Choose Your Own Adventure
- Choose Your Own Adventure
I
If you want to see Jeff swallow a keening bell and portend death among the whippoorwills turn to page 52. (Don’t worry. He meets a blacksmith’s daughter. She turns his innards into a forge and he returns to his normal self. And yet, still sometimes he shouts to his neighbor, Tonight is your night, you sour-bellied old goat! But the old goat isn’t familiar with this idiom so he starts collecting these nights in an old, red Folgers can. Soon he becomes the last historian on earth. Most people are happy with his version of the past, how he festoons the synapse hallway with plastic barrel monkeys and other childhood fictions. How much remembering is simply the snake swallowing itself.)
II
If you want to see Nadine give up religion for comic books turn to page 93.
III
If you want to see Jeff and Nadine fall in and out of love turn to page 126. (This sounds banal so I’ll give some specifics. Nadine is wearing a faded-mauve-colored shirt with a Peter Pan collar, smoking a Camel crush cigarette, standing near some paper birch trees. Jeff thinks smoking is idiotic, but when she exhales, he’s reminded of planes writing messages with smoke. He loved those as a child. She climbs a birch tree, and he asks if she’s read the Robert Frost poem. She says no, but he thinks he could do worse than her. That’s the falling in. Now K’s in Illinois. I’m not. The barn swallows are leaving. K’s asleep, the computer’s humming, let’s forget about story, please, unfurl your old hips, we’ll find a new word, you didn’t love him, right, the word, it was only a physical thing, a new word for what we have, turn around, I’ll press the word into you, typewriter ribbon, end of line, enjambment, end of the line.) [End Page 5]
IV
If you’ve ever dreamed darkly of a lover who yodels at the point of climax, as if you’re a mountain worth not only climbing, but building a language unto, you should know that I’m with you, reader, but there’s no page to turn to. Sometimes you’re the yodeler. Sometimes you must carve the mountain yourself. [End Page 6]
Corey Miller is from Herrin, Illinois, and is currently an MFA candidate at the Michener Center at the University of Texas. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in Narrative, Forklift, Ohio, Sonora Review.
