Thousand

Thousand

Glenn Ingersoll

Copyright © 2010-2018, Glenn Ingersoll

Mel C. Thompson Publishing

3559 Mount Diablo Boulevard, #112

Lafayette, California 94549

melcthompson@yahoo.com

Publisher's Notes

This massive 100,000-word epic prose-poem, Thousand, by Glenn Ingersoll, was created when the author decided he would commit himself to writing one 100-word segment per day for one thousand straight days, a commitment he kept. This work, Christo-like in its ambition and Proust-like in it's thoroughness, inspired me from the moment I first heard about it. Several years after the writing was completed, I resolved to publish it in paperback form on Amazon. It is now available in ten volumes. The author had hoped there might one day be a simple ebook version of Thousand, and so we decided to publish this edition on Smashwords.

For More Information

To find out more about this project, or projects by other authors on this label, or to get information on the many ways you can help the ongoing efforts of Mel C. Thompson Publishing, please use the contact information above.

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Thousand

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Thousand: One

Thousand thousand. You don’t have to be happy, mon ami. The happier, the crueler, I used to say, until the boom got lowered and I had to crawl around on all fours and I discovered the necessity of reserving words for torturing small animals and children. The wind blows, the air shakes sand out of its skirts, and a legless lizard disappears into the downslope. You never know what is going to happen. You’ll hear that a lot. Frequently you know what is going to happen. What is going to happen has happened to someone else who you ought to

Thousand: Two

know by now, being familiar with the experience of humanity. A bug is a bug, or so they say. Once one was wonderful. Then one became wretched, and after looking the body over, one was amazed by the miracle of misery, what perfect drama it created, or if not perfect, then meticulously crafted. Someone is going to write your story up. I have a lead or two. I will get it out of my supernal box then swoop it over your nose—swoop swoop—while the angels of hootenanny repose in their ordnance. I’m sorry I’m going to have to

Thousand: Three

apologize again. That’s what’s going to happen between now and November, more frequently than either of us would prefer. This means I’m going to insult you repeatedly? That’s not the plan. But things I don’t think bad will turn out bad and I will come to see the error of my ways and, all things being equal, will search my drawers for an apology as sincere as any other, clean and uncreased, and I will offer that to you. I promise. OK? That out of the way, let’s look at the inventory of celestial items. I understand fresh produce will

Thousand: Four

be dropped off on a nearby doorstep. We can pilfer that. The stars will need to be replenished from the bucket out back. A rare religious exception will be made for the rinderpest to recede to its original hosts without exacting divine punishment from the wicked. Why? Don’t ask why. The reasons are among the stars, I mean the way they are distributed. It’s a pattern. A completely random and arbitrary pattern meaning nothing, but a pattern nonetheless, one you can read by, the future, the past, and certain recipes, the ones that have been passed from hand to hand

Thousand: Five

and mouth to mouth and sea to shining sea. Grandma, you know what I’m talking about! Meanwhile, in the laundry, one red sock turns every fucking white cat pink. You throw them all in together, hold the lid down, maybe you have to put a few bricks on top to keep the lid on, and when you go to put them in the dryer, they’re pink because some shithead left a red sock from the last load down there in the bottom of the tub. You wanna kill him. Cuz what are you going to do with a passel of

Thousand: Six

pink kitties? Who wants pink kitties? You can’t sell them. You can’t get money for them. You put them in a box by the supermarket and they squall and roll their bloodshot little eyes and the cute little girls bend over the box only to jump back and begin to wail, clutching their mothers’ legs. So you take a tranquilizer. That’s really your only choice. Faced with a preventable accident like pinkness in cats so freshly laundered. You go to the medicine cabinet, you don’t even let yourself meet your blue eyes in the warped mirror as you pull the

Thousand: Seven

door open, as the reveal takes place, the chemistry constructed for your mental construction, for the relief of your aches and cooling of your cough. You didn’t expect the leprechaun. He’s not dead, but the signs of life are few. You consider CPR, which suddenly makes you think it’s an abbreviation of coprolite or, even worse, coprophile. Well, can’t have any of that. So you put the leprechaun aside and move on to the red-capped gnome who also is looking unwell. Were they at each other’s throats? Or at your drugs! You don’t even have good drugs. You stack the

Thousand: Eight

gnome on the leprechaun which is face down on the toilet’s lid. The day is looking up. A new dawn is already crawling into the sky. You draw the curtains. A cold wind is blowing. It gets in through cracks in the walls. Soon something mythical will begin its dark rounds. The leprechaun and gnome, despite being mythical, don’t look like they’d be up to dark rounds. The gnome groans and squirms atop the leprechaun, then, with a long sigh, seems to fall back into unconsciousness. The idea of taking drugs in order to improve one’s situation—is it the

Thousand: Nine

sort of idea one clings to in the face of contrary evidence? Then you remember: you haven’t taken any. So the leprechaun business—you’re facing it straight. It might be a dream, offers the gnome. No. It wasn’t the gnome. Its eyes are closed, its breathing slow and even. Maybe the cat? The cat who lives in the dell? It is time to be naked and empty so the butterfly within you breaks out via your forehead, sloughing the material that held it back, but which held it safe so it could grow, restrained it in order that it could

Thousand: Ten

achieve its beauty, unmarked, unmarred, made. Now, having flexed, it cracked your skull open, pulled itself, wet and purposeful, from the chrysalis. Which it leaves on the accent rug. Next to a curl of hairs and dust beside the shower stall. How does it feel to be emerged from? To be left by your inner child? For starters maybe you’re wondering what’s left of you. It’s all rather sudden. One must take a moment. You blink your eyes. Yes, your eyes blink. You remember who the president is, then decide, no, you’d rather remember who your mother is. Was she

Thousand: Eleven

the mother of presidents? Presidents stand for something. It would be nice to be able to stand. Later, after a good night’s rest, you are rinsing your mouth with detergent and alcohol when there is a knock at the door. You think, I’m not going to get that. It’s way too early to see humans. But again there’s the knocking and this time a voice seems to accompany it. You stop swishing and spit, then cock an ear. That voice is familiar? If so, she’ll just have to wait a minute while you strap on your weapons. Is that thing

Thousand: Twelve

loaded? And what about that one? It’s heavy enough. OK. Shark hat, octopus gloves, dragon breath, supersonic goggles, DNA-disruptors. Check, check, and, oh, no more breath in the dragon breath bottle. You listen again. Yes, the knocking is still going on, and the shouting. It might even be your name. But your name sounds like all sorts of common noises; you’ve heard your name in the sounds of subway trains, the troubling through underbrush of ground animals, and the squeaks of the clouds rubbing against the sky. So you’ve learned to be cautious, not to jump to conclusions without putting

Thousand: Thirteen

your hands inside the launch car, and loose articles under the seat. Besides, who cares if it’s your name. Your name could be anywhere, could go anywhere, could be living a life separated from you by miles and attitude. You realize your brow is wrinkled. That is what happens when you concentrate or when you’re upset, and when the botulism injections have been neutralized by your immune system. If I had allergies, I would take something for my allergies, you say to yourself. The latch is almost off the trapdoor to heaven, you note, as you look up. Put that

Thousand: Fourteen

on the list of things to do. There are always so many things to do. No matter how many of them you’ve done! You go to the door. It’s the foremost thing on today’s agenda, it seems, though you’d been thinking earlier that riding the new slide down from the highest turret at the Castle of Nowundaid with the kids from the Knitting Club or putting in your application for tusk polisher at the Mega Large Elephant Array could fill that ungainly space between the usual chores, the cats needing to be watered, for instance, or the heads of the

Thousand: Fifteen

roses fluffed. The door. Here it is. Standing before you in its gatekeeper way, there to keep things out and in and to provide egress. No, I’m not stalling. Wait, yes, I’m getting a transmission. All that caterwauling that supposedly sounds like it’s calling for you? All that banging and thumping like a crowd of elders on mission after somebody’s slipped triple cap shots in their chamomile tea? Pay no attention. Sh. We’re going to go over to the couch now. Sit down. Let me unlace those hobnailed boots. I’m hanging your chain mail on the hook by the door.

Thousand: Sixteen

See, just here. The portrait of George The Slugmullion Washington will watch over it. I’m going to make you a cup of tea. Coffee? Sure. Cream and sugar? You take it with what? God’s everlasting glory? Sounds great. This blue mug okay, the one with the Live Fish logo? You know, you look beautiful like that, sipping coffee gone to glory. The way the steam paints a soft mist across your bifocals, the way the halo orbits your neck, its counterclockwise motion revealed by the blue bead caught in the inevitable pull of your fine gravity. I, too, am unable

Thousand: Seventeen

escape you, despite my velocity. Not that I’m in any hurry to leave you. No no. I could stay all afternoon. Work? Don’t worry! I called your boss to let her know you wouldn’t be in today. You have the sweetest boss. I would dip her in my bitter dregs any day. Would you like to watch some TV? No? Why are you staring at me like that! I know, what we really need is a transdimensional shift. Yes, I have one. It’s in my bag. Don’t let out the caiman. She’s very sweet but toothy. I don’t know if

Thousand: Eighteen

you’ve ever seen a cathedral in blue? Yes. No, I don’t mean a cathedral painted blue. Never mind. I saw a book once that was all in blue; it was adapted from a major motion picture that was all in blue, which was inspired by a very rainy day. The shift? Look for something that does not look like clothes. Does not. I realize many things do not look like clothes. A fire hyrdant does not look like clothes, a beach ball does not look clothes. A cathedral? Some cathedrals are ready to wear, don’t you think? I guess I’m

Thousand: Nineteen

thinking of those buttresses, flying up like shoulder pads, and those dazzling windows that draw your eye to as much as from the cleavage between breasts lifted, gently together pressed and held, the display of patience before God like that of a bustier before three candles which raise gold flames, unflickering in the warm boudoir. There you go. You found it. It was the best clue one could offer. The transdimensional shift! Beautiful, isn’t it! I know. It’s hard to tell. But it’s more fun to say it’s beautiful than that it’s ugly. In some stories the Devil is beautiful

Thousand: Twenty

and in some stories the Devil is hideous. It seems more reasonable to me that he is beautiful if he’s in the business of temptation. But then, he would have to be a really great salesman if he was hideous. And isn’t he supposed to be? Or maybe he’s supposed to be a great buyer. Although it isn’t right to say a salesmen doesn’t buy things. He buys things for a little and sells them for a lot. Even if the Devil gets a soul cheap, who would want it? Of what use is it? Is a soul beautiful? Decorative?

Thousand: Twenty-One

How many would it take to make nice drapes? I wonder if souls melted down would make an alloy with gold. Could there be a metal more likely to be the soul’s mate? Does transdimensional sound more scientific than soul? Here, pass it to me. Yes, you have a perfectly good grip on it. The thing about transdimensional, it sounds explanatory. But it isn’t, really. Might as well call it a bunduggle wah zinswitz. Euphonious, no? Harder to remember, though. What does it do? Do? I’m tempted to say it doesn’t do anything. But if I were to say that

Thousand: Twenty-Two

a magnet doesn’t do anything, that it’s passive, the lines that iron filings gather into around the magnet being nothing having to do with action but rather automatic sorting via unvarying, unwilled natural laws, you’d roll your eyes at my weirdly restrictive definition of doing. Huh-chew! Sorry. Do you have a tissue? Thanks. Huh-huh- CHEFFFF! Whew. That was a big one. Hm. Would you look at that! See? A prophecy in the spittle pattern captured by the tissue. I can see that reading, but I think it has more to do with whether the weather tomorrow will be good for boating.

Thousand: Twenty-Three

I had been thinking about boating. There is a lot of water in the world and it would be a darn shame not to be able to step about on it. Move about on it, I mean. Swim? I’m afraid I don’t know how to swim. I know how to flail and flounder without quite failing and foundering. Not swimming, really. I probably wouldn’t last long out in the great sea unsupported, even if the waters were shark-uninfested. Sharks always infest the better water, the kind we like to hie over, wind and sea spray, joy of a horizon blemished

Thousand: Twenty-Four

just slightly, like the smudge of a word incompletely erased, by a distant island. It’s not always easy to get to an island, you know. Some of them are protected by reefs with teeth as jagged as any shark’s. You sail your ship around a surf that pounds a half mile from the sand and palms, a wild white surf bashing away on its own skirts while underneath the clown fish and octopus, the parrot and eel nip about among anemones and the coral that grew upon coral that grew upon coral, lumping and branching bonily in a slow secretive

Thousand: Twenty-Five

contortion toward the light while below an ancient volcano washes gently, gradually, roundly down. Try to cross that coral and it will shred the ship’s hull, and then where will you be! On permanent vacation, marooned desert island style. Got sunscreen? Umbrellas? Hurricane waders? Yes, you have a transdimensional shift. Go ahead. Put it on. How? It doesn’t look like clothes, right? You don’t put it on like clothes. Again, you’re looking at me like I’m not being helpful. I would demonstrate but. I have an idea. Give me the TDL satchel. T for Trans, D for Dimension, L for

Thousand: Twenty-Six

L for L for L for leather? I don’t know. L for love? L for El Gran Idea! Something like that. Eh. It’s on the clasp, a logo. I bought the bag in a specialty shop. It was given to me. Things are beautiful and then respond well to caresses. A night draws the dawn back toward itself but there is always a struggle. Always a struggle! People have been known to weep over nothing then stand stoically amid clamorous death. Oh hello, it’s Velma the Caiman. She’s right on top. She usually is. What green eyes you have, my

Thousand: Twenty-Seven

honey, my sweet, my precious. I want to eat you up. I want to slup your entrails, nibble the webbing from between your toes, gnaw the teeth I’ve worked from those powerful jaws, tickle your tendons with my raspy tongue. All in good fun, my dear. Here, I’m going to put you by the fireplace. Watch out for the firedogs! Kidding, kidding! Sh. Just rest there. I’m going to show our new friend the TDL basics. It won’t take but a moment. Have a shrimp. OK. Besides the distractions of the manor estates with their beard moss festooned oaks and

Thousand: Twenty-Eight

the treacle in a glass jar, you will see a newspaper truck idling in front of a fire hydrant. Turn your eyes in a leftward direction but without pivoting. You should be able to spot a child sitting on the grass. If that child is made of straw you will need to count the stop signs at the next three intersections. If the child is constructed completely of bird seed there will be a ladder nearby leading up into an apple tree. There will be no apples on the tree but for one at the very top out of reach.

Thousand: Twenty-Nine

Consider the apple. Would it be sweet or sour? Is the skin puckered, like it’s drying out? On a table on a nearby porch is a pair of binoculars. Do your feet hurt? What time is it? The door is ajar. As you step on one of the porch’s creaking boards, a cat darts out of the house. Then a dog. The dog shoots right past you, almost making you stumble. When you pick up the binoculars you find the neck strap is caught on something under the table. You give a tug. Whatever below has hold of the strap

Thousand: Thirty

tugs back. Do you wonder if it’s dangerous? Or do you bend down to look? While you are hesitating a comet sheds molecules of water, steaming coldly toward the sun. While you think about the fruit’s possible states and the safety of a home swing set made of aluminum, a bell signals the opening of the stock exchange on an island nation too small to support sales of annuities. The strap’s slack is again taken up, but gently. When you peek under the table a little girl in a flouncy yellow dress and white sandals decorated with colored glass gems

Thousand: Thirty-One

curls one hand around the strap from the binoculars and holds the other over her mouth. She’s smiling, clearly. It’s not possible to hide that big of a grin. But when she sees your face the girl quickly purses her lips and puts her index finger in front of them. She gives you a slow blink. A tattered straw hat covers her hair but for wisps at her ears. Around the hat a once white ribbon culminates in a flower, battered, blowzy, and unforgiving. Without letting go the strap the girl drops forward and crawls on hands and knees toward

Thousand: Thirty-Two

the porch steps. The binoculars lurch off the table. Do you grab them to keep them from thumping onto the boards? Or do you figure, they’re not your binoculars, presumably they belong to the girl, she must know what she’s doing? She gets to the porch steps and tugs the strap again as though it were a leash. Does that mean she pulls you along? Or do you watch the binoculars rumble forth at your feet? Is there anything important about using the binoculars? You were going to use them to check out that apple. Maybe a message was scarred

Thousand: Thirty-Three

into its skin by a pelting of hail. There’s no way you’d be able to read that message without the binoculars. On the other hand, it’s just a fucking apple. Who needs it! It’s not like you’d be able to reach it anyway. The ladder doesn’t go near high enough. If it did someone long since would have had the thing in hand, bitten it, sucked its juices, and dropped what of the woody core they didn’t want there among the foxtails and star thistle. The little girl looks over her shoulder at you, beckons with a theatrically crooked finger,

Thousand: Thirty-Four

then makes a break for it, thudding down the steps, dashing across the lawn. She’s left the binoculars behind! Do you look through them now? Or should you follow her? If you are tired of this game, step into the house. There is a pitcher of iced lemonade on the dining table and plastic tumblers stacked upside down next to it. If, however, you can’t resist the girl’s invitation, she seems taken with you after all, make haste. If neither of these options quite sounds like you and you would like a third, reach inside your pocket. Pull out the

Thousand: Thirty-Five

first thing you find there. It should be a pearl. If it is a dirigible or a rubber octopus, please put it back. If it is something like a pearl, even if not exactly a pearl, it will do. Insert the pearl (or pearl-like object) into your ear. It should settle securely into the ear canal. Do not push it in deeply, as the pearl needs time to adjust to its new environment. If you have already shoved the pearl into your ear as deep as it will go, what can I say. Don’t be in such a rush. Take

Thousand: Thirty-Six

your time next time. Consider the consequences of your actions, even if you have no evidence to evaluate or precedent to refer to. Even if, after racking your brains until it’s obvious no strategy is apropos, consider the apple, the consequences, I mean. If all you have to go on is your imagination and you’re likely to get the reality wrong by using it, thrust forth with it anyway, no matter how distantly it takes you, and wander in that realm awhile before doing a thing. Perhaps then you’ll clutch your pearls a little tighter ere you are given the

Thousand: Thirty-Seven

leave to escape across the border of the boundless territory of your inherent limitations that you may submit to a greater other. A wise elder. An oracle. A wind in the pines or willows or the voice of the turtle, song of the eagle, the whisper of the siege machine. The pitcher of lemonade is sweating your decision. A little girl sitting beside it draws trails in its chill anxiety with a pink finger. She tastes the finger. This can’t be the girl who ran off across the lawn, can it? She can’t have got back so fast. She had

Thousand: Thirty-Eight

a mission! This must be her doppelganger, her evil twin, a changeling. Her hair is nicely brushed and braided into pigtails that drop just to her shoulders, each braid bound near the end with a clean white ribbon, at the end a tuft tidy as an artist’s brush. She has on a flouncy yellow dress, the same as the other girl. Is it Sunday before church? Or is mother planning a party? There is a stuffed bear, clean but not new, propped up on one of the other chairs. None of the tumblers waiting upside down has yet been turned

Thousand: Thirty-Nine

over to receive that cold refreshment. The girl lays her head down on her arm, her cheek resting on the thickest part above the elbow. She’s feeling sleepy, or a little cross. Her eyes close then open, close then open, a gesture as unconscious as her sister’s slow blink was deliberate. She draws swirls on the side of the pitcher, and the condensation, gathered together by her finger, suddenly has the weight to rush down the glass. When the girl next touches it, ever so lightly, the pitcher turns and travels two, three inches across the table. Fascinated, the girl

Thousand: Forty

holds her finger up, inclines it toward the pitcher, and brings her finger right up to the pitcher’s side. But she lets it hover there, feeling the cooler air, then, just as she’s going to touch it, the pitcher moves again. Not as much this time, and it turns again, too. The girl sits up and looks over the thick wet trail the pitcher made on the table as it moved. Light gets in it and squiggles but doesn’t stay. She sighs. She is thinking about something, but whatever it is does not show on her face. Distantly, she hears

Thousand: Forty-One

a radio. She seems to recognize one of the voices on the radio, but the sound fades quickly, its source traveling. The girl lowers her head. She pushes the lemonade pitcher back up its own trail and lets it go again. But this time it doesn’t move. When it continues to sit as a pitcher typically sits, with no sense it’s got anywhere to go, the girl jabs it with a finger. Stubborn thing. She touches it once more, this time lightly, apologizing. One of the ice cubes that had been buried beneath the others breaks free, and cubes jostle

Thousand: Forty-Two

into new positions. How much water in that comet, you think? How long will it take before it all blows away? A cold mist spraying out from the comet’s body, spreading around the shadow, whether the comet hurtles toward or away from the sun. It’s not like a peacock’s tail, always behind. When the comet’s come its closest, and all that’s left is to turn away, the sun behind it at last and dwindling, dwindling gradually until it burns only slightly warmer than stars that are so much farther away but bigger, hungrier, younger, the comet’s tail hurries ahead, the

Thousand: Forty-Three

comet coming after it, eating it, eating it until it’s gone. Ouroboros sleeps, wandering in sleep. The little girl removes a tumbler from the stack, turns it over and sets it on the table next to the pitcher of lemonade. She takes a breath. It’s a heavy pitcher and she has skinny little girl arms. She wraps both hands around the handle and tips the pitcher, and the lemonade slides smoothly out, the first splash tossing up a big yellow drop which falls neatly back into the filling vessel. The little girl settles the pitcher back into the wet ring,

Thousand: Forty-Four

pauses for a breath to see if it will wander again (it doesn’t), then picks up the glass. She filled it almost to the top so she needs to carry it carefully, and soon it is uncomfortably cold, so she puts one hand under the bottom, the other gripping the rim. Slowly, even dreamily, she passes down the hall to the still open front door. One jacket sleeve from the overloaded coat tree catches on her shoulder, then, ignored, drops away. A porch board creaks under her, a tired old board, its give and protest as familiar as the cat’s

Thousand: Forty-Five

fuss-fuss when upside down in her arms. There you are out in the yard squinting through binoculars at something high up. The girl walks the lemonade right to you. She stands there, barefoot in the drying grass, waiting for you to notice. Maybe you will at last. You are awfully focused on that apple, I guess. What’s it say? I mean, is there a message scarred into its rosy skin like I thought? Tagged by a graffiti artist bee? Scored by the tongue of a hummingbird? Or is the damn thing that pretty, that perfect a specimen of appleness! If

Thousand: Forty-Six

a god (or God) were to reach a skinny hand out of the sky and pluck that apple, haul it up to a divine tooth, chomp it down to seeds, then drop those seeds one by one into your satchel, would you come home with them, and plant each reverently in a different corner of the little back yard you get in the city, a yard no way big enough for one apple tree, let alone three. Would you water each with precious bodily fluids or water blessed by a priest? Would you lie down under their shade as they

Thousand: Forty-Seven

waggled their leaves in spring breezes and bees tumbled out of their blossoms? I bet you’d write poems about how fine the flowers are, white blushing inside, shy at being looked into, at being seen before they could apple up. You’re still not taking the lemonade. Come to think of it, you haven’t moved. The little girl nudges you with a toe. Take the glass already! The wind toys with your hair, just at the fringes. Still, nothing. You haven’t adjusted the focus on the binoculars; everybody does that. You haven’t shifted your weight even slightly. Standing like that gets

Thousand: Forty-Eight

to be a stress position, you know. You could injure yourself, edema in the legs, bloodshot eyes, tremor in the ribs, echoes, octopus hand, vagaries in the vocal chords, excess sincerity, dropsy, ague, unquenchable thirst, and perspiration. Other things even worse. Like transdimensional deshabille. I didn’t want to mention that, but you forced it out of me. You know, it’s really boring you just standing there, big black goggly telescopes jutting from your face, your lips tense in concentration. I know what would shake you from this stasis! A werewolf! Trust me, they are totally cute. If you rub them

Thousand: Forty-Nine

briskly they shoot sparks from their silvery fur! And they have sweet human eyes in their canine faces, kind of like bears. I mean, I get that a lot of werewolves are angry, and not all of them effect the transformation from man to beast in a voluntary manner but there are medicines for that. There’s a pill for everything! I bet there’s a pill for this frozen quality you’re exhibiting. One must go on a quest for it, I suppose. Or a kiss, perhaps? The handsome prince planting a big smooch on those cold lips, the kiss that rouses

Thousand: Fifty

kingdoms, the kiss that wakes mountains. The kiss, once planted, grows in concentric smackeroo circles, ripples