Zoned
A fiction by Kyle Jarrard (reproduced from the Mississippi Review)
You remember like yesterday going down to Acapulco to the mansion overlooking the bay. Still feel yourself in sunburned skin diving into the green ocean by the red rocks until it felt like needles would punch your eardrums. The swells of the sea carrying you this way and that. A woman with a big heavy white towel at hand when you got out and came to her shivering in the late afternoon. A man at her side in a bright yellow suit. “Say hello to the Chinese ambassador.” Stepping forward, shaking hands, leaving black footprints on the rose cement. Everyone was talking about man on the moon. You sat at a distance on a thatch chair, the maids’ daughters giggling nearby, eyes flickering like fireflies among the blue fronds.
Now that’s all zoned down there and we couldn’t afford to go out to New Mexico, much less Old Mexico, even for a weekend. When the money problem didn’t get my wife off the subject, I came right out and said there wasn’t anything out there worth visiting anyway. Well, you can imagine. Nora stayed mad at me a good month, just under the skin. Then they went and zoned that area, too. Now nobody’s going to be going to New Mexico.
Just as well. Best now to stay home, stay in.
Go monkeys, go!
I see my close friends of the (captive) wild have been busy, according to this Daily Telegraph report:
A group of 15 mo
nkeys at Kyoto University’s primate research institute in Aichi Prefecture, which are the focus of a string of high-profile scientific studies, escaped from their forest
home which is encased by a 17ft high electric fence.
The monkeys made their bid for freedom byusing tree branches to fling themselves one by one over the high voltage electric fence located nearly three metres away.
However, despite the intelligence shown in their great escape, the primates appeared unsure as to what to do with their newfound freedom: the monkeys remained by the gates of the research centre and were lured back into captivity by scientists armed with peanuts.
Pelton and the Paraladies
A fiction by Kyle Jarrard (reproduced from Eclectica magazine)
I begin writing, for it feels like the beginning of the end.
I have a comfortable old trailer parked right here where they unhooked all those years ago. My job, to the tune of $100 a month, is listed as Gatekeeper 1. I control the lock that opens off the All-American and releases water south into the Coachella for distant orchards and vineyards.
I am told this position is perhaps the lowest in the federal bureaucracy, but I still consider myself lucky. And though I don’t foresee advancement, not even to Gatekeeper 2, which would pay $125 a month, earn me a new, larger trailer and more rations, I don’t care. For the time being I am simply here. It is much better than the razzle-dazzle of the big city.
I had my 50th birthday the other day, on the Ides of July. The name they gave me is Pelton Morny, and I’ve kept it all along except for a few weeks way back in late ‘74 when it was fashionable to carry your wife’s name. So, for a while, I was Pelton Rogers. Then we divorced, for various reasons, one I was a nasty drinker. (Leenda got everything. She relocated to a communal farm in Tennessee, a place that boasted of 41,000 enthusiasts.) Anyway, I made a little flour cake and ate it. But I really don’t give a damn about birthdays.
The century recently turned. I seriously did not think, or hope, that I would make it this far.
Today the gate is open. Depth marker reads 12-foot-8.
Believe it or not, an ocean skipjack occasionally breaks the surface of the All-American. It lifts your heart to see such life, brings back fond memories of drunk-fishing with Dad.
I dug on the All-American from early ‘75 to late ‘81. It stretches all the way from Diego, on the sea, across the old regions of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to the Gulf, averaging 15 feet in width and varying in depth from 10-15 feet in summer to deadly heights when it rains. In the past decade, 82 Gatekeepers have drowned. Every year we get a martyrs supplement to stick in our handbook.
Another great product from Cincopa 
Go forth and blow no more
And this was before the loss to Ghana on Saturday night. Justifiable homicide, t’would have been, in any case.
BERLIN (AP) — German police say an American
got so fed up with the constant mosquito-like droning from his
neighbors’ vuvuzela plastic horns that he threatened to kill them with an ax.
