Medium Hero

Korby Lenker

Description

Inside this book are stories about insects, piano teachers, talking birds, dead birds, ex-convicts, suicide attempts, tarot cards, and bible verses. Some of the stories happened to Korby and some of them he just made up. It doesn't really matter which are which.

Up to this point in his life, he has been a professional singer-songwriter, traveling around by himself, playing songs for small audiences, selling CDs out of a suitcase. Occasionally there have been moments where the light shined particularly bright, but mostly it's just been him and a guitar, making music in living rooms and clubs and the occasional concert hall.

He has met a lot of people, most of whom leaned like him toward the fringe side of the social spectrum. He's written some of them into stories hunched over a laptop in the backseat of a touring van, or in the lobby of a Best Western, or on the cracked vinyl couch of a rock club's green room, poking a keyboard with a pair of sweaty pointer fingers.

And then when he was seven he fell in love with the Ramona Quimby books, and then it was the Great Brain books, and then the Roald Dahl. Most of his best friends have been characters from stories he's read. He's always been drawn to fiction because it tells you the truth you need to know. And the truth he needs to know is that, despite considerable advances in science and industry, the world is still a big fat piece of magic.

Sujets

• Musique
• Musique
• Music

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781681620596
• Langue: English

Extrait

MEDIUM HERO
AND OTHER STORIES

MEDIUM HERO
AND OTHER STORIES
Korby Lenker
Turner Publishing Company 424 Church Street Suite 2240 Nashville, Tennessee 37219 445 Park Avenue 9th Floor New York, New York 10022
www.turnerpublishing.com
Medium Hero and Other Stories
Copyright 2015 Korby Lenker
All rights reserved. This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Cover image: Korby Lenker Cover design: Scapati and Maddie Cothren Book design: Glen Edelstein
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lenker, Korby. [Short stories. Selections]
Medium hero and other stories / Korby Lenker. pages cm ISBN 978-1-68162-507-2 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-68162-374-0 (hardback) I. Title. PS3612.E536A6 2015 813 .6--dc23
2015030300
Printed in the United States of America 14 15 16 17 18 19 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FOR REV. BARBARA DAVENPORT
CONTENTS
1. CAT LADY
2. DEAR WILLOW REEDER
3. RAT S DUDE
4. CATFISH
5. FOR APRIL
6. BIRTHDAY CARDS
7. MEDIUM HERO
8. BULL S-EYE
9. THIS IS PROBABLY A CLUE OF SOME KIND
10. TWITTER TRANSLATOR
11. PRO WRESTLING
12. HOQUIAM
13. BUS STOP
14. SUGAR CHEST
15. EVERYONE HAS A MIRANDA MOMENT
16. PEEING MY PANTS AT THE HIPSTER COFFEE SHOP
17. HER IMPOSSIBLE HEART
18. MANBOY AND THE MAFIA TABLE
19. BIRD CRUSH
20. THE COOL GREEN HILLS OF EARTH ARE NOT ENOUGH
21. AMPLIFIED DESIRE AND A DIRTY PEACOAT
22. ANGEL S ENVY
23. NEW YEAR S DAY AND THE GREAT SNAKE
24. SUPERMAN AND LOIS LANE
25. PAGE OF SWORDS
26. TWO RED RINGS
27. SIMON CICADA
1. CAT LADY
I have been spending too much time alone. Not alone. In the company of a cat. Which is worse.
Men who spend their waking hours walled off in some alley of the Self can at least claim the quiet dignity that accompanies true solitude. Beards may grow long, teeth brown, but a man in isolation has at least a chance at virtue.
I, however, am in love with a fuzzy white kitten, and, in the throes of some austere and worthy crisis of mind and heart, will suddenly scoop the animal up like an adoring mother and whisper into its ear one of ten nicknames I ve made up. My sweet Squee. Don t you ever leave me! Poking the wet nose with an enthusiastic forefinger. A deep scratch between the shoulder blades. The animal s cross-eyed smile sending a wave of pleasure through me. Disgusting.
Sometimes these reveries last five minutes or more and find me splaying the helpless creature out on the couch, pushing his long white fur the wrong direction (does he like that?), letting him bite my hand, delighting in the tiny, stinging teeth pressed into the soft flesh of my outstretched palm. Scolding him in the ridiculous high-pitched voice. No! Who s a bad kitty? Fooface!
It is difficult to submerge oneself with any sincerity into questions involving the trajectory of peaceful relations in the Middle East or the future of literature in a technologically obese society when a prancing kitten decides your pinky might be a mouse and leaps over your laptop to pounce. Somehow an entire paragraph self-deletes. My naughty Littlefat! I hear myself say.
It wasn t always this way. From the perspective of true, steel-jawed manhood, I am a pale gadfly where once I was a gladiator.
Yes there was a time I was more brave.
A brief and incomplete accounting of my heroic deeds to date:
On the occasion of my twenty-ninth birthday and in the company of three drunk friends, I took hold of an electric fence, on purpose. The force of the shock knocked me backwards into the street and afterward made my hand twitch involuntarily for five minutes.
Three days after Sept 11 in 2001, I hitchhiked from Anchorage, Alaska, to Seattle, Washington, across the tundra and down the Al-Can Highway. Two thousand five hundred miles. It took four days. I carried a can of bear repellant with me. I spent a night in jail for traveling over international lines without a passport.
During college, under the spell of an imagined spiritual crisis, I spent an entire spring break walking alone through a desert in southern Utah with only a gallon of water and six oranges. I slept on the bare earth.
These are the things you do when possessed by an urgent and unclear need to demonstrate your grit to yourself and God and anyone else who would care to watch.
But now, in my gravity-succumbing thirties, I m all ice cream and kitty cats. What happened?
I decide to reach out to a true friend.
I am a cat lady .
She texts back.
Everyone who knows you saw it coming .
I go for a walk. I reflect. The crisp bronze leaves of fallen autumn rustle under my feet like radio static. The light lays flat in the grey sky, shadowless.
I wonder: is it better to stay soft, to keep to the foothills of life, to watch football on Saturday afternoon eating too many nachos with your sweater-wearing friends? Or is it better to be a wild-eyed, stuttering prophet in scratchy sackcloth?
There was a time I felt like my path led to sackcloth. But then I found out I like beautiful things too much. A worn-in acoustic guitar. A well-wrought sentence cleaved of unnecessaries. A pretty girl.
I walk along a busy street. Cars pass beside me; only half the headlights are on. That twilight hour when not everyone is doing the same thing.
Have I abandoned my true calling? Am I a spiritual fat man? Am I just a random person on planet earth groping his way through make-believe and mystery like everyone else?
Sure, I could live in the desert, but there is no special virtue to eating bugs, especially when a sushi restaurant is in walking distance.
Sushi.
I call my friend Jacob and ask him to join me for dinner. He says yes. I keep walking.
Over California rolls and pints of Sapporo, I catch him up. The cat thing. The former glory of unreflective masculinity. I ask him what he thinks.
Dude, you re probably gay, he offers. I mean, you dress great.
I cast a quick glance down. Denim jacket, antique white cotton button-down, plaid madras bow tie, matching leather belt and shoes. Fair enough.
I can see why you might say that, and, well, I don t want to sound defensive, but I don t like dudes.
Have you tried em?
What do you mean?
Jacob shrugs. I didn t think I liked sushi. Then I tried it. He pushes a section of rainbow roll into his mouth. I love sushi!
I weigh his words and stir wasabi into the soy sauce. I made out with a dude once. I didn t like it.
What didn t you like about it?
Uh, everything. Whiskers. Gross. He was a dude. Dudes are disgusting. I like girls. They re soft and they smell nice and they re delicate. Who wouldn t like a girl?
I don t know man. I m not the gay one. He looks at me and smiles and eats the whole pile of pickled ginger off his plate in one bite.
I let Jacob pay for dinner. We shake hands. He walks back to his car and says over his shoulder, You re fine. It s okay to like cats.
Mark Twain loved cats! I shout back.
I stand on the sidewalk in my denim finery and consider his words. It s not the cat, I finally say to no one. I turn and start walking back home.
The sidewalk I m on follows a road that bends evasively around a college campus. As I walk, a handsome twenty-something with a short black haircut steps from the front door of a Thai restaurant, a pretty honey-blonde girl right behind him. They fall in step in front of me. For awhile they walk side by side. Then suddenly the fingers of the boy s right hand make the smallest reaching motion, and all at once they are holding hands, in the not-quite-all-the-way style of familiar lovers. A casual intersection of hearts and fingers.
We all continue this way-lovers and witness-for a hundred or so feet, until the couple reaches their car.
The car chirps, the hands separate, and the girl walks alone to the passenger side. The boy lifts the latch on the driver s door and slides inside. The passenger door slams shut, the lights come on, and just as I walk past, the car pulls out into the street and disappears.
I consider one of my more recent romances.
The bullet points: young girl, fair-faced, overtly indifferent to my presence one way or another, but with a certain whispered affection that came in unlikely moments like a surprise. For whatever reason, this is the kind of girl I like, and like her I did. I read to her aloud from my favorite books. I rubbed her feet. I made her breakfast. I wrote a song for her.
What happened? I started to be myself is what happened. Too excitable, too many opinions, too much thinking about everything, just too much . She didn t care for the sum total.
The phone in my pocket vibrates. I pull it out and look at the screen. My true friend. It says:
Put down the cat I am calling you .
As I m reading the text the phone rings and I answer it. I say: Another thing that makes me mad. Dudes don t open doors anymore. Bad manners everywhere.
It s worse than that, comes the sharpened voice, I hear they stopped teaching cursive in elementary school.
Hilarious. Take me seriously or I m hanging up.
Honey. It s impossible to take you seriously. You wear a bow tie and I bet at this moment your belt matches your shoes. Am I right?
I don t say anything.
Also you like cats. Who likes cats?
Lonely people.
Barf. Everyone is lonely. Write us a song.
I m going to write a song about good manners.
Do it. God knows we need you to show us the way. You re our last hope, Obi-Wan.
Why are you in such a good mood?
You know why? I m talking to you, loverboy. Look, she says, I can tell you re having one of your flights of fancy. You ve probably been walking around your neighborhood for the last hour looking at leaves an