A Boy, a Cat, a Lifeboat

Two Tiger Flash Fictions by Ben Raker

2009-11-04T07:57:00.000-08:00

50 Word A Boy, A Cat, A Lifeboat Saga (Joseph Campbell Style)

The wave knocked the boy from the raft sometime during the storm. He was glad then to have taught his pet tiger both to swim and retrieve. Returning exhausted, they flopped awkwardly up onto the loose boards—safe. The raft was a flimsy thing, but for now it was home.

A Boy, A Cat, A Lifeboat Saga (freestyle)

The tiger was used to tight spaces and knew how to pace to stay fit. The boy, who hadn’t grown up in a zoo, was less fortunate; their time adrift hadn’t been good for his figure. The tiger thought of telling the boy to go easier on the sea-turtle soup.

---

Note on the text: While at Seattle Book Fest, Ben Raker was in an audience challenged to submit a tiger and life boat story to help with the ongoing effort to make this an open-source narrative form, the "Hansel and Gretel" of our age. That same day, for business school, he received the assignment to write a 50-word (exactly) saga using Joseph Campbell's famous hero's journey which features, departure, trials, return.

Ben Raker is a writer, editor, and MBA student in Seattle.

a boy a cat by Justin Dobbs

2009-10-13T07:34:00.000-07:00

But he's just a boy, thought the mayor as he pushed through the door of his house, and indeed, when he opened the closet the boy flew suddenly into his arms.

A young, winning boy, he liked to curl up in front of the mayor's fireplace with the black tiger who had wandered into the house after a tea party. The tiger had nestled around the legs of a very nice lady named Ms. Machete, who was the town baker, and who had been sitting on the couch before the fire, and when she first saw that it was not actually a cat she didn't become as frightened as she did on the day that she first attracted a tiger.

And when the mayor would go to bed at night when the winds were just as fierce as the lagging tiger, when he hit the sack, when the mayor slept in bed with the woman who hogged the creamer, when he did so everynight he prayed that the tiger would not follow him, because that's just what had happened the other night when the glow of the tiger's yellowish eyes were the clock's accomplices in an early morning's fright whose flight was as sadsongy and slowavistic as the bloodied backyard's sundials movement around the raspy husks of leaves and which were accompanied by the jazzy movements of the monstrous boy's hands.

* * *

Near daylight the next week the boy left with the tiger on a lifeboat on the lake near the mayor's and to mark the triumph of their leaving, a woodpecker knocked fifty times consecutively into the wood of the mayor's head.

------
Justin Dobbs lives in Seattle.

Tony by Matt Briggs

2009-04-22T07:58:00.000-07:00

Ocean. Not a little ocean, but a vast ocean. The shot can be done with a camera with a weight hung from the helicopter. Is this really how it might be done?

I'm concerned here about the camera disturbing the waves. I want it to be clear that the boat and the boy, have lost their ship because it has sunk without a trace. It is as good as if they had been dropped there in the middle of the ocean from somewhere else completely.

There is the boat, a white speck, a tiny thing, a toy boat, a boat with two shapes in it.

There is a boat with a boy with a peach fuzz mustache, and a tan drinking water out of a gasoline can, and Tony the Tiger of Kellogg fame.

We build brands and make the world a little happier by bringing our best to you each morning.

He is somewhat translucent and pixilated. It becomes clear, quickly, that this is not a commercial because this Tony the Tiger isn't smiling, but has lost some weight, and that you can see his bones through his carefully cheerful and colorful skin.

How do you achieve this translucent effect? It needs to be true translucency rather than a suggested translucency --that is there needs to be the effect that this tiger is made out of Mylar or some kind of see through material rather than merely superimpose the background image over the top of him. The background image needs to pass through the medium that is Tony the Tiger and into the viewer's eye.

This is suggested by the distortion of the light passing through the translucent tiger. The boy and the tiger are getting along as they always do. They are eating seaweed.

How does it taste?

They're Gr-r-Great! But, it is clear as they are eating, from their slowing down, from Tony's prolonged glances at the boy--he would rather be eating something else. The boy, too, can tell, because he would rather be eating something else. "It surely would be good to get my hands on a nice steak right about now, wouldn't it," he says. "A nice juicy piece of meat." The tiger laughs. He can only say one thing (you know--They're Gr-r-great--or laugh, and so he doesn't say his one thing because he would rather keep eating the seaweed than lose the conversation of his friend. They float on the water for a long time. The passage of time is indicated by a time-lapse shot of the boat in the water. The waves speed up and jostle around the boat. The thin clouds sweep overhead, and stars swirl up as the darkness pours over the sky and then it is very dark.

They will not eat each other?

They will not eat each other, but will perish like a civilized tiger and boy. The tiger's will begins to break down. In one instance, he sees the boy shaped like a turkey, dripping baked oils, bread and clove stuffing coming out of his butt. When he leans in to eat the boy, the boy begins to shriek. "What are you doing? I am a boy, not a piece of meat!" And the tiger comes to and sees the boy.

It is a dark moment

Now he is going to eat the boy in any case. Saliva drips on the boards of the boat. The translucent tiger is quite hungry. "A boat," the boy says. "A boat." And they see another boat on the horizon. They jump around on the boat. "We are saved," the boy says. He flashes a bit of metal in the sun. They wait. The boat disappears over the horizon, and Tony looks at the boy again. The boy looks at Tony again. Tony has a bib, and a knife and a fork. Just then another boat appears on the same horizon.

It must be a shipping lane or something.

Tony is undeterred this time. He chases the boy around the boat. The boat jostles in the water, one side dipping down very close to letting water into the boat and then the other side dipping up almost to the top. And then finally, this boat has seen them. Tony is about to eat the boy, and the boat is on top of them, a gigantic freighter, and pulls them to safety.

A close call.

A close call, to be sure.

----
Matt Briggs lives and works in a basement near Seattle. His work can be found or is forthcoming at Proximity Magazine, Necessary Fiction, The Golden Handcuff Review, and Birkensnake. His most recent book of stories is The End is the Beginning. A new novel will be published early next year. He blogs here.

Boy, A Cat, A Lifeboat by Claudia Smith

2008-08-11T07:19:00.000-07:00

That day, she picked him up in front of the red-and-orange house and he ran to tell her about the submarine he'd built, with a periscope. Later, he'd told her about the cat. "It was a tiger," he said. "A real one." His sleeping bag was soggy, soaked with something. The teacher said she didn't think it was urine. They weren't sure how it had gotten wet.

That night, she slept on the sofa. Her boy lay on the floor beneath her, zipped up in the tiger, smelling of dryer sheets and baby shampoo. This is another part she will not forget. They were in the ocean, a long a rippling ocean, and she was the tiger and she was also a boat, cradling him. When she looked up at him from her tiger-head prow, he had grown taller, taller than his father. He stroked her fine white nose, and she felt her belly rumble. It was a pleasant dream, the kind of dream you try to remember after waking, but can't keep with you.

Fourteen years later, the boy swam in the ocean. He was a strong swimmer, but something happened, and he drowned. She did not know this, no one but the boy knew this, and the girl who died with him, but he was caught in a giant plastic cover that had fallen from a freighter. This plastic tarp was the size of a sea monster. As the boy was carried out to sea, he began to feel calm. He looked over and saw the girl. She was named Abra, and he had met her two days before, at a bar. She was a camp counselor. He knew three absolute truths about her; her favorite drink was a White Russian. She had one blue eye and one brown eye. She'd proven this to him by taking out one of her colored contacts the night they'd met. And she was a runner. She had a runner's body, the kind that always seems dressed, even when naked.

Abra didn't quit. She gasped and struggled, a tiger, a tiger, he thought, even as he was sinking. She reminded him of someone. He thought of his mother, and of another girl, Tammy. He was certain Abra would live, sure of it, and then he died. And Abra died, also, not long after.

For years, after, his mother recalled the dream she'd had when he was in preschool. She took a pill advertised by moonlit butterflies, to try to sleep, to dream it again. She dreamed about the girl, Abra. She and the girl's mother, Anissa, emailed one another often, but had never met in person.

Anissa and the boy's mother corresponded for three years. Anissa recalled her daughter's love for Scrabble, and her pretty ways. Her daughter had been a champion of chess. Her daughter was unpopular in high school. Her daughter had backpacked across Ireland.

Anissa took pills, too, and she dreamed the tiger dream.

Did you see him? The boy's mother asked. They were chatting in Gmail.

I saw him,

Don't lie to me, did you see him?

I saw him. He was tall, and his eyes were gray, and I was holding him; I was the tiger. I was longer than a football field, I was a tiger, and then I was a blanket and then I was a cocoon, all around him. And I was sinking, and I saw Abra and I loved her and wanted her, the way a man wants a woman, not the way a mother wants a child.

I will try; his mother typed to her. I will try to dream of her.

Do.

The mothers took all their pills, and went to bed. The one in Omaha, and then the one in New Jersey.

-----
Claudia Smith has had over a hundred stories published in several journals and anthologies, including Sou'wester, Failbetter, Norton's The New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories From America and Beyond, Juked, Elimae, Night Train, and Wigleaf. Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and her chapbook, The Sky Is A Well And Other Shorts, won the New England Bookbuilder's Award. The collection was reprinted as part of Rose Metal Press's anthology A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: Four Chapbooks of Short-Short Fiction By Four Women. More about Claudia and her work can be found at her site, claudiaweb.

Adrift! by Jay Chilcote

2008-08-09T09:40:00.000-07:00

"Kelvin?"

"Yes."

"You're awake."

"Of course, you oaf. How could I be talking if I was asleep?"

"You could be sleep talking."

"You're not supposed to interrupt sleep walkers. Or sleep talkers."

"I see. Are you hungry?"

"No. Sort of."

"Do you regret our playing stowaways? Now that we've been cast adrift in this featureless ocean, I mean?"

"I was tired of that tramp freighter, anyway. It was no fun with all the sailors being tigers."

Drifting...

"Do you think your Mom is worried?"

"Yes."

"What about your Dad?"

"No. Yes."

Drifting...

"I keep dreaming of a big, sunny field, my tail swishing through the tall grass."

"Stop that."

Drifting...

"Strange, I haven't seen any birds."

"Me neither."

"It's so funny, you being afraid of birds."

"I've told you before, only the big ones scare me."

"For my part, I like to stalk them and leap into the air to knock them to the ground with a paw when they try to fly off and then I like to eat them."

"Good for you."

"Birds are good eating. So are squirrels. So are hedgehogs, although tigers only eat those on certain national religious holidays."

"National religious holidays? Snort. Tigers don't have national religious holidays!"

"I beg to differ. And in fact, there happens to be one we tigers celebrate called Differential Day, in honor of St. Leibniz, when all tigers beg to differ."

"Sounds like opposite day at my school where some of the boys wear their pants backwards until the teachers yell at them."

"Do some of the girls wear their pants backwards?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Even on accident?"

"Why would they do that?"

"Why wouldn't they?"

"I don't know, and I don't care."

"Is there one girl in particular you wish would wear her pants on backwards?"

"Of course not!"

"I see. Are you thirsty?"

"Yes. But I'm trying to conserve what's left in the canteen. You practically drank the whole thing the last time I gave it to you."

"I beg to differ."

"It's not St. Leibniz or whatever Day, dufus."

"You mean Differential Day."

Drifting...

"Wait. You can't contradict me if it's not Differential Day."

"I can if Differential Day is actually Differential Week, and it started, oh, five days ago."

"Why don't you just jump out of this boat and see if the sharks think you're so funny."

"Do you think there are sharks out there?"

"Every lifeboat is eventually surrounded by sharks. They call that a framing device. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the sharks hadn't swallowed a tick-tock clock to add tension.Then on top of that it would probably have a personal vendetta against you for harpooning its best friend or something."

"Sailor tigers must have their hobbies."

Drifting...

"Calvin, I mean Kelvin?"

"Very funny."

"Are you hungry?"

"Somewhat peckish. Why?"

"If it comes down to it, do you think I should be able to eat you, since I'm a big, fit, productive member of the maritime trade, or should you eat me in order to continue being a little boy who refuses to clean behind his ears?"

"What kind of question is that?"

"It's just... you know those cartoons we watch?"

"Warner Brothers?"

"Yes. In some of them, when there's a situation similar to the one we find ourselves in, one of the characters gets really hungry and then looks at the other and sees a juicy baked ham, or a brown, steaming turkey, something like that. Are you listening?"

"I'm trying not to. You're making me hungry."

"It seems to me... what was that noise?"

"Kelvin, honey, bath time is over!"

"Aw, Mom! We're just now having fun!"

"You heard me. It's already getting past your bed time."

---
Jay Chilcote is the author of the novel Ratcheting Down The Melancholic Afterbeat (a very enjoyable love story) and a musician who has been in (or been) the bands Revolutionary Hydra and Slomo Rabbit Kick.

Voyage of the Peapod by Steve Himmer

2008-04-20T16:27:00.000-07:00

Ever since reading that novel the whole city read at the same time, the boy had imagined what he might do, how he himself might behave if trapped in a lifeboat with a tiger. "I'd tame the tiger," the boy told his friend. "I'd fashion a whip from fishing nets and detach the whistle from my life preserver and for my tiger tamer's chair I'd use a..."

"That sounds like a lion tamer," said his friend. "And what if there wasn't a fishing net or life preserver or chair in the boat? There weren't any of those in the novel."

The boy's friend had read the novel, too, during those summer months when its blue cover peeked from each commuter's bag. Giant flags of the book flew from lampposts along the city's best streets, and each Sunday the newspaper's magazine section profiled someone in the city who was reading it, telling their fellow citizens who they were, where they read, what remarkable life had delivered them to those weeks of shared reading and how reading the book was changing that life.

The boy told another friend, later, "I'll be naked, without any water or food. I'm going to have a vision quest."

"I didn't know you were Native," that friend replied.

"I'm not," the boy said, "but I saw a show on TV so I pretty much know how they work. I think a vision quest is just what I need."

The boy found it harder than expected to rent a lifeboat. Most of the city's waterborne rescues were made by the harbormaster in his motorboat. The few lifeboats remaining in town were on display at the maritime museum or else in the lobbies of nautically-themed office buildings downtown, and none of those could be rented or borrowed or easily stolen.

At last, he found a boat called a "peapod" for hire. It was long enough to hold a boy and a tiger, and more or less the shape he imagined a lifeboat should have, despite the lack of gravitas in its name. The peapod's owner, a lobster boat captain who was hardly grizzled or growling or barnacle-crusted, asked whether the boy wanted the mast and the sail and how many oars and what were his plans for the boat, anyway.

"No oars and no sail," the boy answered, to which the captain raised one of his eyebrows. And when the boy said he'd be sharing the boat with a tiger, that it was to be his vision quest, the captain reminded the boy his security deposit would not be returned if the tiger's claws scratched up the hull. The boy asked whether the captain had read the book, too, but the mariner only whistled while counting the boy's crisp, bank-fresh notes.

The tiger was even harder to come by. There were only two in the city, and both of those were in zoos. The boy checked the schedules for all the traveling circuses he could think of, but none were coming to town. Circuses hardly ever came to the city because each time they did they drew more protesters than enthusiasts of lion-taming and monkeys riding bicycles on elephants' backs. The boy, who had been to his share of circus protests, almost regretted his passion for animal rights now that he needed a tiger so he could commune with the natural world.

In the end, he paid a hunter to cage a cougar, and even that wasn't cheap -- he'd budgeted what he thought was a big chunk of money for tiger expenses, and spent most of it on the inferior cat. The rest went to an artist hired to paint tiger stripes, and to a veterinary student whose tranquilizers let the artist work safely and let the boy drive the cat across town and kept it asleep until the boat was offshore.

The boy's destination wasn't specific, just far enough out to sea that land fell from sight. The captain threw in haulage for free with the hired peapod, and once the horizon was the same slate expanse in all directions he detached the tow rope and received a bundle of clothes the boy had stripped off. Then he swung his bow toward the first string of lobster pots he'd pull that morning and in a few minutes was beyond the boy's view.

And all that remained was the tiger that wasn't a tiger, and the lifeboat not quite a lifeboat, and the boy.

The tiger still slept, curled in the bow like a house cat on a couch, and the boy waited for something important to happen. To pass the time he imagined the dreams of the tiger: virulent, vivid dreams of dashing and darting and pouncing from branches above. Dreams of ravishing tigresses and lionesses alike and perhaps even human women who wandered too far off the trail. Of cross-species connection with a boy like himself, a boy the tiger had been waiting to share his tigerness with, with the vision to understand what it is to be Tiger.

Dreams of dreaming tigers so enraptured the boy that he fell asleep on a bulkhead, and while he slept the tide washed his boat back to shore. The tiger awoke and sprang over the gunwale, a bit seasick but no worse for wear, and wandered away on the sand leaving deep tracks that lasted just minutes. And when the boy emerged from his visions he was alone in the boat though surrounded by seagulls, and a cold breeze off the water brushed his body the same shade of blue as the cover of a novel the whole city had read.

---
Steve Himmer blogs as Tawny Grammer. His works has appeared in various places including Pindeldyboz, MonkeyBicycle, and more. Read it, concerned reader. Read it all.

My Grandmother by Justin Dobbs

2008-03-01T08:24:00.000-08:00

It wasn't long ago. My sleep had been fine (almost telephone free) when, after a silver dawn had painted a pale light into my bedroom, I discovered the wild, crazy tiger. He was knawing on my socks!

It is enough to wake one up. Here I am now, in the lifeboat, on a fairly oily and cremulous sea, and mulling over my chances to arrive at a distant church although I can see its ancient spire above a hill. I have also placed my wild tiger into the lifeboat. The cat's tail seems to read my thoughts about the church and to navigate all at once.

My investigations of the island have been fruitful. My grandmother was a baker in town, and bakers, in this town, are very important. So much so that she had been given the only key to the town's only library. And so one night, when everyone was asleep or watching grandfather on television, my grandmother stole me past the bakery, past a yard for chickens, to a small, silver door on a blank, purple wall. Inside, it was madly dark, but she had brought matches, and a candle. My grandmother was pretty as a young woman, and dressed racily then as she does now. And so, as I crept forward in the dark, her hand pressed firmly to my lower back, I could smell the lavender in her clothes, in her skin, in my dreams of the tall, fabled church.

---
Justin Dobbs has work in elimae, 3:AM Magazine, and Billy Sauce's Fortune-Telling Blog. He lives in Seattle and New York.

The Formula by John Olson

2008-02-05T11:15:00.000-08:00

Alfred Egmont was in a bad mood. It was 5:00 in the morning and still dark. Rain was falling heavily and he and his wife Linda were driving south on I-5 to Sea-Tac to catch a plane for San Francisco. They were flying to San Francisco to see an exhibit at the de Young museum, a collection of Baroque art including Tiger Hunt by Peter Paul Rubens and The Maids of Honor by Diego Velázquez.

Alfred had anticipated little traffic, but was surprised to find the freeway already bustling with trucks and taxis and buses and shuttles, all moving at perplexingly high speeds. Each time a truck or Escalade or Hummer sliced through the rain the leviathans created a rooster-tail which compromised all visibility. Alfred was tense. He was having difficulty making out the lanes. He repeated a phrase: a boy, a cat, a lifeboat. A boy, a cat, a life-boat. A boy, a cat, a lifeboat. He turned it round and round in his mind like marmalade, a gooey mantra of soothing translucence. The phrase had been coined by a friend as an example of literary prescription, a formula for generating stories. Stories about boys and tigers. Stories about religion and survival. Stories about God and water. When Alfred’s mood began to darken in bile, or his level of stress rose from truculent to screaming, he ran the phrase through his brain as a counterweight, a bromidic equation whose arrangement had a certain buoyancy to it.

The source of Alfred’s bad mood, in part, was an incident that had taken place the day before. A crew of landscapers were working on the yard of the house being remodeled next to their apartment building. They had parked two trucks in the easement leading to their parking lot. Alfred had gone out to drive down to the store where Linda worked and pick her up but was blocked. He asked if they could move their trucks. The workers looked up and gave him a look of sour confusion. A man dropped his shovel, shouted something in a foreign language at one of the other men, and the trucks were moved. But when Alfred and Linda returned home, the easement was blocked with the trucks again. He was going to park in the street, but then Linda suggested she go and ask them to move their trucks. She worried about their car being stolen, or getting whacked by a negligent motorist as it had been clobbered already several times when it had been parked on a city street, and the perpetrators had not left a note. Why would they? Why give a shit, if it’s not your car?

Alfred could not figure out why the landscapers had parked in the easement. Neither of the trucks were in use. They were simply parked there. Once more, shovels were dropped, looks were exchanged, and the trucks were moved. But one of the trucks had chosen to occupy the spot that Alfred normally used to get their car turned around. He was forced to back in to their slot in a manner to which he was unaccustomed, and as he tried to maneuver the car around, the front end of their car knocked the dumpster. There was a kawhack, followed by the groan of metal rolling back on stubborn little wheels. He felt foolish. He got out to take a look and saw some dents and scrapes near their front fender. Had those already been there? He could not tell if they were old or if he just now caused them by knocking into the dumpster. This bugged him. He could not get the dents out of his head.

He repeated his mantra, anointing his rancor with his inner marmalade: a boy, a cat, a lifeboat. A boy, a cat, a lifeboat.

But why a cat, Alfred reflected. The story in question concerned a tiger. Perhaps it was a matter of inclusion. Cat was more general. Tiger was very specific. That weighted the mantra. It lost its buoyancy. Cat preserved a certain level of abstraction. Abstraction equaled lightness. Imponderability.

One thing was certain: as of Christmas, 2007, boys would begin taking tigers more seriously. Don’t taunt them, for instance.

Christmas Day, 2007, is the day Tatiana, a 350-pound Siberian tiger, leaped from her grotto at the San Francisco Zoo and killed a seventeen-year old boy and mauled two slightly older brothers. This story was in many ways more interesting than the story of the boy in the lifeboat with the tiger. A book which he, Alfred Egmont, had not yet read, but had only read about, and could not, therefore, pass judgment. Nevertheless, when fiction came up against reality, reality usually won.

What had those boys done to get the tiger so riled? The consensus among the experts, such as tiger trainer Rick Glassey, whose tiger Jake starred in 'Dr. Doolittle', was that it would take a lot more than yelling or urinating or throwing things to get a tiger so mad it would crawl up a 12.5 foot wall and go on the attack. Was that even possible? The evidence was there. Concrete chips had been discovered in the dead tiger’s paws. The tiger’s rage must have been astronomically intense.

What in the world had happened that night? Was it simply the misbehavior of three stoned kids taunting a notoriously cunning predator, or a combination of things, things that exceeded the range of human thought, human experience, things that could only be understand by a feline, a Panthera tigris, a 350-pound tiger confined to a San Francisco grotto? What emotions had been vulcanizing in the tiger for possibly some time, days, months, years? Had the constant spectacle of tourists and their loud behavior chafed against the animal’s sensibility? Animal intelligence--feline intelligence in particular--was a mystery. No less a figure than Michel de Montaigne was sure of a keen intelligence among cats.

The zoo was not on their itinerary, but the tragedy that had so freshly occurred seemed to have colored or imbued Alfred’s perception of the city, which had only just celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love a few months ago. Each time he saw someone go by talking on a cell phone with a look of vacant self-satisfaction, or heard the tinny, abrasive singing from a Disney store pour into the street from a loudspeaker, he bristled. Did he and the tiger share a similar rage? A rage against what? Loudness, vulgarity, boorishness? This, of course, was silly. How could a tiger pacing back and forth all day in a zoo grotto have a sense of a fallen world? Was indignation within the purview of a tiger?

Before boarding their plane, Alfred had spent a few minutes browsing a bookstore at the airport. It was there that he had come upon Yann Martel’s book Life of Pi. He was tempted to buy it, but he was already immersed in a novel by Claude Simon called, simply, Histoire. He liked this book for its exquisite details, although he didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. The book was all details. There were characters, but the external features of the characters had not yet been described. So far it was a world of hyper-detail, but a world in which no one’s actions or motivations had yet become plain or intelligible. Which Alfred liked. It was writing about writing rather than plot or character development. He enjoyed its stream-of-consciousness dissonances and absorptions, its churn of energetic associations, its agility and focus. There was nothing tame or predictable in it. The writing was unrestricted. Immoderate and wild. Which is not to say the writing was undisciplined. Quite the contrary. It was as vigilant and alert as any animal on the hunt. This was the way writing had to be if it hoped in any way to say the unsayable.

It interested Alfred to see what books were selling. It was comforting to think that enough people still read and enjoyed books to merit the presence of a bookstore at an airport. Each time he entered a Starbucks or Tullys he died a little inside to see everyone sitting at their table gazing into the pixels of a laptop computer. People seemed to know more and more about less and less. This disturbed him. There had once been a time, he thought, in which people like Jean Paul Sartre, Simon de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag made the news. Now it was people like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. It takes critical thinking to keep a democracy together. No wonder the country had a dunce for president.

Alfred and Linda got checked into their hotel and took the elevator to their room. It was a small but tastefully appointed room with pictures of ferns whose fronds had been gracefully rendered, a spacious closet with a courtesy umbrella, and little bottles of soap and lotion in the bathroom.

They had requested a quiet room and the hotel had complied by putting them on the topmost 15TH floor. At home, they were frequently awakened by their neighbors who stomped around in the kitchen sometimes as late as three in the morning. The couple, still in their twenties, liked to go out partying. For reasons that utterly baffled Alfred, the couple would return home at one or two in the morning, slam the front door, stomp up the hallways steps, and head straight for their kitchen, which was directly over his and Linda’s bedroom. Thump, thump, thump. Bang, crash, bang.

Why the kitchen? What is so enticing about a kitchen when one comes home from a party, ostensibly drunk or stoned? Wouldn’t bed be a more attractive destination? Alfred had spoken to them directly about this problem, explaining that the floor was so hollow that he and Linda could hear their microwave ding, but when they continued to make their usual noise Alfred had resorted to using a broom, whacking the ceiling hard enough to leave dents. This did no good either. The symphony continued: Thump, thump, thump. Bang, crash, bang. Their stay at the hotel would be a welcome relief.

But shortly after midnight he and Linda were awaken by loud voices. Someone was partying in the room next to theirs.

Alfred got out of bed.

'What are you going to do?' Linda asked.

'I don’t know,' said Alfred.

'Well I wish you’d stop pacing,' said Linda. 'You’re making me nervous. You look like some animal in a cage.'

Alfred dug some ear plugs out of their bag. He gave two to Linda, and stuck two in his ears. He felt the sounds diminish as the cotton wadding expanded in his ears. A boy, a cat, a lifeboat, the phrase returned. The lapping of water, the slop of the silly sea, and a tiger curled up for warmth at the far end of an inflatable raft.

-----
John Olson is the author of The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on the Cat, Oxbow Kazoo, Free Stream Velocity, Echo Regime, Logo Lagoon, and Eggs & Mirrors. Backscatter, a collection of new and selected work, is just out from Black Widow Press. His work (essays, articles, stories, prose poems, and verbal aquariums) have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including American Letters & Commentary, New American Writing, First Intensity, Talisman, Bewildering Stories, The Raven Chronicles, and The Absinthe Literary Review). He lives in Seattle with his wife (and poet) Roberta Olson and their cat Toby.

A Boy, a Cat, and LifeBoat by Brandon Scott Gorrell

2008-01-16T21:22:00.000-08:00

"Can I tell you where you will predict me," the boy said. "You will be right probably."

"Do you know where we are?" said the cat.

"What does it matter?" the boy said.

A wave happened, and the boy fell into the cat's chest. The boy rested there, in the cat's chest, inhaling the smell: a tiger, something alive, something affecting him, a little.

The boy was nothing and all things and the lifeboat existed in an array of situations which the boy had both processed and would eventually be willing to process. The cat sat beside him, analyzing.

"That wave there," the cat said. "Its crest seems different. Is there brown on that crest? What does that crest mean? What about the wave? Does that matter? What is the relationship between the crest and the wave?"

"Yes, there is brown on that crest," the boy said.

The lifeboat shifted to a new wave.

"All crests seem the same," the boy said. "I'm not sure."

"What's going to happen," the cat said.

The boy looked at the cat and at the waves and at the crests. The lifeboat swayed and rocked, and the boy could think of nothing beyond his immediate situation. The cat couldn't, either. The boy and the cat and the lifeboat drifted.

Over mountains underneath water. Above a constantly shifting gradient. On a never ending moving walkway.

"Everything's certain," the boy said.

"Everything's certain," the cat echoed.

The lifeboat waited for something to happen.

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Brandon Scott Gorrell lives and works in Seattle as a freelance writer. His work can be found or is forthcoming at Pindeldyboz, elimae, 3:AM, Lamination Colony, Dogmatika, NANO Fiction, and other places. His first poetry book, during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present, is forthcoming from Muumuu House. He blogs here.

Tiger in a Lifeboat™ by Matt Briggs

2008-01-01T10:51:00.000-08:00

The main problem was that the tiger would either eat the child in the first half-hour of the show, or the tiger would act like a big house cat until it starved to death. The desired effect of the show was that the cat would behave like a house cat with the inevitable, intended promise that it would eventually, freak out and eat the boy. The boy through cunning and guile had to survive -- not that the boy would survive because he had bonded with the cat. This was the problem they had uncovered after going through several hundred test boys -- that is boys without any clear identifying information that they had bought from the homes on the streets of LA. Four hundred bucks could buy a functional seven-year or eight-year old. They preferred English speakers, but many of the boys spoke Spanish. One boy spoke a haunted babble they could not identify but thought might be Linear Pict X. Thirty of the boys died within minutes of getting launched in the test lot with the tiger.
They tested five tigers -- and this became a problem, too, because the tigers that learned to kill continued to kill (and got better at executing the boys) and so the producers learned that once a tiger did the kill, it would keep killing. And this became part of their thought process in putting the boys in the boat with the tiger. They would have to have a supply of tigers, as well.

Of course, all of the boys had to die because no one could know how they had perfected the show. It had a lot of problems, this show. It was a delicate balance to get it to work.

Yann Martel had to be contacted and he threatened to sue if they went ahead with the show. The public domain idea, he said, was a boy and a wild cat. A boy and a tiger in a lifeboat, I have that copyrighted. If you do this, my lawyers will contact you. So they paid him a half-million dollars for the rights and threatened to say they would call it “Yann Martel’s Tiger in a Lifeboat,” playing both to his ego (like anyone even knew who this guy was) and his pretension, what kind of literary guy was he if he’d originated a reality cable show?

Reality was played out anyway. This was a latch ditch effort to get some interest behind the show. Early one morning in a warehouse in Burbank, they launched the boy and the tiger in the lifeboat, and waited.

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Originally posted at Semantikon (along with an MP3). A version with music provided by Christopher Chaplin was posted at MacJams.

Introducing A Boy, a Cat, and a LifeBoat

2008-01-01T10:07:00.000-08:00

This blog is a series of short stories based on the public domain idea of a boy, a wild cat, and a boy stuck in a lifeboat. The idea became an international open source idea when the Canadian Yann Martel retold a story by Brizilian writer Moacyr Scliar as The Life of Pi. Martel hadn’t even read Scliar's work. However he had read a review in the The New York Times Book Review that Martel mysteriously attributed to John Upike. (Updike for his part, does not recall having written this review.)

In turn this blog is a sequence of stories based simply on the idea of: a boy, a wild cat, a lifeboat. Just as Martel didn’t read Scliar, I am not suggesting that anyone read Martel. The open source idea is: a boy, a wild cat, a lifeboat.

If you are interested in contributing a story concerning a boy, a wild cat (such as a tiger), and a lifeboat in any style or form that pleases you, it be my pleasure to receive this story at matt(dot)briggs(at)gmail so that I can post it here.

My own story, a Boy, a Cat, and LifeBoat will be released in a collection of stories called The End is the Beginning on April 16th, 2007 by Final State Press.