world hunger

A Mutual/A Storm

By Stephan Crown-Weber

A mutual only known to this narrator from a digital part of my world was starting a broadcast, his shot on a walk down a country road pointing back at his arms and bust, wind-blown blond hair, pallid nostrils, (imitation?) Ray Bans mirroring a Samsung. Mutual M was communicating to a distinctly unknown group with a: “Thank you. Thank you. Join this call. Join this call. You found it. Hold on. Hold on. A spatial call…”

A patch of background sky: indigo. Corn: swaying, crackling brown, against rock walls or strings of wood posts and rust. County and country possibly unknown—to factor in Canada. M was of a kind who would wish this narrator a happy Christmas and additionally many US public holidays. M had no kids or was gnomic about his family or was not custodial but did think about kids. M’s posting on main not long prior had also brought to mind a luchadorismo of insults about skill and astroturfing, shots of angry DMs and rivals’ paroxysmic blocks, his job or lack of job unknown, his past unknown, his mortality or immortality mystical within a situation in which both of us had plausibly sought vibing on truths and fictions.

At this point in his history this guy was notionally talking up a cut of a symphony found by a scholar who had an original vision of a draft found of a composition from 1902. His vocalizations of his narration of his walk rang out impishly and hammily amidst raging that “A civilizational iris is in a spirit of faith.” M was shouting that dialogical music was a “mirror unto baby pain,” and now flatly going, as though talking strictly factually: “A tidal youth is partly war according to FBI logics.”

Anybody who took in this form of this symphony as I did would find cunning in making this composition sound worthy of his accusations that it was “Illuminati ritual.” My flash intuition was not ruling out that M was mocking my digital habits; I only did long hours of classical in a month for grandma factors—and for guiding my thoughts with background sound.

I told him in a chat box: “Badass. Talk this up with an old lady at a show.”

M for an instant did scan his contraption and go: “Uh-huh” but took in this road without additional words on this topic.

His symphony was now playing along with this indigo wind and his roast: ritual via banging of drums, striking blocks and gongs “triply capitulating” a flow of long-lost organisms galactic in gigantism and as cold as a famous kind of android; this symphony was in truth lacking in rhythm to start with; additions of cold omission all fall into a spirit of cosmic vacuum. Its lack of charm was, in his words, akin to high school marching band jazz minus an instructor, but M also got to stating: “If you trust that option A, you trust a guy in a fascist group opposing ordinary joy. This is a halfling fight with punk.”

I will hardly hint at a conundrum for a fussy fantasy man or woman and so on tapping into this broadcast. I by contrast thought of fact-finding among my county’s county building’s land and titling administrators back in high school. A postal guy would show up this or that day with skinny limbs and a blooming tummy far past proportionality. “Working on your growth,” a lady or two on county staff would laugh.

“Ah’m growin’ out mah tummy!” that postal guy would shout. “Tummy of a grand old-timish way.”

I told staff just on that solitary occasion that that postal guy was good stuff. A lady who was actually from down my road was on staff and shook ungraying hair, not with iris-linking-with-iris, but sassing as though narrating a film: “I don’t know whát this boy is sayin’.”

With my thoughts on an actual human sounding board past his shot’s limits, M was raging about futurist uprisings and intoning: “A blossoming of what is just out past a machining of union busting and coast-to-coast walk outs and fishing—out past hazy calls for colonial risk-taking by proxy via storyboards of quips about films about Molotov cocktails that built upon an assumption that long ago bows and arrows in hands of immortals and mountain halflings push’d forward proudly, and now a cosmic drift had brought this group into our nowadays, immortal and mountain halflings growing ultra radical upon sight of history coursing.” Mutual M said a solution now was rising in constant hullabaloo from roots in loving; this conundrum took hold without a thought as to what joy was occurring. “Our Josifs at work do day-to-day tasks without scholars or activists; salvation is hard if a task at hand is to find a BC of public rhythms.”

Following my hiatus from this broadcast to do a bit of craving, I saw his body against possibly an oak trunk. Skinny mutt hounds all baying: brown, rust, black fur. From his waist a guy was in a shot shouting git-git-git-you-git-on-goin’ and pulling this and that dog by collars back across a road. “Rain’s comin’!”

M’s murmur upon this guy driving off was “A total Mason!” M could distinguish this guy’s minivan’s plating, honoring a global war without location, full honors: a bird of a skull contacting him from a national rhythm past compass and pyramid framing. “Criminal philosophy profoundly triangular in its manhood!”

Amidst moaning, M was insisting unknown folks of an old rail-stop parish had possibly “got hit by skunks again and again for skunky stink glands… for pagan ways at a gray rock cut-through of a county road.”

Wind was sighing, hard.

A rock in his hand hit a cow patty. Air distortion almost hid M’s roar of: “All humans of a folk rhythm must call for folk songs about rusting tins of thick or solid motor oil. A digital lady will absorb my hoping for a lady’s companionship. Do not shy away from a kind guy.” His zoom on black cans plausibly or implausibly “brought on” abruptly clamorous sounds from this bad avant- gardist’s particular symphony from possibly boom box two.

A chain of gray plastic bags did a lazy man o’ war float-by as shown by a longish and calm shot of M’s making.

A toad was hop-hop-hopping in front of him from wood A to wood B, isolatably cosmically frail in Samsung-magnifying black humid air.

Storm clouds burst past that instant into woods and cow lots. Wood block struck industrially. Cacophonous rain was pouring, possibly far from any housing known to him. Panting from mutual M would start fusing with this storm during sprinting. Lightning plasmifying panlocationally from air to ground. Actual gong. High hats. Guttural violins. For a half hour, possibly, ship-gray clouds brought on a hissing accumulation of grains of hail displaying as blindingly glacial or ivory from a Samsung or similar improbably at arm’s width, standing to avoid drip into plugs. Distant fog or low visibility. Train klaxons and rhythm sticks, a tumult that brought to mind God on holiday and an absolutism of crisis if not for squishing boots. Rain akin to static was in all of this—not dissimilar to M’s symphony fixation, still playing—plausibly ravaging that Samsung past a point at which M’s broadcast cut out.

A story built up that day upon his account’s coming up in my app as “shut down.” I had “no way” to contact him. And I had tasks to do such that a span of hush got to aligning on that app’s flow of posts following this fall into hush.

Stephan Crown-Weber’s fiction has appeared in minor literature[s], ExPat Press, Revolution John, Hobart Pulp, and Don’t Submit! He hopes to publish two eighteenth-century novels in translation—one about chivalry and infidelity, the other in the form of letters from a bitter hermit/critic—two chapters of which were printed in The Trinity Journal of Literary Translation. A summary of his translation and fiction work can be found at www.crownweber.com. He lives in rural Central Kentucky. On X, he is @crownweber.