Good Deed Rain

Vic Shingles’ Ghastly Puppets
Good Deed Rain
Planet Fishing
Modern Alice
Pets
Pagoda
Why Models Stand The Way They Do
Fleas Please
Vic Shingles’ Ghastly Puppets Encore

Vic Shingles’ Ghastly Puppets

He pulled the curtain aside and the crowd
screamed in horror. All the terror that could be
expressed by human beings at seeing their
worst fears. Then he closed the curtain.
They had paid their dollars and there
were more waiting in lines outside.
They left shaking and holding
each other for support.




Good Deed Rain

The richest man in Sao Paulo had a magic umbrella.
When he opened the umbrella, an endless supply of

money green rain would waterfall out. He would let

the green pile up to his knees then shut it solemnly

and put the black umbrella back in the safe.
Nobody knew how he was getting all the money he

was spending. Before, he had nothing, but now he was

buying houses, land, cars, airplanes, anything that had

a pricetag he would buy. Except for an occasional loss

of peace of mind, the money gave him whatever he

wanted.
Lately while it poured, he strangely wondered why

he had been so lucky. He dreamed about buying the

world and giving every person a million dollars…
Sometimes, with the morning sun dripping his window

panes and collecting in a glass of orange juice on his plush

carpeted floor, the richest man in the city had a vision of

kindliness. He would pour the money out over the slums

that surrounded him and seeped through the city of Sao

Paolo like cockroach dancing.
Feeling so benevolent (he even felt above his head for a

halo) he climbed into his distinctive yellow bright chauffeured

helicopter with his umbrella on his lap and commanded in

a Moses-voice, “Hurry, off to the slums!”
Minutes later. Hovering over the crumbling poverty of
breakfast blue smoke fires and tin rust roofs. Cardboard

walls and flies crawling the faces of children who stopped

fighting only to poke their hands at the sky, to where the

golden helicopter buzzed in place directly overhead.

He opened the umbrella, leaning out the door like Zeus

with his thunderbolt. He smiled as money fluttered
down, laughing for a moment at the thought that this act

would no doubt buy him sainthood: picturing statues of

himself in town squares strewn with flowers and humbling

townsfolk kneeling before the altar of his image. He ordered

the pilot to circle round and round while he shook the umbrella

manna out of the sky.
Closing his eyes he basked in the hot Osiris sun, the roar of

blades overhead the roar of the faithful, he slowly opened his

eyes to see his pyramids below…
Instead, he was horrified to see spluttering thousands of
rotten green-brown yams the size of elephant tumors dropping
Earthwards. Screaming panic, he wrenched at the umbrella

trying to close it, the mechanics of it jammed with foul yam

slime. He shook it, rammed it against the rocking helicopter,

staining its bee yellow hide. But the umbrella wouldn’t close

and continued to spray its pestilence down on the poor people

of Sao Paolo.
Frenzy seized, he edged too far out the doorway and tumbled
out, gripping the umbrella pole handled like a lifeline in the palm

of the sky, praying in his leg kicking dervish free fall that it could
somehow parachute him safely.
But rancid yams were pouring down over him, soft thousands
sticking to his sleeves, shoulders and hair. He just fell faster to

the ground, with the yams flashing by, the whole world looking

brown and green. Instead of hitting the ground, he hit a mountain

of deep vegetable mush and he sunk down inside that gloom,

waited two days to be mined out.




Planet Fishing

Fising for the finest planets
Ernest Hemingway rigged a hook
and weight to the thick silver line
letting it trail silently wobbling
behind the ship. He trolled
through a small lake of stars
and easily caught small planets
which he reeled in, unhooked and
threw overboard again.




Modern Alice

Now she was older
things were different
anyway
Holding her hand out
to touch the circles
water made
Modern Alice
fell through
the mirror again
and found herself
in another world
where everything
was backwards

Pets

Now with science we can make our own animals,
from the circus or a zoo at a size convenient for you.
Elephants are popular, shrunk down to 20 inches tall,
holding to your leg as you move from room to room
at home. A six inch whale in a goldfish bowl, spouting
every half hour like a cuckoo-clock to keep time by.
An ostrich in a canary’s wooden cage, flapping its
wings in the sunlight coming through the window.
A hippo curling in your arms and purring like a cat
when its stomach is rubbed. With all the animal
kingdom to pick from, his possibilities were
exciting and pet stores took on a magical glow
like the colors and chrome of a dreamed 1956
Chevrolet showroom. He would carry home
a four inch buffalo scratching in a little paper box.
There were airholes poked in the top and as he
walked he could inspect through to see his pet
move. And he would let his buffalo loose on the gold
carpet of his bedroom floor, watching it roam
the prairie floor, past the toy model railroad
stretching from one corner to the other like
Manifest Destiny miniaturized.

Pagoda

It seemed to be a very small planet she was on.
Looking out the window, she could see where
the edges curved on the black forest horizon,
where there where synthetic rain clouds piled up.
Surrounded by seas of leaves and ripe berries,
the pagoda stood in perfect calm between the thorns,
as a kind of blackberry lighthouse.
She had no idea how she got to this place
all she knew was she had been asleep
and woke up here. Sometimes, she caught
memories of what she used to be. If she tried
hard enough, small moments in time would appear
and blink like fireflies. Through some magic
she couldn’t understand, she was here now,
in a self contained world of blackberries.
She had built the pagoda long ago,
a Japanese thing of dragon beauty
with green tiles and dark red wood,
tiers moving perfectly calm to a height
of over thirty feet. The rooms inside
were quiet paper walls with furniture
made of wicker. To survive, she learned
to make everything she needed from
the vines, leaves and fruit she cleared.
It was her daily ritual, sweeping forever
shifting and growing blackberry seas
around the pagoda and all the moving
twined pathways inside of the jungle.
After she was finished gardening
around midday, she would return home.
She was sitting at the loom upstairs,
making a blanket in a room lit by blue
candles, when a shooting star fell.
It went down slowly, rattling the pagoda
as orange flame settled in the courtyard.
It was not like the sparking meteors
that sometimes crashed far away
in the fields, there was something
different, it was something else.
When the fire went out and it was quiet,
she left the window and went down
the spiral stairs. For a moment,
she hung in the doorway and stared
out at the strange gleaming shape.
It didn’t look completely unfamiliar,
it was something she might have seen
before, a long time ago, something
connected to the dreams she had.
A door opened on the curved side
and what came out wasn’t that different
in shape from herself. It wasn’t wearing
the blue and red clothes she wore,
it was dressed in the same color as
the spaceship it left. Silver.
Things started to change suddenly,
like seeing through smashed glass,
or quickly melting ice, she was starting
to remember everything that happened.
She understood him when he said
“Good Afternoon, Captain Franz!”
in the language she had forgotten.
Then she could read the letters
on the spaceship: USA.
She had a name too,
Isabella Franz and things
like photographs were shuffling.
“Looks like you’ve got quite a crop going,”
he laughed, “And I like what you did to
the escape-ship.” He pointed at the pagoda.
“I almost didn’t recognize it. You’ve really
made yourself at home here.”
Isabella sat down heavily on a wicker chair.
The rocked burned the air, it was no longer
the sweet blackberry smell. She remembered
how it began, it was years earlier when
Captain Isabella Franz had walked across
this barren moon, so long ago, planting it
with blackberry seeds. Hundreds of moons
had been converted, getting atmospheres,
rich soils and crops, becoming farms
for the crowded needs of the home planet.
And this was one of them. This was
a blackberry moon she had turned into
a garden for Earth.
He was holding a clipboard,
“I’d like to take a look at the crop
before I call the harvesters down.”
She watched him walk over to the wall
and he fed the berries to a computer.
A paper with calculations rolled out
a moment later. The blackberries
were broken down into numbers.
He smiled, “I’ll go radio the harvesters.
They’re in orbit on the other side,”
he pointed at the sky, “Just waiting
for the signal to land. We can have
the surface reaped and burned back
in less than a day.” She remembered
what they did to the sugar cane moon.
“Yeah, since you’ve been here,
there are new machines, we can
triple our yield on the moons.”
He flipped through the notebook.
“It’s amazing really. You won’t
believe the statistics.” He moved
towards the rocket ship.
“Wait” Isabella got up,
“There’s something I need to show you.”
Back to the wall of blackberries and then
into the winding, he followed her down
a twisting steep path. She took him under
vines the size of tree branches. Other paths
crisscrossed and they squeezed on through
the sharp maze. She could open doors in
the green, leading to other dark hallways.
Then he turned on his helmet light,
“This is not exactly following company
specifications, Isabella.” It had all been
tunelled out of the plants. He was lost
and tired, cramped after the hour shuttle
flight to this small moon and now
she had him walking miles in the crop.
In places all he could see was her shadow
on the narrow trail in front of him.
The thorns were tearing his suit.
“What did you want to show me?”
He repeated himself, but his words
were getting to noone. She was gone.




Why Models Stand The Way They Do

She was a model, you could tell by the way she stood
at the filing cabinet. When I asked her why models
stand the way they do, she told me about Twinkies.
They had changed their recipe, she told me.
She had been eating Twinkie cakes for years
until the sugar filling was changed.
There was a loss in her voice as she talked
in terms of the tragic crumbling of America,
the self destruction of this once proud land.
To her, this was the worst of America’s crimes
and she decided to do something about it.
She wrote them what she thought about it.
A year later she told me, sadder still,
her letter never got a reply.




Fleas Please

Out along the road
where there used to be wolves
sixty years ago
they would hang out
and drink beer
on the big rock
spraypainted with
heavy metal band names
and girlfriends
who are gone
with the sounds of cars
passing headlights at night
glowing the dark woods
they would blow into bottles
and howl like wolves




Vic Shingles’ Ghastly Puppets Encore

For an encore,
he whirled the planet
in the palm of his hand.

He left it spinning recklessly
on the beak of a crow
and went out with a showgirl
on each arm


9/1/90 7:35 PM



cover picture: teresa mansfield
writing: allen frost in 1990