Small Maps of the World

Brooke Biaz

Description

Brooke Biaz’s short stories unearth the bonds between individuals and location but also wonder on the underlying connections between people and their sense of belonging.

Sujets

• Literary
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 24 octobre 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781643170008
• Langue: English

Extrait

By the same author
Dancing on the Moon
Black Cat, Green Field
Teaching Creative Writing
Swallowing Film (editor)


Small Maps of the World
Brooke Biaz
Parlor Press
West Lafayette, Indiana
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906
© 2006 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Biaz, Brooke.
Small maps of the world / Brooke Biaz.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-932559-57-4 (acid-free paper) -- ISBN 1-932559-56-6 (pbk. : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 1-932559-58-2 (Adobe ebook)
I. Title.
PS3602.I19S63 2006
813’.6--dc22
2005030572
Printed on acid-free paper.
Globes Illustration © by Bryce Kroll. Used by permission.
Vector World © by Alexander Briel Perez. Used by permission.
Cover and book design by David Blakesley
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paperback, cloth and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the WWW at http://www.parlorpress.com. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 816 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [e-mail].


For Louise, with all my love


Contents
Traveling I
Heloise Finds a Mammoth
Science Fiction
Being Umberto Eco
Innsbruck
The Festival of Funerals
A History of Sleeping
The Instrument
Recording the Humpback
Going to the Volcano
Maine Mane
The Bridge
Bill and Sue’s Big Adventure
Marvin Studlovsky’s Brother
The Little Merman Turns Sixteen
Wolf Boy, Aged 83
Traveling II
Arrival
Breakfast Is at Eight
The Entertainment
Holiday Romance
Hotel Crime
A Man Is Not an Island
Tourist Attractions
Departure


Map-making is not the whole of philosophy, just as a map or guidebook is not the whole of geography. It is simply a beginning—the very beginning that is at present lacking, when people ask: “What does it all mean?” or “What am I supposed to do with my life?”
—E. F. Schumacher, Guide for the Perplexed
Yn y fro ddedwyd mae hen frueddwydion.*
— Island of the Blest , Welsh and Irish Legend
Maps codify the miracle of existence.
—Nicholas Crane, Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet
* In that happy region there are old dreams.


Traveling I
Time


Heloise Finds a Mammoth
1
Vastraborg. Sweden. 2002. Heloise has found a mammoth. She has found it in the fresh, exposed earth of the new Vastraborg-Ljungberg shopping mall development. In the late afternoon. On her way home from music practice. Heading down Claes Street, in fact, much like the fluffy white seed of a daisy blown off the nearby deep green acreage of a Vastraborg-Ljungberg field. Her in that sheepskin coat she almost always wears in these final spring months of school. Blowing home. Nearing dusk.
Heloise has found a mammoth.
2
At first, stepping onto the soft dark turned soil, she didn’t notice it. The distant dusty churning of a mighty cement mill, and the men busily working up high on the steel skeleton of what will one day probably be the Claims Department of a chain store, held her attention. But as she stepped in, further onto the dark moist expanse of the construction site, she noticed a tusk protruding from a newly bulldozed mound and, from there, something kicked in.
Perhaps the word “tusk” though, is too great a leap. Better: a white hard node of intrigue; a suture or a slice in the soil. Smooth and fixed at a sharp angle. Not so much poking out as forming a clod of its own, halfway up the mound, exposed by the tumbling of the earth as nearby the last half-tracks of the day rumble out with their humped chocolate-colored mounds. The new mall site looking, from that angle, like the diggings required for a monstrous swimming pool, or the expanse of a war zone. Heloise entering at the shallow end where the earth was smooth, dry, but not so steeply sloped, and the mammoth appearing on the sunken, moist gouge of the next, deeper level.
She stoops down slowly to peer way across the soil toward it, the exposed point of its tusk like the point on a tooth, only there is no tooth, just the point, a tuft of strangely orange bristle, like the innards of one of those old striped mattresses, springing from around the side of the tusk itself, and the vague, disturbing suggestion in the bulging curve of the mound that something much larger and more encompassing lies beneath.
3
Heloise has found a mammoth. In the distance. There in the dusk light of the Vastraborg-Ljungberg Mall development. It seems entirely unaffected by the construction going on around it. Partly uncovered maybe, but fixed still in the earth. Untouched.
She approaches it gingerly.
The construction site is busy even for that time of day. They are planning to open the new mall in summer and as it is already April it seems almost impossible that they will meet their schedule. So, night and day, the construction goes on, against this impossible timetable. Huge banks of floodlights elongating the day, as if somehow light converts minutes to hours and men themselves are renewed in the process.
The lights cast strange shadows over the site. A tall bare skeleton of heavy steel. The rolling drums of the cement mill. A criss-cross of high hung wires. The rumbling phantom of a dump truck.
Heloise creeps in under the broken fence. She has found a mammoth.
4
Coming home from violin practice, Heloise has found a mammoth. At the Vastraborg-Ljungberg mall development, which she passes, on the way.
Every Wednesday afternoon she practices violin. Her first finger. Her second. Her third and fourth. The E-string. The G-string. Scales and arpeggios. Flowers from Fröso Island. She has a vision of joining a symphony orchestra. Mrs. Petersen-Berger, who runs the Vastraborg Music Academy, says she’s talented. But Heloise knows there’s more to it than that. Though she is not yet sixteen years of age, she recognizes that luck plays a part. That she might, after all, stumble on her way. That time, and ambitions, change. That nothing, much, is ever fixed.
Yet, at the moment, she rides this vision of a place in a symphony orchestra like a seagull riding an afternoon sea breeze. She carves her way along the current of it, high over the head of all others. It separates her from her school friends, when she wants this, and makes her unique among them when she doesn’t. She likes it that they think she is odd. Determined. Artsy. Destined.
Out in the twilight of the construction site she imagines she has stepped from the world of Vastraborg, with its small, old wooden stores and fibro cement houses, its rumble of old ruralness in the half-built land and rusty outcrops of what was once dairy sheds and cattle yards, into some new world, lit like a stage, dark and loud, enormous and demanding, her breath catching at the roar of engines and the clang of hammers.
Heloise has found a mammoth and this makes perfect sense.
5
“The thing about music,” thinks Heloise, as she creeps up on the mammoth across the moist tumble of upturned Vastraborg soil, “is that it changes your perspective.”
Without realizing it, she sounds these days a lot like her parents, who said these things once, but have been caught up, lately, in ordinary life. Her mother teaches history at nearby Vastraborg-Ljungberg High School. Her father runs a landscaping firm.
In fact, if her father were here he would perhaps imagine the upturned soil and tangle of grass, bush and fallen trees, birch and fig and beech and the like, as the beginnings of a long job. While her mother, playing to type, would recall that it was on this acreage of Vastraborg that the first local sawmill was built, slicing the birch and beech, and cedar and whitewood as well into the long shanks of homes, which sprung up soon after across the valley, and provided the impetus for the establishment of towns, and brought the railway, and encouraged the development of the nearby port, and attracted tourists, and saw the highway grow wide across the old farms and gave rise to a hospital, a race track, a returned serviceman’s club, a gaggle of churches, several schools, and the Vastraborg District Sports Arena.
But their daughter is different.
Heloise, of course, has found a mammoth.
6
A mammoth is the ancestor of the elephant. First appearing in Africa five million years ago. In North America around two million years ago, crossing the Bering Strait from Asia into Alaska, when the ancient sea was at its lowest. And in Europe around one and a half million years ago.
In Vastraborg-Ljungberg Heloise has found a mammoth much more recently.
She imagines its hefty shoulders, rising up twenty feet or more above her. And further, above that, the hump of its back. Its coat hung over its body like a throw on a mighty old lounge chair. Something her round and rollicking grandmother might own. Smelling of musk and tobacco and shoes. Its tusks curving up in a gigantic white bow, and its black eyes, small and sparkling with curiosity, blinking nervously into life.
Whereas once a mammoth might have covered the frozen expanse of Siberia or stood proud in the Pleistoscene regions of Sardinia, here in Vastraborg-Ljungberg Heloise imagines it standing over her like a frightened infant, soil shiveri