Sam Martone

The Day After the Election*

The day after the election, he paced around the house smashing all the light bulbs with the heel of his black dress shoe.

“These are old Ideas,” he said with sweaty eyes. “We need new Ideas.”

He came across more things he was unsatisfied with, more things we needed to replace, as he paced up and down the halls, up and down the stairs.

The picture frames were laughing at him. Smash. The window was a cloudy day. Smash. The TV ate up all the Time. Smash. He smashed the clock before Time could get away.

“Everything’s wrinkled and gray,” he said. “These decaying glass shards are so sharp they’re dull. They’re dead blades of grass.”

Then he came across the mirror, The Ugly Echo, he called it.

“I’m an Old Story,” he said. “They’ll dig me up and the newsprint will be covered in bits of marrow, specks of blood, and little green flies.”

He brought his heel down hard on the shimmering reflection, and The Ugly Echo began to skip like a handsome broken record.

“I need new limbs, and new skin, a new face,” he said. “I’m not a politician, I’ll be a tree with royal leaves, or a fish with autumn gills. Throw out all my medals and swords and jewelry, I won’t need those anymore. Those are old Ideas.”

He wasn’t drunk tonight, not at all. He wrapped my grandmother’s shawl tight around his head and fell asleep in a sea of chipped teeth.

After that day, I made him promise not do anything like that again. I made him get the broom to sweep up the debris.

“The flag needs new stars,” I told him.

*Various sentences, phrases, words, ideas, and themes stolen from various works of writing as part of the “Collaborating, Hacking, and Stealing” class. I am not a crook.

Bear Suit

Then there was that day we all showed up at school and there was a bear in the parking lot, eating garbage. No one really knew where it came from, all the surrounding forests were cleared out years ago. We didn’t know what to do, so we just went into school, looking over our shoulders at the far corner of the parking lot, where the bear was resting against a minivan, chewing on some crumpled, stained math quizzes.

About halfway through the day, a nervous, breathy announcement was made over the intercom.

“No one is to go to the parking lot until notified that it is okay. If you have a class off-campus, do not leave, report to the cafeteria. Again, no one go to the parking lot.”

Me and Knife were in English when the announcement was made. Knife’s mom still brought him to school, so he didn’t get to see the bear in the morning. When he first heard of the bear, from a group of giggling freshman girls, he didn’t believe it, and thought that one of the seniors, like Jack or Winston, had made it up to scare them. I don’t know why Knife was called Knife, even though I had been friends with him since kindergarten, when I kicked his blocks down.

“Are we absolutely sure it’s not just Jack in a bear suit?” Knife asks me. Knife sat behind me in English.

“Yeah, pretty sure,” I say. “Looked like a real bear to me. It was eating trash.”

“What’s the answer to number four?” Knife asks me.

“Shut-up, Knife.”

Knife was really skinny and a head shorter than me, even though he was almost six months older. All day, he talked about wanting to go see the bear, since he hadn’t gotten to in the morning.

“I should be getting a car soon,” Knife says, eating his cheese sandwich.

“Yeah, sure,” we say.

Finally, after lunch, me and Knife and Marc went to the doors that led out into the parking lot and tried to see the bear through the glass so Knife would finally shut-up. Before we could really look, the vice principal told us to get away from there.

“I don’t want that bear to see all you, then try to come up in here, thinking he’s getting served dinner,” he says.

Knife asked him when bears learned to operate door handles. Knife got detention.

The whole day, the entire school was abuzz about the bear. Announcements kept being made, reminding everyone to stay out of the parking lot, and to just avoid the outdoors in general, just for now. Every once in a while, we heard a car alarm go off.

It was hard to get anything done in our classes, since it was all anyone, including the teachers could talk about. Some people who hadn’t seen it in the morning for one reason or another still didn’t believe it, and thought that the announcements must have been made for some other reason. Jack later told me that people kept asking him if they had planted the bear for a senior prank.

“I wish,” he says.

Jack tried to start a riot in the halls by yelling, “The bear got inside!” but a teacher stopped him and sent him to the office.

We were kept in our last class for an hour and six minutes after the dismissal bell, because the bear was still in the parking lot. Knife was happy because he didn’t have to go to detention.

We had to listen to Mr. Campbell’s standup comedy routine. Knife was the only one who really laughed, but Knife always laughed at everything. It wasn’t really a bad thing. Sometimes his laugh made everyone else laugh, and when everyone else started laughing, Knife would laugh so hard, he’d cry, and by then nobody remembered what we were laughing about. But only Knife laughed at Mr. Campbell’s jokes. Everyone else told him to stick to teaching chemistry. Knife later said he only laughed because he wanted a good grade.

“Yeah, sure,” we say.

We later learned that all of the animal control field units had been busy apprehending a raccoon that had taken an old man’s wallet, so that’s why it took them so long to come get the bear. There were pictures of his grandchildren in there that were irreplaceable, and the raccoon had already eaten his driver’s license.

When we finally got to leave, some people found large indentations in their cars, but for the most part there was no damage. One guy said he found bear shit by his truck.

Knife came to school the next day in a bear suit and hung out in the parking lot, fiddling with litter, wanting to scare some freshmen. One of the seniors who hunted took his rifle out of his truck and hit Knife from a few hundred yards away. He wasn’t close enough to see the stitching. His friends high-fived him for being such a great shot.

I think the year after I graduated, the school’s mascot was changed to the bears, but then some people called and complained about it being insensitive, so they changed it back.

Tutorial Found in Fortune Cookie

“Sam’s Fortune Cookie: You create your own stage and your audience is waiting!”

The process of building a stage takes many pieces of wood and a large enough area to contain said pieces of wood. The process of building an audience takes a large number of people willing to cram into the aforementioned area surrounding the stage that will be made with said pieces of wood. The already spoken of people must also be willing to purchase tickets, buy overpriced concessions, and most importantly, be willing to wait, perhaps talking amongst themselves or being alternately absorbed in the anticipation, for what may appear on said wood, which have by now been laid flat and nailed together, forming a brown barren plane, perhaps elevated. The already spoken of people, which have by now been seated in adjacent and parallel rows of seats, are still waiting for the rainforest to grow out of empty black curtains, for God to emerge stage left and create the world in seven minutes.

Don’t worry, this is just a metaphor.

In all likelihood, you will not have to actually build a rainforest or God, and in many cases you will have more than seven minutes. Presumably, you will be putting on a play or some other theatric performance on the said pieces of wood, which have been nailed together in order to create a stage, in order to entertain the already mentioned people, who have by now paid ridiculous prices for tickets and drinks and food and have been waiting longer than you promised them on the marquee. The process of building a play requires more people, but not people who are already in the audience, and you will need two varieties in order to build your play in a sturdy fashion. Your first variety of people is the actor-types, which you can easily distinguish by sullen looks and egotistical banter. If they mention Shakespeare within five minutes of meeting you, they are ripe and ready to be picked. These people can usually be found lingering in coffee shops or behind the theater of your local college, usually drinking coffee and smoking. Use posters promoting your recently built stage and recently built audience in order to lure the actors to center stage, which has been created by laying said pieces of wood flat and nailing them together. The second variety is the technical workers, or “techies.” They are generally less cooler than the actor-type, but are far more productive and important in building your play. You can usually find them living in their mom’s basement. If they are ripe, these people, clad all in black, will save you the trouble of building a set, designing lights, creating sound effects, and putting makeup on the actor-types yourself. It is for this reason that this tutorial does not contain instructions on how to build sets, lights, sounds, or makeup.

You’re almost there. Now all you need is a script. The process of building a script requires more wood, only this wood must be turned into pulp, and the pulp must subsequently be turned into paper, on which the script will be written, probably you or, if you are lucky, one of the more ambitious actor-types you have hand-picked. By now the audience is getting restless and ready to crumble, so once your script has been built, simply throw it at the actors and give them what sounds like reasonable advice and ideas, but really doesn’t make any sense. The actor-types will understand perfectly, and begin to build the performance as the techies build the technical aspects on the stage you built by laying many pieces of wood flat and nailing them together, perhaps on an elevated plane, in front of the audience that you built by finding people willing to sit and watch as you, metaphorically remember, build God out of thin air.