea?”

  “It was fun,” I told him, but he wasn’t talking to me.

  “It’s a good idea,” my mother said. “One of your best.”

  “One of my best.” He shook his head.

  “It got you the loan, didn’t it?”

  “So this time it’s not just our own money I’m losing.”

  “You keep saying business will turn around.”

  “That’s what I keep saying.”

  He drove in silence for a while. We were going fast again, and the wind in my face was cold enough to make me shiver.

  “We’re running away,” my mother said, extra-serious, making it a joke.

  My father said, “We are not.”

  “Then where are we going?”

  “East,” he said. “Sunrise.”

  I watched the stars fade. Fields of irrigation pipe and just-sprouted corn gave way to sage and grassland.

  “Here it comes,” my father said when the first bright sliver of sun broke the horizon. We passed Briggsdale about then—a gas station with a rusty Drink Coca-Cola sign. I craned my neck to see, but it was only after we’d gone by that I realized he didn’t mean the town.

  “This is the best time,” my father said. “Milk truck time. Seeing night turn to day makes the rest of the day yours, like a secret.”

  I woke my
sister up then. I said, “You’re missing it.”

  She kicked me and said she was cold. I rolled the window up and shook her again. “Come on,” I said, but already the light was different.

  When she finally did sit up, she said, “I’m hungry.”

  “Breakfast soon,” my father promised, and then he said, “Maybe I’ll drive a milk truck again.”

  In an hour, we stopped at a McDonald’s in Sterling, but it was only to use the bathrooms. There in the parking lot, my father opened the trunk. It was full of brown paper bags. Some of the bags held groceries and the rest were full of folded clothes. My father handed a box of crackers to my sister. “Share them,” he said. She hugged the box and grinned at me.

  My mother was looking at the clothes.

  “Just a vacation,” my father told her.

  “The kids have school Monday.”

  “This is more important.”

  “More important than school?” She looked worried.

  “Don’t ask me to explain. It will ruin it.”

  “How are we going to pay for this?”

  “There’s room enough on the charge cards.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  “Let’s not worry about it. Facing the music comes later.” He searched through another bag. “Who wants an apple?”

  After we were back on the road, driving again into the rising sun, my sister paused between crackers to ask, “Where are we going?”

  “East,” I told her.

  “That’s not a where,” she said.

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Mom,” she said, “where are we going?”

  My mother didn’t answer. Instead, she looked at my father.

  “Your brother’s right,” he said. “We are going east.”

  “But where?”

  “To an eastern place,” I said. “Let me have a cracker.”

  She pulled the box out of my reach.

  “You know,” my father said, “there’s never going to be another trip like this one.”