CPSC Notices 5/27/10

Cost Plus Inc. Recalls Tea Glasses Due to Risk of Lead Exposure – The Moroccan tea glasses contain excessive levels of lead in the exterior coloring. Lead is toxic if ingested by young children and can cause adverse health effects. No injuries reported.

Buckyballs® High Powered Magnets Sets Recalled by Maxfield and Oberton Due to Violation of Federal Toy Standard – The high powered magnets sets were labeled “Ages 13+” and do not meet the mandatory toy standard F963-08 (effective August 17, 2009) which requires that such powerful magnets are not sold for children under 14. Magnets found by young children can be swallowed or aspirated. If more than one magnet is swallowed, the magnets can attract each other and cause intestinal perforations or blockages, which can be fatal. The firm has received two reports of children swallowing one or more magnets. No injuries were reported.

Micro-fiction 5/27/10

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
I held the tea cup in my hand. The light stroked over its china curves, it’s thin handle. I wouldn’t let anyone to touch it. Only the light.
“Should you really be holding it?”
I looked at him. He would ruin this moment.
“Just a few more minutes can’t hurt.”
“But it’s been ten minutes now. And days previous.”
“A few minutes more won’t kill me.”
“Your exposure is already intense at best. We need to run tests. We have to extract some of your bone marrow as soon as you destroy that thing. With the output of that thing, you’re brain might already be microwaved leftovers.”
“Don’t call it, ‘that thing’.”
I held it up once more, and smiled, as the reflected sunlight beamed off its yellow paint, the intricate details of the design.”
“It is beautiful, isn’t it?”
He sighed. “Yes, it is beautiful.”
I let the tea cup rest lightly in the palm of my hand, and thought of its beauty. I pushed the vision I absorbed from the cup, back out of my mind, up my arms, and into my fingers, where the force of its weight drawn by gravity pressed into my skin. I concentrated, briefly. I pushed back. The tea cup rose out of my hand, a few inches into the air, and spun slowly on an invisible axis in the morning sunlight.

For information about this series, please see the introductory post.

Alright guys, I don’t ask you for much.

What am I talking about? I ask you guys to listen to my rants all the time. It’s ME that owes YOU. But I’m asking anyway. I’m cashing in on all of those Internet friendships.

You may remember my little tube project? Crazy tubes? Fish-eye pics? Ramblings about the super-ego?

Well, now we’re pushing it to the next level.

This little installation, above? 500 tubes. Now we have a former department store turned art space in Salem that is going to let us put in 5000 tubes.

This is the new project.

The main expense, by far, is the tubes. We’ve got a Kickstarter to help out, and we need $650. Not too bad, to get a room filled with tubes, right? Right.

There are also some pretty wicked rewards. Some of them, may or may not be filled with candy.

So I think you should help. I think your friends should help. I think you’re follower list, your friends feed, and your AIM buddy list should help. All we need are some micro-payments, and our tubes could be your reality.

So thanks in advance. And if you are too lazy to click on the link to the project page, let me re-create our proposal for you here.

The tubes are:

Anti-:
Anarchistic Artistic Augmented Autonomous Balanced Chaotic Collective Distributed Echoed Evolving Experiential Independent Individualistic Instant Interpretative Lateral Liberal Ludic Multiplistic Multivocal Networked Rhizomatic Self-governing Shared Specific Spontaneous Unbiased Work.

Pro-:
Anti-Social Authoritarian Binary Bureaucratic Censoring Centralized Controlled Dendric Disgusting Dualistic Incorporated Invasive Libidinal Mobbed Obligatory Ordered Owned Programmed Pollutant Schematic Segmented Shrieking Sorted Stratified Structured Unified Universal Vertical Violent Product.

Our infection will belong to you.

The installation will open June 2, for one month, at
Project Space
150 Liberty Street
Salem, Oregon

Here are the things we need:
Hot glue
fabric
poly-fill
A one-way truck trip
5000 tubes

The Salem Art Association, a non-profit, is giving us $250. With $650, we could cover the rest of the expenses (the tubes are by far the biggest expense, at $800).

YOU can help. And then the tubes are yours.

Please treat things as you would like them to be treated.

CPSC Notices 5/25/10

Cummins Power Generation Recalls Portable Generators Due to Fire Hazard – Fuel can leak through the carburetor during normal usage, posing a fire hazard to consumers. The firm has received 25 reports of fuel leakage. No injuries or property damage have been reported.

Chairs Recalled by Brunswick Bowling & Billiards Corporation Due to Fall Hazard – The chair frame can separate from the seating section of the chair, posing a fall hazard to consumers. Brunswick has received one report of frame separation. No injuries have been reported.

Micro-fiction 5/25/10

I smell gasoline.
It’s just smells volatile, you know? Like heat, not yet exploded into flame. Like something you’ve turned your back on, that is falling, but you haven’t heard it because it hasn’t hit the ground.
Smells like potential.
People think they like the smell of gasoline. Don’t know what they like about it. Smells sweet, maybe.
They’re not the kind to light fires, though.
You have to love flame for the way it eats, the way it grows, the way the light gets bigger, faster, and hotter, no matter what you do.
I don’t set fires.
I just sit in my chair, and I notice things. The way people pass by, the way they speak without caring who hears them. Sounds stupid. Like ignorance, like insolence, like inelegance. Like whatever you try to do is failing, no matter what you do, but it’s other people, all around you.
Not that I care.
And so I just notice them.
Still smells like gasoline.
I wonder where it’s coming from.

For information about this series, please see the introductory post.

CPSC Notices 5/21/10

Chocolate Soup Recalls Children’s Hooded Sweatshirt Sets with Drawstrings Due to Strangulation Hazard – The sweatshirts have a drawstring through the hood that can pose a strangulation hazard to children. In February 1996, CPSC issued guidelines (pdf) (which were incorporated into an industry voluntary standard in 1997) to help prevent children from strangling or getting entangled on the neck and waist drawstrings in upper garments, such as jackets and sweatshirts. No injuries reported.

HP Expands Recall of Notebook Computer Batteries Due to Fire Hazard – The recalled lithium-ion batteries can overheat, posing a fire and burn hazard to consumers. Since the May 2009 recall, HP has received 38 additional reports of batteries that overheated and ruptured resulting in 11 instances of minor personal injury and 31 instances of minor property damage.

Micro-fiction 5/21/10

Your chances of exploding are roughly one in fifteen-hundred.
Used to be far worse.
And one in fifteen-hundred? Yeah, it could be you that bursts into chemical flame while downloading data to your hoodie. But the vast majority of people will enjoy the fabric net, and will live their entire lives comfortably in their e-clothes, until the day they’re hit by a bus, die of radiation exposure, or one of the other hundred ways to catch it in this day and age.
We need electricity. The info-blankets in which we shield our naked flesh require energy. Better lithium-ion covering your skin than fissile material, or soaking yourself in gasoline. Chance could be one in a hundred–could be one in ten. They’d still line up outside my shack for a battery swap, and then go off down the street, connected into the network, as they must be. As their employers must. As their friends must. As their sexual partners must.
Without these batteries pressing against their flesh, they would not be human beings. They would be monkeys with sticks. Neanderthals covered in hair. Peasants digging in the mud. Don’t believe me? Look it up. Check out the pictures. See? Explosive-free living is as about as fun as dysentery. I said, look it up. It’s all there.
You know what, kid? I’m busy. You don’t want it, live your life trailing a plug behind you. Standing against the wall. I’ve got customers here. I’ll have another thousand and five-hundred by 3PM.

For information about this series, please see the introductory post.

CPSC Notices 5/20/2010

Walmart Recalls General Electric® Coffee Makers Due to Fire Hazard – The coffee maker can overheat, posing fire and burn hazards to consumers. Walmart has received 83 reports of overheating, smoking, melting, burning and fire, including three reports of minor burn injuries to consumer’s hands, feet and torso. Reports of property damage include a significant kitchen fire and damage to countertops, cabinets and a wall.

Target Recalls Storage Trunks Due to Strangulation Hazard – The lid of the trunk can drop suddenly when released, posing a strangulation hazard to small children opening or reaching into the trunks. CPSC has received two reports of injuries that occurred when the storage trunks’ lids suddenly closed on children, including one report of an 18-month-old girl who reportedly suffered brain damage when the trunk’s lid came down on the back of her neck and pinned her throat against the rim of the trunk.

Micro-fiction 5/20/2010

He made the coffee. He always does. He’s so attuned to the vibrations coming through the grinder that he can feel the precise moment when the beans whirring through the blade are the optimal size, when the particulate matter is in the exact concentration of fragment, grains, and dust to best percolate through the filter. Something like that.
He poured the water into the reservoir, pushed the button, black on stainless steel. Then we sat at the kitchen table and didn’t look at each other. We looked at the wicker trunk, under the window, the rays of sunlight highlighting the dark gaps between the weave.
“I’m sorry,” I finally said. He didn’t say anything. The coffee pot clicked, and gurgled. He never says anything. This is my vibration.
“We never should have opened it. We knew, and we did it anyway.”
He folded his hands on the table and sighed, but imperceptibly, so I wouldn’t see.
“I’ll get rid of the trunk. It’s all we can do now. It’ll be gone by the time you come home.”
The coffee was finished. He stood up, and reached for the mugs.
“I never would have thought… inside there…” I started, but couldn’t finish.
He handed me a cup. “Be careful. It’s hot,” he told me.
We both sat quietly, watching the steam rise in the morning sun.

(I’m resisting the urge to provide commentary on these, to explain my motivations for the fiction based on the CPSC notices. The urge is made more intense by the fact that often there are real deaths, injuries, and damage associated with the recalls. I feel I need to phrase the fiction as a response to this distruction, to ensure my literary action is adequate. But of course, this violates the principle of micro-fiction, skirting the “rules”, as it were. Anyway, this “need to speak as action” dynamic was in my mind when I wrote this one, and perhaps that says it better than anything.)

For information about this series, please see the introductory post.

CPSC Notices 5/17/10

Mall of America Recalls Plush Toy Due to Choking Hazard – Young children can remove and ingest the squirrel’s nose, which poses a choking hazard. No injuries reported.

Children’s Deaths Prompt Recall of Toy Dart Gun Sets Sold Exclusively at Family Dollar Stores – If a child places the soft, pliable plastic toy dart in his/her mouth, the toy can be inhaled into the throat and prevent the child from breathing. CPSC and Family Dollar have received reports of two asphyxiation deaths involving a 9-year-old boy in Chicago, Ill. and a 10-year-old boy in Milwaukee, Wis.

Micro-fiction 5/17/10

“It’s no crime,” she said, first time she kissed me.
First time we stuck up that man on the avenue for cash, it was.
Don’t matter where it starts, matters where it goes.
Where we were now, I don’t know, but I’m not letting her hold me back from where I’m going.
“No more of that Dollar Store shit,” I speak to her purple top, cinched tight in the middle how she wore it, always trying to change my mind. “I’m gonna knock off the Mall of America.”
“I know,” Susan looks at her bare feet. “And that’s why I called the cops. You won’t make it. They’ll kill you.”
I raise my Gordy Auto Fire 238, and pull back to cycle the first of eight bright red shells into the chamber.
She has a single tear running down the scar across her nose. “Sarah, I love you,” she whispers.
“Love is a crime, ” I say.

(The first actual injuries we’ve covered in this series, and two deaths to boot. Two deaths from a toy gun deserve some memorializing hard-boiled micro-fiction. Yes? No? What’s appropriate? More toy guns?)

For information about this series, please see the introductory post.

I could not tell you what he was thinking when he reached to pull the pear from the tree branch. He stood and reached upward with a certain slowness, suggesting to me that there was something on this man’s mind keeping him from moving through the particular task with typical deft finger work innate to our species. He was not picking fruit, but picking this particular pear, and I’m think of the word for it, but I cannot find it in the mazes of my mind. He stood still with feet planted in the sparse grass beneath the tree while a little sunlight filtered through, holding the pear in his fingers, rubbing the pads slowly over the bruised and blemished skin of a typical piece of produce from a suburban fruit tree growing in a man’s front yard. He must have been studying this fruit, but I believe he was no connoisseur of such growing things; rather, his reflection was of something else weighing heavily on his mind, metaphorically dragging him down, you understand, like the laden boughs of the pear tree bending low towards the sweet rotting flesh surrounding on the grass and sidewalk, late summer as it was.

It was held before him in hand at face height, much as I hold him before you now, spinning it round in the fingers, showing it off to himself. But for this man, this fellow with loose, white skin suiting flopping in the space between his fingers, he was considering something I imagine to be particular, and certainly something unrelated. He couldn’t have ignored the fruit, and its earthen smell, and the bounce of the tree limb as it rebounded from the release of the tension as he plucked the pear, and the sweet alcoholic rot on the ground around him, and the hot air, and his summer suit, and his neighbors around in the yards, and his nakedness under his clothes, but all the same, there was something unspoken and unavoidable in his life.

Just then, a small girl child with a tricycle rode along the sidewalk steering her front wheel through the squished pears, swarming with ants and with flies and with bees, and she stopped by the man, looking up at him. I am not sure, but I would be willing to say that he did not see her at all. He kept looking at the piece of fruit as he brought it close to his face, closer and closer to his cheek. His eyes locked on it, finally, it and only it, and as the flesh touched his clean-shaven face he bore down hard upon the small yellow lump, squishing mashed, sweet, fruit all over his face, quite ripe as it certainly was. And the juice ran down his neck and darkened the white collar of his shirt and the white label of his suit, and his elbow pivoted as he smashed the pear all over the one side of his face, closing his eyes now, pushing back against it.

* * * * *

He had brought the bag and showed it to her guiltily from behind his back. She brightened and smiled, pulling him into the house and closing the door. He asked her if she wanted to right now, and she screamed yes of course with the excitement of a school girl, and she ran into the bedroom, with him chasing after. She had removed her shirt and bra already by the time he entered, and threw herself back upon the bed wearing only her skirt. He opened the bag and poured the plums over her, bouncing and cascading down onto her legs and chest and neck, and she laughed as she held up her arms because even though they were small plums, they still hurt a little when they impacted her body.

The shirt and his pants still covering his body were coming off, when I assume her more reasonable thoughts overcame her excitement for a moment, and she pulled the comforter and blanket off the bed, raising it like a tarp to roll the plums onto the white sheet covering the mattress. The bed was now naked and he was naked and so was she, their bare flesh remarkably similar in coloring for a trio in this day and age, and she lay back down while he held two pieces of fruit in his hands and pushed them together, only instead of rebounding as they did off of her they combined, and the clear juice flowed out like water with only a slight tint of redness, falling onto her breasts and her hips and her thighs and neck. She gasped at the sensation, and he took her into his eyes, no doubt glad he had paid extra money for the fruit even though they were out of season and shipped at cost from a warmer location with more annual precipitation. He bent over her, and began to kiss and lick the sweet liquid from her skin, while she encouraged him in all sorts of ways, which I do not really know about, but of course which I can readily imagine, as well you might.

I think it was probably another twenty or thirty minutes later, when the mashed fruit was everywhere, on their skin, in their mouths, and also on other orifices specific to sexual pleasure, when he finally entered her, amid torn purple skin, and warmed, soft, sweet pulp, and of course, running drips of juice staining through the sheets to the mattress. Around three pits in her mouth she was sucking greedily, and between his kisses and all the other noises, she giggled and said to him that she was so glad that he had brought the plums, it was even better than she had imagined. And she said she had suggested this strange fantasy to her last lover, and he had called her strange. The lover above her now laughed out loud and from his mouth loudly dripped a few drops of juice onto her forehead. What was the matter with him, he asked. Well, he’s gone and missing out on all these delicious plums now, he said. I’m willing to believe he continued his motions forcefully, with a renewed interest in making it the best she had ever had before, to try as hard as he could to effect this, if he was able to manage it.

* * * * *

It was cloudy and it had not begun to rain yet, but the desire of the clouds to do so was reflected in most people’s moods. They were walking down the street, a few blocks from the main drag with the shops, and I could tell at some distance what sort of kids they were. The tight and ill-fitting clothes, the shape of the hair and the colors as well, the bright, shiny sneakers bought from a mall or a mail-order catalog showed them to be the resident representatives of the current black-clad counter-culture, and they walked befitting their station of course, all over the sidewalk and into the street, naturally in a number no less than five, which is enough to make them a menace to certain sorts of people. I suppose this is the key to the ideas of such a fashion as that they observed.

There was a way of walking among them that sent them oscillating forward and backward in waves, never walking in pairs or in threes, but always galloping ahead and then falling back, changing order like spinning ropes and gears, and revolving wheels. Their laughter was loud and they swung their bags around them, plastic sacks filled with heavy, dense collections of something, pulling them outward as they spun around, twisting up to their fingers and back down again, smacking into the backs and the legs of each other. The bags held peaches, not very ripe, which I saw when one of the older male members reached into one of the girl’s sacks, and pulled out a peach, and bit into it hard, the unripened crunch visible in his black-clad and thin shoulders.

As they approached a construction site vacant for the day, and because the fruit was clearly not ripe enough for his impatient distaste, he launched it up over his head, sending it up high, high into the dark clouds lowering over us all. Some of the others noticed and watched, but others were too distracted by their own doings, continuing to talk and to chatter and to move all around the sidewalk on their way to wherever they were going with such fruit, or perhaps, I suppose, on their way from wherever from they were came. The fruit arced high, and then came down inside the construction site’s chain link fence, getting further and further away from them as it fell, until it contacted with something deep inside the unfinished building which was not visible to anyone. There was a defiant crash of broken glass or other light masonry, and they all recognized the sound and the guy who had thrown it took off running. They all followed, yelling and cursing and laughing and swinging their sacks full of peaches around them. I don’t know why they were running because nobody of any authority was around. I assume all the bags were all full of peaches, because all of them looked the same.

* * * * *

The man walked in the broadest of strides, taking up a good half of the width of the sidewalk with the alternating march of his giant feet. The feet were shod in white leather loafers, polished and cleaned to a brilliance, reflecting light to the surface of the curb as each landed flat to the cement. I imagined them to be the solid base of his fashion, leading upwards from this foundation to the pale yellow slacks, each hemmed immaculately and just barely skimming the tops of the shoes. Though he was a large man, the trousers fit very well, held just below the rim of his stomach with a narrow brown belt. His shirt was a seasonal patterned affair, blossoming with blooms in yellows and greens, but just shadowed ever so slightly by his white sport coat allowed to hang open in the seasonable warmth of the late morning. Above the layers of broad collars there was a neatly trimmed beard, the shade of which was almost perfectly matched to the belt, I would say. On his wide head was a white trilby, with a yellow and green striped band, as wide as the day. Certainly a way of dressing few practice today, though I would say the man was overwhelmingly normal despite his appearance.

He made a great show of checking his watch a number of times as he made his way along the sidewalk through the center of town, heading to an appointment or at least carefully managing his free and unassigned but no less valuable time in the constrained space of a weekday. But I guessed he had managed it well, because in sighting an unoccupied bench he stopped to partake of its respite, seating himself directly in the middle, leaning back, first widening the gap of his jacket’s lapels around him, then tipping back his hat, next removing a thin cigar from his coat pocket and wetting the end with his wide, red tongue and lighting it, taking a puff or two, and smiling to himself, confirming its quality in his own mind. Time and schedules and the observance of clocks are a strange thing to a great many people, which I don’t conceit to understand. Then, he reached into the outer pocket of his jacket and removed a small, flat package.

The outside was cellophane and he unraveled it, and the next layer was waxed paper, which he unfolded using the tips of his fingers, though his digits were wide and flat like short tongs. Underneath he dexterously parted a sheet of paper towel and revealed four neat slices of pineapple, each cut from the entire fruit, but cored and skinned carefully. Holding the cigar in the far hand out to the side, he used two fingers of the other to loop a slice of pineapple, and then he leaned over the wrappings resting on the bench to his and gobbled it down quickly as if racing against the time it would require to drip juice down his chin and onto his fancy clothes. His massive mouth made little work of these succulent bits of fruit, and before two minutes had passed, if I were to estimate the time, he had consumed the lot. He picked up the paper towel and reversed it to the dry side, wiped the corners of his mouth. Replacing it, he folded up the whole excessively sanitary package, and set it next to him. He took another two slow puffs of the cigar, savoring the sweetness and the bitterness of the tobacco smoke. Then, with a tiny glance of his eye towards the leavings, which he hid from obviousness to have an alibi of forgetfulness if anyone mentioned the trash, though of course none would, he left the wrappings sitting just where it was, and continued down the sidewalk in his large, all-encompassing manner, checking his watch once again, and enjoying more puffs on the cigar.

* * * * *

A little girl on a red tricycle with red hair and red overalls rode down the sidewalk with her handlebars swinging back and forth with the effort of her pedaling, because this is how a small tricycle moves with the pedals attached to the front wheel. The sidewalk was wide and bare, though the concrete rose and fell where the tree roots grew underneath it over the years. She was big enough now to get over the stones herself with some effort, and her parents allowed her to ride as far on the sidewalk as she wanted as long as she stayed out of the street.

She stopped near the far corner of the block where the sidewalk ceased to be, and reached around to the basket on the rear of her seat. There was as small box made of clear plastic, and inside there were ten bright red strawberries given to her by her mother earlier that afternoon. She had loaded them onto her tricycle, thinking it would be fun to play as if she were riding off on a picnic, even if she could only go as far as the corner. I only call it playing, because I’m not sure how a child would really describe it. Somehow, it seems to me that she would think of it more as if she were really going on a picnic, though she would naturally be aware she was only riding to the corner with some strawberries in her basket. She opened the box and fished out a berry, and put it in her mouth, enjoying the nubby skin of the fruit as much as the sweet juice bursting out when she cut it in half between her tiny teeth.

She came to this corner because across the street there were men working on a tree. They had begun early in the day with ladders and handsaws of various sizes, and they had climbed to the top and started removing branches as if they were undressing it. They cut off all the small branches and put them in a shredder. Then they used loud roaring chainsaws to take the biggest branches, and these they also put in the shredder. They were almost done now, and all the branches had been put in the shredder, and only the tiniest twigs that had broken off in the process remained on the ground. As the little girl ate her strawberries she wondered what they would do with the trunk, standing naked in the blue spring sky. Maybe they would chop it down with an ax, like lumberjacks. Maybe they would leave it alone. Maybe they would pull it down with a rope like on TV. She put the box back in her basket and dismounting, turned her tricycle around with her arms, dragging the handlebars slowly in a circle, because the sidewalk was too narrow to turn around without a flat driveway free of parked cars. She rode back down toward her own house. The strawberries were gone except for a little bit of juice around her lips, which as I know very well, always gets on children’s faces when they eat fruit, as if the inside of the mouth extended out to the lips.

CPSC Notices 4/13/10

Children’s Sweatshirts Recalled by Tommy Hilfiger U.S.A. Due to Violation of Federal Flammability Standard – The sweatshirts fail to meet federal flammability standards for wearing apparel, posing a risk of burn hazard to consumers. No injuries reported.

Junk Food Clothing Co. Recalls Children’s Hooded Sweatshirts with Drawstrings Due to Strangulation Hazard – The hooded sweatshirts have a drawstring at the neck which can pose a strangulation hazard to children. In February 1996, CPSC issued guidelines (pdf) (which were incorporated into an industry voluntary standard in 1997) to help prevent children from strangling or getting entangled on the neck and waist drawstrings in upper garments, such as jackets and sweatshirts. No injuries reported.

Microfiction 5/13/10

His shirt was brown, and my shirt was blue. He pulled up his hood and I pulled up mine and I looked and him and he looked at me. He was an inch taller than I was but I weighed fifteen more pounds. He was an evil little sun of a bitch, and I was the only good one left on the earth. He knew he would attack me and I knew he would too, but he knew I would wait for him to move first and I knew he was impatient. He was the last one left to kill, and I was the last one left to do it. He was the devil child, and I was the murderous kid.
He leaped at me with his hands out stretched, I pulled all my chakra into my fists. He got his hands round my neck and my hands went up into his belly. He twisted his fingers into my flesh like screws, and I pounded against him like iron pistons. His flesh sprung alight, and his skin began to blister. My air disappeared, and the world went dark. He choked me, and I burnt him. He was a raging torch of holy flame, his life turned to ash. I was a stretched out Tartarus, falling into blackness. He was consumed, and I consumed myself. Together we died.

For information about this series, please see the introductory post.

CPSC Notices 5/12/10

Rome Snowboards Recalls Bindings Due to Fall Hazard – The snowboard binding’s base plate can break at cold temperatures, posing a fall hazard to snowboarders. The firm has received 14 reports of base plates breaking. No injuries have been reported.

Remote-Controlled Helicopters Recalled by Imagine Nation Books Due to Fire and Burn Hazards – The rechargeable battery inside the helicopters can overheat, igniting the helicopter and posing fire and burn hazards to consumers. The firm has received 49 reports of the helicopters overheating, including six reports of flames coming from the helicopters, and one report of minor property damage. No injuries have been reported.

Microfiction 5/12/10

No one would die today. The small helicopter fell out of the sky, in flames. The controls dropped from my hands, and I did not see them land. I flew into the air, as my broken snowboard bindings caught upon the white blanket of snow. I heard a snap, and felt my feet begin to move separately from each other. The helicopter began to fly erratically, not responding to my commands. I sailed down the hill faster, eyes in the sky, watching the helicopter attain its target. The wind picked up as I took off from behind the tree where I waited. I launched the helicopter on its mission, sailing through the air silently, it’s deadly package hanging below it. I put down the binoculars, knowing it was time. I looked at the men on the trucks, unaware I was stalking them from up the hill. I pulled the binoculars and the controls to the bomb from my white parka, two black objects against a pure white hillside. I would have to follow the bomb down the hill to stay in range. I had been practicing my snowboarding technique for weeks, preparing for this attack. I took a deep breath, and steeled myself for what I was about to do.

(I forgot to mention that the criteria I’m using for the micro-fiction is less than 250 words. If this gets boring, I might decrease it to 99 words, which for me anyway, is much more of a challenge.)

For information about this series, please see the introductory post.

I have a lot of literary balls in the air right now, so it’s time to start committing a few to the Internet, to get them out of the way.

I’ve been thinking a lot about micro-fiction recently. At first I was against the idea of some sort of gimmicky constraint on the fiction-writing process. But then, after I tried writing a bit of micro-fiction, my perspective changed. The process by which one writes micro-fiction is different than simply writing. The space constraint means that each sentence must be packed full of meaning, taking the reader somewhere very purposefully. Adjectives are deleted, as is repetition. Sentence structure is made as minimal as possible, very efficient. You start discovering ways to hack the grammar, to say more with less. What subjects and objects can be dropped completely? When would simply a verb suffice as a sentence on its own?

A thing I always look at, in any sort of literature, is the assemblage of the writing. Sure, you’ve written something enjoyable of a certain length, it’s a novel. But what does this novel attempt to do? Does it have a goal? Why or why not? What goals should writing have, if not just informative depiction, or entertainment? If it is less than a novel, what is it, and why? With micro-fiction, often the goal is a joke or a riddle. You let on only enough information for the reader to discover the “catch” by the time they get to the last line. Hemingway’s “six word story” is one of these (and often the classic example of micro-fiction). The goal of that story is that you “get it”, but only at the very end. The Joke formation is a classic trope-goal of human literature. It is like a vector model of motion: you move in one direction, and then another vector sends you in another direction. You thought you got it, but the punch line makes it mean something different, and NOW you “get it”. There’s nothing wrong with this; except, maybe that it is all do easy to use this as the “goal” when you have only a few words to use.

What else can micro-fiction do? What is worth saying in just a few words?

If you follow my Twitter feed, you might have noticed I have a certain preoccupation with the Consumer Product Safety Commission‘s product recalls. I follow their RSS feed (which is available through the link) with great interest. The interest is macabre–not quite dark, perverted, or Modernist enough to be considered Ballardian, but still there is something quite bizarre about the physical dangers of every day consumer objects. It’s kind of like an infomercial coupled with a death announcement. Sharp blades, hazardous chemicals, high voltages, extreme temperatures, pinch and choke points, and deadly stored inertial energy are around us all day long, but normally sealed within lovely consumer design, like a butler with a pistol. The CPSC does fantastic work. We may think to mock the safety-conscious “nerds” who test every day products for any conceivable danger, but the days of caveat emptor have been replaced by strong protections against the profit-seekers. Most recalls come from these elaborate safety laboratories, protecting us from the danger we need never know. And yet, if you search the CPSC’s public records, you will find that several product recalls a year do not occur without registered deaths and serious injury being attributed to faulty design, materials, and construction.

A consumer device–something so innocuous and common-place–can also be the symbol of any person’s particular death drive. The death we seek out, and pay for, in the form of convenience and good design. Death lurks under all of our desires, the entropy at the end of the joke that is our lives.

Perhaps micro-fiction and consumer-hazard were meant to be together. The short, consumable package, the encased, enclosed, economically-packaged power–and the end result, the final toll, the end of the story. Maybe together, they can find a meaning for each other.

I’m going to write a micro-fiction story inspired by each day’s worth of CPSC recalls, and publish them here (amid my other blog rambling). Not every CPSC recall is interesting, and they may not come out every day. Not every story I write will be interesting, either. But at least they will be short and easily consumable. And in some of them, we may just find the product we’ve been searching for. I’ll continue the experiment until I recall it, or until it’s made obsolete.

CPSC Notices 5/10/12

A) Claire’s Recalls Children’s Metal Charm Bracelets Due to High Levels of Cadmium

B) The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) announced today that the Virginia Graeme Baker Pool and Spa Safety Act’s (P&SSAct) State Grant program is now accepting applications for funding from eligible states. The P&SSAct intends to enhance the safety of pools and spas by reducing child drownings and suction entrapment incidents and educating the public on the importance of safety devices and constant supervision of children in and around water. CPSC is the lead agency in implementing and enforcing the Act, which was signed into law in December 2007.

Micro-fiction 5/10/12

I found the letters, each a different shape, just lines really, all bent together. I drew them for father and he thought they were pretty. “You say they spell words?” I showed him how. He went down into his shop and he got out the metals–he melted and smelted and poured and pounded. Then he asked me again to draw the shapes. I did, and he slowly etched them into metal, one each on the clasps, twenty-two in all, and then fastened them into a band. He slipped it around my wrist. “Now you’ll always have them with you.”
I showed them Europa, and she thought they were neat. We went out by the pool to play while father took a nap. We tossed the bracelet back and forth, so light, so shiny. My letters flew back and forth between us as we sang. I threw them up high, and Europa missed. We could see them sink down below, in the clear water. “I’ll get them for you,” she said quickly, and dove in the water. I saw her go down. But she never came back up. Neither did the letters. I’ve forgotten Europa’s little face. I still remember the letters though.

For information about this series, please see the introductory post.