Pee On Water

THE MAGIC UMBRELLA

One day there was a girl whose name was Jen. She was a secondgrader. Jen was running to catch the bus when she saw that it was raining. She ran back to get her umbrella. On the way she saw an umbrella walking towards her and it had a face! Jen was scared but she opened it anyway. It was taking her higher and higher, it took her to Mars. Millions of aliens walked in a big circle around her. They said “beep beep.”

All the way back at school, the bus had arrived and the kids were playing outside. Rachel, Jen's best friend, was saying, “What is that noise?” It was the bell. All of the kids ran to their classrooms. They went in. The teacher said “Where is Jen?” No one knew. Right then Jen's voice said “Here I am.” She had flown right through the window and into her chair!

All about the author. Agnes wrote this when she was seven. She grew up in Point Judith, a small shore town. The youngest of many siblings, she was still thoroughly bored by her family. Though known in Point Judith for her watercolor seascapes, Agnes found these unremarkable. Sloppy clouds dripped into the ocean. A bird’s eyes smudged and looked like glasses. Her paper got waterlogged and wavy and her brushes frequently lost their hair. Occasionally, she attempted something really modern, but she knew her place. She was a young regional artist.

One time on a family retreat, they slept in tents by the sea. Morning light seeped through the tent in a friendly, inclusive way and she was last to wake. The sea made its wushing sound, like it was washing itself. Breakfast was cooked over a fire. Agnes looked dreamily into the fire. The others had run off to play. It was just her and her uncle. She felt grown up on her own, without the crowd of her family. The fire reached up into the air and then was stopped by air. She looked closely at the embers, where she saw the shape of a face. Her uncle said he had a weird dream the night before. The telling of the dream went on and on. She did not care for the dream.

Eventually, her uncle left her staring at the fire. The face in the fire was not just a coincidence of shapes. The fire was a creature and picked itself off the ground. The fire thing looked at Agnes. “I hate when people retell their dreams,” he said. Agnes could barely hear his voice, it was so crackly. His legs were made of sticks—his arms, head, feet, knees, all sticks on fire. He walked with a snapping sound. Agnes followed the fire man to the ocean, where he extinguished his flames. Then he was just sticks and wood. “I have two styles,” the stick man said, “on fire, or just sticks.” Then he swam a bit in the ocean while Agnes watched. He was an excellent swimmer. Water shot through his arms. A couple sticks broke off and bobbed in the sea.

Agnes’s brother walked up and said “What’s new, Stupid?” Agnes ignored him and he left laughing. She could see her stick man in the distance and she watched him fight the tide toward her.

All eyes turned when they stepped into the saloon. A man said “Leave that firewood outside!” Agnes was about to explain when everyone in the saloon cracked up because they were all friends with the stick man. The bartender stopped to shake his hand. There were lanterns and whale nets hanging from the walls. People were dancing to a banjo player in the back. A drink was placed in front of Agnes, but she was afraid.

The man of sticks drank his drink and another was placed before him. A beautiful woman walked by and lit his head on fire with a match, flirting. His head had flames like hair. Then the woman blew smoke from the stick man into another man’s eyes. The stick man didn’t have the kind of mouth that smiled, but Agnes knew he was happy. He asked the beautiful woman to dance and left Agnes alone with her drink.

The stick man and beautiful woman danced song after song, while Agnes wondered where her family was. Her drink sat in front of her, taunting her. It was the kind you were supposed to drink quick like medicine. The bartender looked at her suspiciously. Though she looked very human, she was the one who stuck out at the saloon, not the man of sticks! Her whole summer had been like this. At the fair, she’d win the raffle, and then the prize would be something worse than nothing. She’d follow a recipe exactly and still the food would taste like laundry. All these people had already met her magic stick man. She closed her eyes and drank the drink. It tasted like poison and then it warmed her chest.

With a vague wave to the stick man, she left the saloon. The ocean crashed and spread. It made the sand a different color. It left bubbles in its wake. The ocean always seemed capable of teaching a lesson, but really it was just busy water. It didn’t know you from anyone. It had never walked the streets. It hadn’t started out a baby or gone to school. The sea had a lot living in it, a lot riding on it, but really it just washed itself and sounded independent.

The girl who wrote this is Jo. At fifteen years, Jo is very tall, thin, and brown, and reminds one of a colt, for she never seems to know what to do with her long limbs, which are very much in her way. She has a decided mouth, a comical nose, and sharp, gray eyes, which appear to see everything. Her long, thick hair is her one beauty, but it is usually bundled into a net, to be out of her way.

Elizabeth, or Beth, as everyone calls her, is a rosy, smooth-haired, bright-eyed girl of thirteen, with a shy manner, a timid voice, and a peaceful expression which is seldom disturbed. Her father calls her ‘Little Miss Tranquility’ and the name suits her excellently, for she seems to live in a happy world of her own, only venturing out to meet the few whom she trusts and loves.

Amy, though the youngest, is a most important person, in her own opinion at least. A regular snow maiden with blue eyes and yellow hair curling on her shoulders, pale and slender, she always carries herself like a young lady mindful of her manners. What the characters of the four sisters are we will leave to be found out.

These are the popular sisters from Louisa May Alcott’s widely read Little Women. Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania to Abigail May and Bronson Alcott in 1812. Bronson Alcott was a teacher known for his methods. He emphasized conversation and encouraged questioning. “Who is ‘four’?” he might ask during a math lesson. “Would an eight be able to put up two fours, if the fours had traveled a long ways and were in need of board?” He was playful, famously letting a chicken loose in the school room to get the pupils’ attention. His philosophical teachings have been criticized as inconsistent, hazy and abrupt. The conservative Andrew Norton once said Bronson took the work of “Plato, Kant, and Coleridge and churned them [sic] into butter.”

In 1840, the Alcotts moved to Concord where prominent American author and close friend Ralph Waldo Emerson helped the family set up. Louisa acted out plays with her sisters and went on nature walks with Henry David Thoreau. Bronson wished to further his beliefs in transcendentalism and bring his daughters a greater understanding of nature. In 1843, the Alcott family took part in a failed experimental commune. The fruit crop was not what they predicted. The Alcott sisters sobbed they were so sick of hymns and mock battles.

One summer, Louisa had a crush on the shadow of a tree. She was appreciative of lace. Growing up, her best friend was a spoon! She praised all objects, even shoddily-made ones. She did not condescend to animals. She felt most herself in the midst of a long hot bath. Once, she attempted to sew a butterfly’s broken wing back together, but the operation failed.

She wrote poems and got them published under nonsense names. Wiggle M. Jenkins. Sneeze S. Breeze. Many of her friends married, but she remained single. She wrote and wrote. She’d think she had nothing left, and then she’d squeeze out another sentence.

Louisa May might have been a lesbian or an intellectual. Her book Moods was a precursor to lava lamps. A known civil rights and women’s rights advocate, Louisa installed the first washroom in the Underground Railroad. She had a bout of bad luck and dropped a very expensive jar of jam. Some say her sisters never forgave her. While other women were out dancing and spending money in Europe, Louisa was blowing her parents’ noses.

Her overnight success with Little Women was a shock to the nation. She did cartwheels across a field. Her town was alarmed by the news. The grocer watched her stiffly, unable to make small talk. The librarian got teary-eyed whenever Louisa stopped by. Louisa wrote Little Men but it was less fun than she’d thought. Glumly, she swept her house.

The Boston Review quoted her as saying that she’d “fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.” But this was before she met the town sheriff. The Sheriff was great. It was like running into a wall if you ran into his chest. He thought Louisa was really funny. She was used to living in a weird dream world, like Emily Dickinson and other ancient girl authors. Once, when she was drunk, Louisa told a Shaman that enlightenment “was bullshit.” And she was right.

Louisa wore a lot of layers. The Sheriff made her understand how sexy she was naked. She was used to being a tomboy and a shut-in. She didn’t realize she could be those things, but also a really sexy woman, and also an adventurer like Jo from Little Women. Louisa and the Sheriff went square dancing and didn’t care if they messed up. They hustled pool at the pub. Louisa still wrote stories, but the Sheriff was her main priority. And he still was a Sheriff, but a lot of the time he was just thinking about Louisa and what an original she was. All his friends thought he was insane, but once they spent time with Louisa they saw she was smart in a spontaneous, natural way, not just a facts way. And she wasn’t the normal kind of pretty, she was peculiar.

One day, Louisa was out in the fields with the Sheriff and he was showing her how to shoot a gun, but she was afraid to hold it. He said that Jo wouldn’t be afraid to hold a gun and he was right. Louisa laughed her melodious laugh, took the gun and held it. She smiled at the Sheriff because she had finally fallen in love. It was so much more amazing than she’d thought. She had never thought loving a man could outdo being friends with a bunch of eclectic eccentric women, but here she was, in the middle of it, happily proven wrong. The flies in the field chased each other. The sun watched them from behind mountains. Louisa sneezed and her fingers clenched the trigger and the Sheriff was shot in the heart! Down he went like a horse. She fell to his side, mortified, and he held her laughing. He told her he forgave her and he loved her, and she cried and cried and he laughed and he died.

It took Louisa her life to get over her only love. She devoted herself fully to her family and her writing. She wrote letters to women all over the country. Sometimes, she arranged food in a pleasing shape on a plate. Other times, she ate it from the pot. She kept pets and when each died, grimly got another. She sat. She waited. She thought. For years, she wrote an autobiography with flourishes and new additions. In this autobiography, she cared for a lamb named Noelle. She was in a silent movie. When she was finished, she didn’t want to stop working. She began the laborious task of typesetting the book. Long ago, she’d inherited a press and had never before printed from it. Using the old type and new ink, she laid out each page. She made only one copy. It took her half a year. Then she drove to town to get it bound. On the day her book was in its complete state, she read it cover to cover. It is extravagant to read a book all about oneself. Louisa felt vain and excited, and then she forgot about it.

Readers, I am that book. My cover is linen and worn. I am 143 pages in total. I am well over a hundred years old. I am positive I am worth a lot of money. Presently, I am squished between others in a rare books collection. I cannot understand spoken language, so the chatter of my collectors is as illuminating as a baby's babble. This could be any country. Nevertheless, I have arrived at some assumptions of this grand room. I sense carpeting. I believe there to be a loud, clinking (grandfather?) clock, for I can sense even intervals, and have no heartbeat to speak of.

I sit next to a first edition copy of The Great Gatsby, and it’s been sleeping since I got here. I have read that book fifty times since my arrival! I am an avid reader. Many books don’t care about reading. Hoards of books are incapable of reading even themselves.

I have read so many books. I'm wild about Nabokov. I admire Cheever. I am not a fan of Latin American fiction. I dislike Kerouac and the other deadbeats. Tolstoy I adore. Henry James, a genius. Early encyclopedias have implemented me with a foundation and overview of the world. Dictionaries have distilled scores of definitions and obscure usages. When there are no books of value to occupy me, I read myself. I know precisely every word.

There was a whole decade I got bored. I just sat there. I did not read. We might call what I did 'meditating,' but, readers, that would be dressing it up. I was surrounded by slick covers of paperback reprints. I had little inclination to be. Then one day, a reader spoke aloud to me. I cannot distinguish sound into words. To me, it was just a mumbling vibration, but I felt this reader was imploring of me. How I struggled to speak back! My binding made a crack, but that is all, my friends.

My life lacks movement, interaction, and event. But I do not expect these things of it. As a life, mine is vicarious, but I suspect most are. It is seldom a book is exposed to the outdoors. A book must study nature from other books and accept that it has been shelved in an artificial environment, and, likely, it will stay there.

More than anything, I desire to attend a symphony. A zoo would be amusing. I can summon little interest in sports contests, but a botanical garden would certainly be educational. I'm quite sure I have a unique perspective. I imagine I'd teach. I'd teach at the University, but summers I'd travel and paint. I'd keep my shape. Frankly, I do not crave a body. A face is intriguing, how it moves and learns, develops, displays, but the mouth has always seemed messy to me. Hair, I imagine to be a chore.