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He caught her at the cafe and they sat for drinks For a moment they watched the clouds, a bundle of helium balloons colored with the colors of the Mexican flag, and pigeons checking the ground for food.

Finally, he said, “He called me a cod. A cod.”

“A reference to fish?” she said.

“I don’t know what it was a reference to, but I’m going to look it up,” he said. He raised his finger for wait service but there was no wait service at the moment.

“It must mean something bad. He must think I’m such a dork.”

She shrugged. She took up her phone. “I’ll check,” she said. After a few moment, after some tapping, she smiled and said, “Sort of. Scrotum. It’s another word for scrotum so not exactly dork.”

He nodded and raised his eye brows. He saw a wait person and raised a finger and a woman approached. He said, “Could I have iced tea” and the woman said sure she’d have it right over. “Paula?” she said because she knew Paula.

“Coffee, please” and the woman left.

“Well, then, why didn’t he just say that?”

“He figured you probably knew what it meant,” Paula said.

“But he didn’t say it like that. He said something like ‘Cods do this. They forget to sign off on their projects.’ Fucking ass. He’s a fucking cod. A big purple scrotum. Mr. Purple Scrotum. Sir fucking Winter Shriveled Scrotum.” He imagine the boss as a big scrotum in the boss’s chair and when the boss chuckled the scrotum shook or shuddered, the hairs going rigid then relaxing in the skin when he stopped laughing.

Paula smiled. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It sure as hell matters. Now he thinks I’m a cod. What am I going to do?”

“I don’t know. Sign off next time. Don’t forget.”

“It’s ready made, you know, for putdowns,” he said, “what we call our sex and what we can get away with in the office. Ready made to just toss around. Men are called pussies. We’re called dorks and cods and assholes. An asshole isn’t really a hole. I don’t think holes are most of the time closed. We’re never called fingers or elbows.”

Paula was at her phone again. She said, “To be fair you’d have to call me a cleft of Venus or a mons pubis or a labia majora for the same general effect or relationship. Cleft of Love.”

“I could call you a clit,” he said. “Let’s say you forget to sign off and I’m the boss and I say, ‘Clits do this kind of shit.'”

“It doesn’t work,” she said.

“We should give our things proper names. I would call mine Henry or Marshall. I’ll come into the bed room and say, ‘Hey, Henry wants to see Bridget or Judy. Henry wants a dance or a ride to the levee. Marshall wants to take Mary for a drive. Marshall wants to see what Mary’s keeping secret.”

Paula said, “I wouldn’t know what name to give. I think cleft of Venus is a horrible thing to call it.”

He wasn’t going to agree or disagree. Instead, he watched the pigeons. He wondered what you called theirs. He imagined pigeons dragging their organs between their knees.

“Ask it what they call a pigeon’s cod. Ask it if pigeons have a cleft of Venus.”

She picked up her phone. She spoke a search string out loud as she pressed the pad. “What do you call a pigeon’s sex organs.”

And then they waited.

In six experiments, holding heavy or light clipboards, solving rough or smooth puzzles, and touching hard or soft objects nonconsciously influenced impressions and decisions formed about unrelated people and situations. Link.

Of course, the tale provoked mystery and wonder in Maricela, who watched the moon. It seemed so nearby.

Cruz–he’d been anxiously wondering what might come next–said, “But what’s troubling now is the distance between words in typical text.”

“Cruz,” Maricela said, “can one man invent a new tradition?”

“It has nothing to do with that. Consider the distance between three typical words in a sentence. The distance between those words is a little more than the width of a letter in whatever typeface is being applied plus the almost imperceptible distance between two letters, approximately. As far as I know there is no name for the distance between words. In any event, we must work on putting more distance between words.”

“Yet studies say that adding significantly to the distance between words will add that much more distance between you and your father,” Maricela said.

“That may be true,” Cruz said. “And logical. I rarely call him. If we place more distance between the words love and father, therefore, I will be less likely to call my father on his birthday.”

“Which you forgot last year,” Maricela reminded him.

“It’s because he was born in a difficult season of months.”

After a moment, Maricela said, “Which is, of course, significant, as we can graph our own relationships with points on a grid at arbitrary distances.”

The moon. It had appeared from behind the nearer trees. From the direction of the river, they heard the drone of frogs, which reminded Cruz of sand, Maricela of ice crystals suspended in blue light.

“Aristotle’s eye brows brought to mind a memory I had as a child,” Cruz said. At the same time that he uttered these words, Maricela’s ornithological hand moved from the top of her head, passed across the face of the moon, and came to rest on her knee. “I had been young. A ball had rolled under a car. I got on my stomach in preparations for reaching under to retrieve the ball, which had come to rest against the exhaust. In that position, I saw a horse. I saw the lofted edges of the distant downtown buildings utterly grayed out. I saw the upper crusts of the mountains. I saw shadows that amounted to the violence of war. Then someone kicked me in the ankles and told me to hurry and get the ball. And that was when I saw the ball.”

“The eye brows are very complicated,” Maricela said. At the same time she said this, she saw two things, if it can be said that as we speak we can also see things in the mind’s eye. The first thing she saw was Cruz’s herpetological hand move from a knee to the back of his head where the fingers began to scratch, the sound of which brought to her the imagined sound of Aristotle rearranging his eye brows with a small black comb. The second item was the image of Cruz’s father, who was standing beneath an impression of Maricela when she was young and had climbed the roof of her house to watch the moon light refract in the clouds. In her logical mind she knew that it had not been Cruz’s father but her own father standing in the yard and calling up to her that she must come down from there as she might fall. But in this iteration of the impression, Cruz’s father had replaced her father and was not calling up to Maricela but to Cruz, a young Cruz who was seated at the top of Maricela’s house, observing the sky, and how the clouds and the moon light–their subtle physical synthesis, their strange roundness, glow, and flock-like structure–brought to Cruz’s mind the sound of the ocean.

The fire herder asked me to look at my hands and when I did I saw a caterpillar struggling up a stone in the space where my left palm should’ve been.

“What the hell?”

The fire herder said, “Okay, okay. It’s an illusion only.”

The caterpillar withdrew behind my thumb and index finger. I said, “That’s better.”

He said, “Your hands are metaphors,” though the way he said it it came out “metaphers.” He said, “For a poet just learning she’s a punching bag and words are the boxer who’s sweating, mean, and just won’t quite coming.”

You, reader, ask, “What’s a fire herder?”

I asked Father the same question and he said, “A fire herder’s someone who herds fire. Pretty obvious that.”

“Is it like someone who tires to make mud stand on end?”

“Pretty much,” Father said.

“Is he magic?”

“He can make your hands disappear,” Father said. “Ed up on the hill you know. He was once a guitar player. But he doesn’t have any hands anymore and so he sold all his instruments.”

“The fire herder took his hands?”

“You didn’t hear it from me.”

My hands were like cats. It took weeks but I soon managed D7 to the A shaped Eb chord, which is the way one turns the hands into unmanaged wire or loose crabs. My hands had taken on new life. At night, I’d hear cats chasing through the bedroom. But it was my hands with minds of their own, racing in and out and wrestling on the carpet, tumbling, knocking, banging at the windows, and burrowing into the sock drawer. In the morning, I’d brush my teeth and my fingers would claw for my tongue and I’d subdue them in a bucket of ice.

My brother said, “Last night your hands near strangled me.”

“They’re just playing,” I said.

The fire herder come through town. I watched him from the porch. He had a long stick and five pieces of fire marching in front of him, little smoking fluffs of light the color of hot magnesium that would often dart left and right, and the herder would snap them with his prod and they’d ease back into place.

I called to him. “When will my hands learn to walk like that? When will they smoke and dart?”

He stopped and said, “Don’t rush things. But I’m late. Inquire elsewhere” and he stepped off down the road with his strange flock.

It was good advice. I avoided him. I remember the day he made my hands disappear. It had rained. The air had smelled of snow. The caterpillar had emerged then disappeared and the strength of my fingers was like stones crushing.

In the kitchen, soon after my last encounter with the fire herder, I lay B7 onto the table top and sprinkled some pepper on Cm. I made a crowd of other shapes and arranged them into constellations, shadow dapples. I arranged them into ancient stains, various dactyl lengths, paisleys, grins and frowns, spider prints on ash.

Father came in with an ax. He said, “Make sure you don’t break those. Make sure to clean them up, too.”

The filmmaker saw an amazing thing. On a busy road, she saw a chipmunk jump from the edge of a yard, race across the street, and leap into a crop of lilies that had yet to open their blossoms. Normally, this road, at this time of morning, evoked the loudness of commuting. At the moment, however, the air was quiet, which she found perfect.

Seconds later, another chipmunk followed the first chipmunk. It behaved exactly as the first chipmunk had behaved. It jumped from the yard, raced across the street (in the small-legged arcs of the movement of chipmunks), and leapt into the exact lilies and in the exact place of the first chipmunk. A few counts later, yet another chipmunk burst from the yard, bounded across the street, and hopped into the lilies behind the first and second chipmunk.

Three chipmunks, one after the first, the next after the second, all performing exactly the same movement, following the same line across the surface of the world, each entering the lilies in exactly the same place. In the distance, she saw a line of approaching cars. The lilies, however, remained as still as lilies stand in those brief, rare moments of the passage of chipmunks.

This rare observation, of course, brought to her imagination the notion of pens. Yes pens. In her studio, she had many pens and each pen was the same. They were simple pens, pens from a box. Inside each pen was a small spring. Each pen had the same spring but it was a different spring, made by machines. On the line of assembly, one pen follows a fellow pen in much the same way as the chipmunks had followed each other across the road. But, she knew, there was a significant difference. One image was a random image, rare, perhaps even impossible, while the second, the image of pens, was non random. The filmmaker considered a worker at the factory where the pens were constructed. This factory worker, a person who wore rubber gloves with small amounts of ink on the fingers, rarely questioned whether one pen would come out a machine minus a spring. The factory worker, drinking coffee in the break room, would perhaps never count all the pens that had, by some strange fluke or anomaly, been placed into their boxes missing their springs.

This thought, of course, brought to the filmmaker all the events happening in the world that she might never observe. Every moment on the planet, events, simultaneous events, strange and beautiful things were happening that defined the very essence of the random, the non random, phenomenon that illustrated the abstract notions of shape, color, emotion, and narrative. Puzzling evocations of theme, progression, circularity, and probability.

Just a few days ago, her friend, the writer, had made a casual observation about coffee. She’d said, “Coffee is cruel. It’s bound to happen that if I put too much sugar into my first cup of coffee, I’m sure to put too little into the second.”

Sure enough, just before observing the chipmunks, the filmmaker had spooned too much sugar into her coffee but she hadn’t remembered the conversation she’d had with the writer until she’d seen the animals, imagined the pens, and it was at this moment that she put it all together: the chipmunks, the pens, the writer’s observations on coffee, her own mischance with sugar, and the over-compensations to come. The conclusion suddenly hit her, that problem she’d been fighting herself about all morning prior to going out for the paper and encountering the amazing repetition of the chipmunks.

She rushed into the house and called the writer. She said, “I have the ending. After everything that’s happened, after the whole struggle, her hand can never reach that phone. That’s what happens, she reaches and reaches and reaches with those small delicate fingers of hers and her hand never touches the goddamned phone.”

I remember being in Osaka in Honchu many years ago. We were standing at a street corner. A small man approached us with a square of photographic paper. He showed it to us.

The man said it was a photograph of his father, who had been lost in the heated vapors of August 9th.

He said, “My mother said he was an unlucky man. She said he disappeared in a great burst of light.” He laughed. The man seemed not to believe what his mother had said but could neither confirm nor deny the truth.

In the photograph, which was very old and had the consistency of worn tissue paper, I could make out the mere outline of a figure, a fragmented traceline, washed out by sun or over-exposed lamp light, little more than a blank image.

“Why is it,” I asked my brother, “that in almost all the photographs we have of Dad he’s laughing but I really can’t remember what his laughter sounds like? I never remember him laughing.”

“I have three cameras in my house and we never use them,” my brother said.

One day, my mother was on her porch laughing with friends. One of her friends had brought a jar filled with oil from the Gulf of Mexico. I walked up the steps of the porch. Large bees hovered heavily among the flowers. I held my hand up to one of the bees and it veered away.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

The women, many of whom were alone and visited my mother frequently, threatened that they would all someday live together in the house and frighten children on Halloween, that they would die together in forgetfulness. I rarely visit my mother.

One of the women said, “It’s oil from the Gulf. I dipped it for a souvenir.”

“That’s horrible,” I told her.

“Take a picture of it,” my mother said, grinning.

“Yes, take a picture of it,” said the woman who’d brought it. “Take a picture of me drinking it.”

All the women were drinking wine and had obviously had more than one glass.

A woman in a baseball cap said, “Laura, your son reminds me of every man I ever hated.”

My mother said, “You mean Bill or Henry?”

“Both those assholes,” the woman confirmed.

Years ago I asked my father about his father. “He was a train engineer,” my father said.

“An operator?” I asked.

“Something like that,” he said.

On another occasion, perhaps over some dinner out, my father said, “My father had just one hand. He lost the other hand because of his inexperience with a chain saw. He worked in lumber. He used to poke us with his stump, just jab us with it, and he’d say, ‘Got ya, got ya.'”

“I thought you said he was a train engineer,” I remember saying.

“Well,” my father said, “whoever told you that’s a goddamned liar” and then he raised a glass to his father’s hand–“A toast,” he said, “a toast to my poor father’s lost hand, lost in the woods, buried by leaves, and to his stump, the stump he turned into a sword”–and we joined him in the toast and I asked my father no further questions.

Years ago, I found an important photograph of my father, a film maker who said his own father had been born and raised in the Netherlands.

Or was it Belgium? The photograph had been taken before the war. We know this because of the condition of the paper, which, perhaps, had been chewed around the edges by a mouse, ants, moths, or some other symbol of time. In the photograph, my father is buried to his neck in a vacant lot. Imagine putting a watermelon down in a field and taking a picture of it from about ten or so yards away and from a fairly low field of view and you’ll have a sense of the scene.

My father’s head is small, like that watermelon. From the look of the sky, the day may have been somewhat cloudy, though the browning black and white photograph makes it difficult to judge. The angles of the shadows are a better way. Near my father’s exposed head is a bird, an ominous crow or raven. A dim but noticeable shadow points from the bird to my father’s face, and from my father’s head another shadow extends. Of course, the second shadow is rounder than the shadow spearing out from the large crow. The sun, therefore, while there may have been clouds in the sky, is positioned slightly to my father’s left and behind the crow.

What we don’t know is whether the bird is approaching my father’s head as there’s nothing in the photograph that proves one way or the other. The crow, however, is observing my father’s helpless head with that taut and menacing expression of crows.

“It was a prank,” my brother says. “They buried him in the ground because he wanted them to?”

“No,” my sister says. “It was punishment. In those days, families buried children in the ground to their chins if they broke the rules.”

I say, “But that’s the photo of a man, not a child.” My sister smiles, sometimes laughs. We would laugh at the photo. We would pass it hand to hand and then we’d hide it when my mother entered the room and lift other, less controversial photographs.

The expression on my father’s face is interesting. In one interpretation, my father looks like he’s just bitten into a lemon or into a grapefruit and the hair on his head has been combed up and out in the aspect of a fern. Another interpretation claims that my father is in terror of the crow. That the crow is moving closer and closer, stalking his unprotected head. Prior to the photograph being taken, the crow had landed, intending to inspect the head. My father, who’s helplessly buried, knows that the crow will soon be plucking at his eyes with its hard black and hungry beak and so he’s pinched his face, preparing for the inevitable attack by the bird.

“It’s obviously a prop,” my brother says, “put there by his friends. It’s all staged. They buried him, stuffed up a good toy of a crow, and then took the photograph.”

My sister says, “Maybe, but look at the feathers. I’ve observed crows. That’s a real crow. Look closely behind the bird and you’ll see it’s footsteps. It’s coming for his eyes and ears.”

I say, “It’s impossible to tell. We’re too far away from the crow. Those marks behind it could be anything. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Regardless of interpretation, every time we found the photograph and passed it around, we’d end up laughing at it. My sister would laugh; my brother would follow with his own laughter, pinching an edge of the rather fragile photograph in his fingers. I remember a night when we quickly hid the photograph and staunched our laughter when my mother called from the kitchen, asking, “What are you three laughing at?” Maybe some Thanksgiving or Christmas.

It was years later when I summoned the courage to ask my mother about the photograph, as, after so many years, the photograph had been lost.

“The photo of Dad,” I said. “The one where he’s buried in a vacant lot. There’s a crow. He’s buried to his head. I’m sure you’ve seen it.”

“I can’t remember why we never asked her about it,” my brother says.

“It does seem strange that we never did,” my sister says, “absurd, even. And now it’s lost.”

My mother said I must be crazy. “Buried,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

“He’s buried to the neck. I know it sounds crazy. There’s a crow. Dad’s buried in the ground. I’m sure you know it.”

“I really don’t know what picture you’re talking about,” my mother said. “Something like that I’d remember, don’t you think?”

“Could you just look?” I say.

My mother sounded confused, but in her voice I made out a hesitation, a hesitation that bespoke a knowingness or sudden recollection, and that she was thinking fast and had to express something that would either divert me away from the subject or mitigate the reality, immerse it in some other context that would turn the photograph into a misinterpretation or childhood figment, thus easily dismiss it as false. I sensed that she was thinking through her options. She said, “I’ve never seen such a thing, but, sure, I’ll look.”

“Yes, just look,” I said over the phone, which must’ve made the request even stranger.

“I think she knew we’d found it,” my brother says.

My sister says, “I think she burned it, tore it up. It’s amazing. You must have caught her off guard.”

I regretted asking my mother to look for the such a photograph.

“I will,” she said. “I’ll look for it.”

It is assumed that the last stitch in a rug somehow touches the first stitch as the final word in a sentence or poetic line reaches back into reading time and provokes meaning. In film, the last image recalls the first.

In my room, for example, I have a leather pouch filled with coins: six, it may be true, old silver dollars mysteriously minted. I don’t, however, know where this room is any longer.

I do know that each of those coins may contain four other circles and a triangle whose vertices are ABC. ABC each form the center points of three of the internal circles relative to the super circle that forms the coin, whose center is S’. When I think of the coins, I consider the implications of symmetry, and when I think of the lacework of rugs, I think about the magic of sentences.

It may be true that the penny I handed across twenty years ago has found its way back to me. Or a forgotten face finds its way back. Example: I met an old friend in Mexico City. Of all places on the intersection of 5 de Mayo and Bolivar.

He called me by name and I stopped, thought about it, and said his name back and shook his hand. He said, “What a wonder to see you here of all places.”

I said, “Yes, it could have been Chicago.”

He said, “I was there just last week” and we laughed. We had coffee. Five minutes into our conversation, I felt alarmed by his alienness. I felt an ominous feeling of estrangement and displacement, as if I had suddenly come into contact with someone who might kill me at any moment. Every nostalgic word he uttered, every name he spoke, every incident he narrated made me shake. I felt the need to run.

I flew home the next day. I sat on the couch and considered the photographs I have on the walls, the northwestern wall behind which a river flows. On the couch, I couldn’t shake the fear that I had felt in that Mexico City cafe, seated with that stranger. These photographs, these faces and other artifacts in them, belonged to another man. This other man had crept into the house behind me as I’d entered with my bags and leapt into the den without my noticing. I felt the geography of fear. I felt suddenly that the intruder was standing behind the couch and that he had a knife in his hand.

The feeling of intrusion was strong enough to make me turn. But when I turned I saw nothing, no intruder, just vague outlines of things, triangles, rectangles, an empty kitchen.

In John Timmon’s short film the search for meaning (part 1), a man initiates conflict in the narrative by responding to a woman’s expression of boredom. She claims that she wants to do “something new and exciting.” He responds by saying “like driving around naked.” This is a film about revealing character.

Conflict in the narrative is motivated not by the woman’s boredom but by the man’s joke (as we know jokes are the seed of many a drama). He’s surprised that the woman leaps to and agrees with his outlandish choice. We have to assume that the man is taken back by the woman’s agreement, that she would suddenly begin stripping, that she’s now seated in the truck’s cab naked (and always will be) and exposed to the rain or to the sun and to the neighbors, like Henry, who has dashed through the rain or the sun to check his mail and observes the woman’s white body entering the truck, catching how her body had glowed in the sun or shed the rain, although the rain in the film may be an indication of a “play with time” or a “play with emotion,” such as vulnerability or an inner dramatization of the woman’s state of being, or a “play with season,” such as spring.

In addition, we must assume that the man thought that driving naked was something unusual enough to provoke a sense of adventure or break an unusually lengthy period of equilibrium in the woman’s life which has caused her to feel boredom. We also must assume that he had thought that the woman would shed the suggestion like the rain. Perhaps the audience will be left thinking: the man has learned something about this women.

States of being are significant in dramatic forms. This is significant to the woman, who’s state of being at the beginning of the film is “boredom.” The man’s question is a catalyst, an apocalyptic provocation. She accepts the challenge of the question and the man is, therefore, moved into the state of “fear” from that of being safely contained. But what does he fear?

Does he fear being caught; does he fear being exposed; does he fear some strange law prohibiting public nakedness and thus public humiliation? Does he fear what the woman will or has become? Does he fear that he will be left behind, not physically on the street but left in some unknown or perilous condition or “state behind,” as two people in a relationship, no matter the nature of that relationship, are always trying to “keep up” with one another, to enjoy synergy, to stay abreast psychically? Does he fear that the woman will consider him a coward, which is a variation on the previous fear, if he doesn’t join her in the escapade he himself sowed, which now weighs on him like a heavy stone? Does he wish he’d kept his mouth shut; that he might have offered a more banal suggestion, such as rock climbing?

The prior list of fears are conditioned on the identity of the characters in the film, however. The list of fears would change if the woman in the film was revealed as the man’s mother or, better, grandmother or elderly aunt. The intermittent or liminal state of being between is of course one of shock, a period in narrative where action is suspended and characters are provided time to collect themselves and begin to make sense of their new world. (We might say that the liminal state is conveyed by the voice simulation or filter.) As this is true, we must assume that the naked woman is not the man’s mother or an elderly aunt as the liminal state might have come with a remonstration, such as “What the hell are you doing, Mom?” or “Aunt Jane, put on your pants?” not a reminder of the original intention.

Withall, we’re left with a naked woman in the truck, drops of rain on the window and rain on a table, and Henry wondering what will happen next across the street (he will be waiting forever, unfortunately). Most importantly, we are left with a choice: remain clothed or strip and drive. What would you do? How you respond will reveal your character.