Author: Michael Farfel

originally appeared in Bear Creek Gazette, July 2021

the Re-Earthing of Mother

Father found the fox outside, digging. Its feline nose pressed into the dirt, its ringletted tail upward. He tried to shoo it off. Shoo, he said, git. The vixen turned and faced him briefly. Father said, good lord, those damned eyes. And the fox kept digging. Its fore paws and little, wilty face half deep in earth, scattering out mounds of discarded rocks and grubs between its hindquarters. Father got closer, quietlike, sights set. Git, he said, go on. It faced him again. Its eyes, hollow, flat, sunken in things like Mother’s. Its whiskers, all mucked up, twitched and then it bore its teeth. By god, Father said, its teeth. Pearly, human looking chompers. It clicked its canines then kept digging. Body almost fully buried in the backyard now. Father reached out and nudged it with his gun at its farthermost back foot. It turned and nipped and showed its squirrelly little, blood-black tongue. Shoot it, I said. I cried out, shoot the little bastard before he digs her up. 

Mother’s grave. We’d buried her that day. Buried. Not quite. Threw some dirt. She’d just been withering lately. Withering between living and dying. Between walking round the house at night and wailing. She’d been sick for awfully long. Half dead. Half gone. Always having daytime nightmares and frightening the birds. Always cursing at the curtains and screaming bloody murder at the doorknobs. She laid out in the garden so we tried to bless her, tried to invite her in one last time, but she were gone. Gone as good can get. Gone as gracious. Gone. So we buried her. Just that day. Some hunks of clay. Some soil from the stoop. And now this godforsaken vixen. 

Ah, be damned, I said when it got hold of her well-worn red dress. Nothing ceremonial, not at all, just what she was wearing when the time came to shovel. The fox held the fabric in its maw and crawled backward, slowly pulling, slowly revealing that Mother wasn’t dead, she were only sleeping. Christ, Father cried. Almighty, I wept. She dusted herself off and held the little beast to her breast. Her eyes and its flocked together, side to side, disapproving of us, saying without saying, how could you? She turned toward our small house—barefoot, caked in burial bits—and pointed out all her belongings to the fox. Her long diminishing palm and fingers outstretched, my tree, she said, my axe, my garden trowel. The fox mewed and milled against her warmth. 

That night we sat round the table, her and the fox cuddled at the fore and Mother told us of a dream she had—after you two had forsook me in the garden plot I dreamt of a glooming winter a long and dastardly coldening up from the mire I dreamt that others felt its burden but not you two men you two evil doers who’da left me out in that swarling swirling snow up up up from the mire just below. Her and her new pet cackled, its squirmy little visage pressed against her nooks and still dirt belumbered hair. Mother’s pallored, viney skin was shadowed from the shadow of the lamp. Her veins all purpley, pulsed under her sunken eyes, her chapped lips still muddied formed a fungally smile. Won’t yuh wash up? Father asked and she spat out a half eaten brussel sprout which the vermin gobbled up. 

We buried her next winter with the fox head as monument. She’d wrung its neck one night in one of her awful frights, in one of her full bemoaning moaning full moon cataclysmic states, she shook the poor dumb creature till it was unhooked, unhinged. It were as easy as if it weren’t a thing at all. After killing her pet, Mother crawled right into the snow, hand and foot and toe, and closed her eyes one last time and said one last curse and we shoveled one last heap and she were quiet, quit of the earth, as dead as death, as gone as soot. When spring came next we feared the worst, but snow melt revealed only her garments and some gnawed over bone.   

Vacation’s End original published by Door is a Jar

Desert all around, dust and hillspire and dots of antelope. A family of four ride the highway West. Old car. Oldish father, mother. Two children in the backseat. The daughter clamors to the window. Nostril imprint, blue-purple lips.

“Can’t we stop?” she nearcries.

The father huffs.

Her brother  repeats the question.

The mother turns. Black hair spattered across her brow, tired ringlets. She doesn’t speak—they cower.

Powerlines ghost by in twos and the siblings can’t help but point. Whisper communications about how they’d climb the distant giants. The mother calls them twins. They’re not. The son is black-haired, twisty-curly, fat-nosed, bone-jawed. The daughter is fair-eyed, fair-skinned. The father has joked, They can’t be mine—are they the milkman’s, the roofer’s?

He’s not joking now. He’s dead on home. Floored, 80-90-95. The car struggles and speaks—fan belt clucking, suspension cussing. Age old rust sparks and dusts the road behind them. 

“Music?” he asks.

They are beautiful, man and wife. But now, their voyage home, they look like drench-soaked sailors, undrunk. Filled gills with sand and salt. Vacationers who are vacationed out. She is tall and scrunched in her seat—long, oaky, sweaty legs cross and uncross. A tick of nervousness, a tick of going too fast. She adjusts her bunched up dress in fidgets—yellow flowers, brown and black.  He is long too; his kids think of him as bendy, angular. Limber-looking willow tree. 

The scenery scrubs by. Spacecraftlike. Windows cracked open, rushed air smell, huzzary buzzary. Mountains in the distance, flattop, once bedrock, shift and adjust the horizon. The children watch the passing sunlight shape the plains. Shadowed creatures manifest and bound through the orange-wavery hills.  

The mother tries the radio. Crackle, crackcrickle. Drums, bassline, highnote, for a moment. Cawcurring, cawcrackle, currcaw. Father shakes his head no. “Worth a shot,” he mouths and puts his full weight into the steering wheel. He’s no longer ending, but bending and formed to the helm. Faded leather clutched, atomic level binding. Man is car is man. 

Silhouetted on the side of the road an arch of rock rises. The children jostle in their seats and dare another, “Please?” 

“No,” father blurts.

“But…”

He turns to face them. Wild white slit wide-eyed eyes, red. Car is man is. Floating now. Steady, steady. Screeching. Steel buckling. Correction. Bucking bronco. Uncorrected. Gored through matador. Concussive, coconuts. Yelping. Screaming. Howling. Full earful, fulnear death. Full tilting. One way, one way. 

Silence. 

Purpling leviathans, born in the updripping dusk, surround them—their shadows stretch and fill the world with tricklight. Moon rising windnoise whistles and groans and grows in echoes as the children dance. Holding hands and cheering in their freedom. The red earth pales yellow.

The car, the wife, the husband, the two children, all frozen in debris and rising dust, all breathing deeply, all checking for pulses and lost body parts. The mother speaks first, but makes no sense, an incomprehensible syllable, syllable, sob. The father peels his hands from the wheel and laughs. The car is dead, mangled, hissing. The children tumble out. Unafraid. In fact, the blood on the son’s forehead makes them giddy. The daughter touches it with the fat of her hand and presses it to her face. Palmprinted beauty.

Gray clouds gather, orange-lined. Lightning in their hollows. Mother and father sit quietly in the wreckage, a moment of reprieve. She reaches across the console and touches his face. Stubbled, new-wrinkled, still young-eyed. She follows his jawline to pink lipline to temples. Curled silver over his sweat-peaked ears. His calloused hand rests above her bare knee and walks, mandolinlike, up her thigh. Smoke smell and binding piston reek can’t stop them. Tooth tongue, lip stumbling, never alone, alone at last. 

The children make it to the near hills—have gathered sticks and rocks, rubies and diamonds; new friends, wolves and birds. Volcanic black rocks, in slips and slabs, crunch under their feet as they climb. They hold their hands in binocular shape and stake claims on all creation. Nightfall covers the earth. Thunder amasses, east and west. Headwinds collide headwinds. Dust devils. Devils. Darkness. Will be mine, they say. And mine and mine.

the Weed originally published by Riggwelter Press.

It is quiet on their back porch. They overlook a small patch of grass butted against a red desert. Mountains in the distance and small developments creep in from all directions. Before long it won’t be so peaceful. Small families moving in mean small children. Small children mean noise. Now it’s just coyotes and windsound. Sometimes rain and with it thunder. Those nights are their favorites. The crash and excitement against their solitude. 

At the edge of the grass, before their world slopes down into another, a tall gray weed sways. Neither of them remember it being there the day before. Just beyond it are cactus and sage and the bright flowers of the desert. 

“If we’re not careful,” he says. “That weed’ll take over our whole yard. It’ll get into the foundation.” 

She smiles and nods.

“They grow so damn fast,” He says. 

“A constant battle,” She agrees.

“I better get it before it turns to seed,” He says and stands.

“It’s nearly midnight,” She responds.

He sits back down for half a breath and gets up again. “It won’t take me but a minute.”

He grabs his gloves. Old cracked leather, formed to his hands. He grabs his tool. A makeshift thing he made himself for battle. An old, white-oak shovel handle, wrapped at one end with cloth and twine for grip, and at the other, a two pronged metal blade. Perfect for weeding, he says, or hunting seals, he jokes. He makes his way across their patch of grass and plucks up three dandelions as practice. Expertly. Masterly. The prongs strike at either side of the stem and he pulls up the bastardly things from their roots.  He holds the bunch above his head and yells to his wife, “A feast!”

She watches him from above in her rocking chair and rocks back and forth. A hand rolled cigarette in one hand and a mason jar in the other. She ashes her cigarette and stands to tell him he looks like a fool. He howls into the night air in response. She adjusts the dial on the radio. Classical music. To her it sounds like it’s playing at half speed. All he can hear are the live cannons. He winces and carries on.

She wears a flowing dress and dances. Very slowly. Each movement starts in her right foot then works its way up. Her knee swivels, hips stutter, torso, breasts, neck, head—her hair and dress move in contrasted waves. She inhales smoke and sips her wine. On her toes now. Slides from left to right across the deck. The moonlight catches her and her shadow is her partner. In the corner, cast across the house, the shadow moves one step behind her and comes down on her from above. She fills her cup and ashes her cigarette.

That buffoon, she thinks and half says. That silly man. Had he just left it, I’m sure the weed wouldn’t even last the night. Besides, she thinks, from up here it’s almost beautiful. Looks a bit like the setting sun.

The weed arches over him. Gray thistles and green veins make up its slender arms. Its leaves curl and grip one another as if to keep warm. A bulbous purple flower makes up its head with yellow filaments stretching out from its center. It watches his every movement. You goddamn bastard, he says. I’m not afraid of you, not afraid of you or any goddamns. 

He looks over his shoulder to assure his wife that he won’t be long. To tell her that this weed is no match for him, in fact, he probably doesn’t even need his tool, could pull it out of the ground with one hand, he thinks. But she has gone to sleep. Her dancing partner, her shadow, is all that’s left—the porch, the grass, the world—all covered in its cloak. A coldness settles in.

He is filled with dread and considers turning back or yelling for his wife. He sits down to think and catch his breath. It’s my yard, my home, he says. Nothing out here can kill me, nothing out here is new. It has been here since the beginning of time. This weed and I. He presses his face against its stem—colder than expected. 

He holds his weapon above his head and stands toe-to-toe with his enemy. It no longer flutters in the wind—this evil thing that stands above him, that rises with the moon and stretches its limbs as if human. He arches his back and swings his weapon at its face. A gash across its meaty brow. He swings again, this time the weapon bounces back and he is uprooted. Spun around. Dizziness. He falls and laughs and is on his feet again. Devil, he cries out and stabs the prongs toward its roots. But the thing is too well set. From the porch and even from their small patch of grass the weed looked so much smaller. He is ill equipped. 

To the shed.

The small shed is warmed by a wood burning stove. He feeds it absentmindedly and the room is sweltering. He sits at his workbench. Ancient tools hang above him, aesthetic things whose purpose are long forgotten. Jagged and orange-rusted saws whose shapes serve no purpose hang from small hooks and levers made of stone. His hands are older now, covered in new scars. Each knuckle swollen. White calloused tissue connects the brightfull veins. He sharpens his ax. It was his father’s ax and his father’s father’s. He is meticulous and the blade shines, reflects the light of the fire.

She reaches across the bed for him and feels the cold of the sheets. She had been dreaming of her old house. The one with the arched doorway and the yellow brick facade. Her father and mother had built it. Will last until the end of time, her mother had said. Her dream is always the same. A scanning of each room. Floating. Things undisturbed. The old books and old carpets all unmoving—settled and permanent. In the kitchen there is a warmth and the sounds of her mother and brother laughing, but they are nowhere to be found. It makes her sad. It happens often. 

She stands on the porch and scans the darkness. The weed has grown. Its grisled body, all bloodied and chipped, stretches into the night. Its angular appendages cast moving shadows across her face. Beyond the weed the sky is empty but for the moon—fullish and pinkish and glowing. She makes her way across the frosted grass. 

The fool, she thinks. Could’ve left it until morning. And now—where is he? Lost again. Out here in the cold. The frigid awful midnight.

She reaches out and touches the weed, surprised by its warmth. There must be some furnace, some engine in its guts. She can hear a noise within it, a kind of ticking. She presses her ear against its green flesh, just above where her husband had stabbed it. The warmth overtakes her, she can feel it in her chest and through her feet. Steam comingles off the both of them—woman and weed. Her cheeks flush, her brow sopped with sweat. The ticking is louder now. Perhaps a bird, she says aloud. She moves around the weed and examines its every pore. Searching for a hollow, somewhere for a bird to nest and make its ticking sound. 

Below one of its many arms she finds an opening and peers in. It is bright inside the weed. There are no shadows, only open spaces, a roundness in all directions. The ticking though is not a ticking—a dragging of stone across steel, a sharpening.

She turns and steps away just as the ax splits the weed down its center. 

Its inner workings spill out. The sky and earth are red. They are both covered—husband and wife, standing just before the desert. He swings again and again. He looks to sever the roots of the demon weed from their earth. The dirt and the force of the blows dull his weapon. The calluses on his hands have opened. The ax handle breaks and he collapses. 

“I didn’t think there’d be so much blood,” she says.

The weed is at their feet, curled in the shape of death, dried and ashen-white. She fills his coffee as the sun comes up.

It’s finally here, The Reluctant Journey of Manfred Bugsbee. Years and years of work, stretching the imagination, restretching, reorienting, etc, etc. A few years back, Utah was hit by an earthquake, a strange, seldom occurrence. This happened one week(ish) after my job decided that COVID was becoming scary enough that we all needed to work from home. A tumultuous time, to say the least. Morning of the earthquake, I got a very short email from the wonderful Montag Press, “Is Mindiidus still available?”

After spending a few hours checking my very old, very brick, very (already) crumbly, apartment building for cracks, I spent a few moments in the surreality of the potential of a book contract. Writing can be incredibly lonely. It’s an often thankless, sometimes seemingly pointless endeavor. To imagine that even one person spent time with a project of mine and enjoyed it is a magical feeling.

The Reluctant Journey is a side of my writing that is purely imaginative. It’s me tapping into all the things I loved as a kid—and the holdovers in adulthood. Inspired, in large part, by all the sticks turned swords I found in my grandparents’ yards. Grant Morrison’s, Animal Man and Doom Patrol are in there. Terry Pratchett, Akira Kurosawa, even a little bit of Cormac McCarthy can be found. I’m really proud of this book. Mostly because it was just so fun to write. I had to get over myself a few times while putting it together and remind myself to just play.

This project, like all of my projects, is only possible because of the support of my family and friends. During the pandemic, the earthquake, the excitement of book contracts, I was also saying goodbye to one of my most important creative bastions, my wonderful Aunt Nanci. Much of the magic and play in this book is because of her. She never let me lose sight of the beauty and creativity inherent to the world around me. Every object, hollow or whole, real or imagined, brims with light and adventure if you let it. She taught me that. I miss her everyday. So much of her is in this book.

Word of mouth and reviews go a long way with a project like this. So, grab a copy and tell your friends!

If you’re lucky you have a song. Something you go back to time and time again. It can be a space to recharge your batteries, hype yourself up, confront trauma, confront sadness. I have a few–this one, definitely this one, of course, this freaking one. They remind me of times and versions of myself, intense joy and sorrow, frustrations, building-budding empathies, and on and on. They are conversations I come back to. They help me see the change in myself. They help me let go of, even if only momentarily, the baggage of life. Music is a damn thing–I have to remind myself that sometimes. 

I owe a lot to my sister, my sister, my sister. I come back to this a lot, but I think she may be my only true hero. I have a long list of people I look up to, but whenever I try and sort through it, she rises to the top. Anyone who knows her knows she is a force to be reckoned with. We both have the same anxiousness–you’d never know with her. Her whole adult life she’s worked in and around good ole boys’ clubs. Always having to prove herself, go above and beyond to prove herself in male dominated hierarchies. She’s very constantly reaffirming that she’s not to be fucked with. As with many things in life, she may not see it in herself, but the world around her sure does.

She and I both turn to the same band when we need to reorient, Stretch Arm Strong. That band (and punk rock in general) is a gift of hers to me. Something that I’m able to reach out to when I feel lost. I always know when she’s getting ready to confront something that scares her. She’ll send me a link to their music before and my mom will tell me the next day how well it went. Like clockwork.

When I was a kid, I wanted nothing more than for her to think I was cool. So, when she started letting me borrow her walkman to listen to CDs I was overjoyed. It was there that I began to see the many (many, many) pathways one could take toward personhood. I still struggle with identity, and hope to never stop changing. But it’s from this foundation (the willingness of my sister to share punk rock with me) that the weirdo you know and love began to sprout.

Everyday, especially lately, new horrors are showing up in the news. Music still comforts me. In part, because it reminds me that it’s always been bad, and there have always been folks fighting back. I have hope–it dwindles and shifts and spirals, but its there–in large part because of my sister. Because she gave me music. Because she constantly reminds me that strength comes from within and you should never count the little guy out.

The many stories I tell (and want to tell), my DIY mentality, even my fierceness (it exists, somewhere), and hope, comes from looking up to her. I’ve been made by a lot of things–music and sisterhood are key.

There I was, swimsuit clad, a vision of intense pretentiousness, reading Beckett’s fantastic anti-novel, while families of fifteen surrounded my wife and me. Heat moving beyond 110 degrees and people were wading about in the hot tub, ordering fully loaded nachos with extra cheese. To try and make sense of it, even now, is dizzying. Of course our dear friend Samuel helped urge me through the absurdity. You can’t go on? You can’t comprehend this place? You must.

Who better to spend time with in the strangeness of Las Vegas than Samuel Beckett? Hopping from pool umbrella to pool umbrella feels a bit like tracking the arc of The Unnamable. You get the sense that there’s an objective, a narrative even, but every time you get your footing the sun shifts ever so slightly and you’re blinded again. Recursion and destruction and an oppressive nothingness. Not as many smoke clouds in Vegas nowadays, yet there is a stench that moves over every object–a sweet smelling repugnance. A place of pure Beckettian quality.

In all the strangeness (ugliness, perhaps) and despair of Vegas there is a profound beauty. That’s why my wife and I decided to get married there. It is a romantic place. Chaotic, yes, but the chaos of neon flesh–of moonlight crashed to earth. To see my wife cast in the flickering purples and yellows, to hear her laugh overlapping the chimes and bells, to kiss her beneath luminescent cowboys, is as complete a beauty as I can imagine. We promised to love each other forever in a pink Cadillac to a pastor whose lips were stained with cherry popsicle and who couldn’t quite remember my name–if there’s a happiness beyond that I’ve yet to see it.

Vegas, Beckett, and my very pretty wife are forever intwined. And if I believed in the sort of thing I’d say it’s by design. The hopefulness hidden in Beckett, the swirling dream of Vegas, and the jovial, mischievousness of my best friend all meld together as if to say, life can be oh so terrible, but not today.