The Buttered Slice» Acheté

I can rhyme, any . . . dream. – by ACHETÉ

Acheté — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 18:33:41 +0000

The dream before the dream I just awoke from—penultimate but still within the accessible part of the ephemeral queue of norepinephrine-free memory—took place in a class, a religion class. Our teacher was teaching us extemporaneous rhyming (also known as rapping; possible waking-life genesis in the title-text of this), which in the dream seemed in keeping with the ironic theme of last week’s lesson, from a different teacher, on how to lie. (Maybe poetry is just how to lie in style.) He explained to us that anything can be rhymed, anything at all, although sometimes it’s a little tricky (abuse to word boundaries, for example). We would say a sentence and he would reply with a rhyme. I showed him, though: I ended a sentence with “silver”, after also considering “orange”. He was stumped, of course; these are in the list of famous rhymestoppers. Then I really showed him (this is still in the dream) and came out with this:

[Da DA da DA da silver,]

They put her on The Pill, Ver-

sion 2.

The dream after that was more pedestrian: He is following the concrete-lined streams—the correct path, where the stream is lined on both sides—down the cataract to the fountain where she will choose, by taking a key from a rack, her true love (is it the fellow who this, or the fellow who that?) and he hopes against hope that he’ll be the one, and finally she lets him know that the pictures on the keys represent, not different men, but different aspects of all-him, every one. At the same time she lets him know—”My name is Tor” (rather than Jill, or Julie, or Jennifer, or whatever he had assumed)—that she herself is also someone he had once dismissed or overlooked.

I’m sure Stephanie Meyer could turn these into a million dollars each.

Knuckle — by ACHETÉ

Acheté — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 03:24:33 +0000

The girl who sat in front of Max one row over could crack her knuckles in five different ways. None of them seemed to work for Max. He watched now as she carelessly grasped two fingers at once: she was about to do the double crack. He followed her actions with his own hands—secretly, under his desk—but twist as he might, his own performance remained a noiseless pantomime of the brief staccato across the aisle.

Alone that night in his room, he tested a new resolve. He must just never have tried hard enough. The simplest method seemed to be a straight-out pull, gripping around the second knuckle to crack the third. He chose his left middle finger as the most promising candidate. Pull once . . . pull again, harder . . . nothing. If he was honest with himself, though, he still wasn’t using his full strength. The third time he braced his wrists against his ribcage, elbows to the side, eyes to the ceiling, and pulled out and back with his whole arms and shoulders. Pop!

No. This was wrong. His hands had flown apart, and there was the finger, still locked in his right fist, and there were the four remaining fingers of his left hand splayed two to a side and shaking. In a panic, almost without thinking, he rammed the middle finger back onto its stub: with a snap. And there it stood again as though it had never left—except, that is, for a bright, thin ring of blood all the way around, circling the place where seconds before his flesh had given way to emptiness. Bewildered, he stroked the length of the finger, front and back, and felt every touch. The finger still curled and extended in unison with the rest of the hand, or in a ripple, and it wiggled side to side at his brain’s command. He licked the blood clean, where he could reach, and stared. It stung a little: almost like a paper cut, but he imagined that he could feel the sting all the way through.

For the first time in his life, Maxwell began to suspect that he was not entirely human.

Introducing Acheté

Pilcrow — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:52:08 +0000

Another new contributor, Acheté, my brother of the sterling tongue, has joined The Buttered Slice. Excellence in poetry and language are his; he wrote the piece below, titled Gravity. We’re thrilled to have his gifts at our disposal. Please read more about him at the Contributors page.

Gravity — by ACHETÉ

Acheté — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 04:41:56 +0000

Gravity is the security tether
That lets you let go of the grass
And gaze open-handed into the abyss
Of sun, moon, stars, and empty space.

Gravity is the shifting illusion
That says, of the wandering zenith,
“There! There is up and not down!”
And masks, with unfathomable
But green-blanketed mass,
The vast co-wandering nadir.

Tell me, daughter of Eve:
How does it feel to sit on a globe
Where live tigers wander free
And rain falls through open skies?