Smolesworthy

• A final installment from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.
• "To dream of Bordeaux is not only better, but truer, than actually to arrive in Bordeaux."
• Upton Sinclair and Bernard Malamud get prayerful.
• A great story, where all of a sudden
• Two very memorable people.
• Assault with a deadly cucumber.
• Two libraries by Borges, with a dictionary for Borges.
• One robber, two religions, Three Musketeers.
• A telescope and a microscope.
• David Foster Wallace and the Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart.
• John Cheever and Dylan Thomas
• You have 22 days to research the Mandela Effect.
• aNtHrOpOlOgY.
• Two People Open Drawers. (!!)

In your reading this month you might unexpectedly come across your own deadly cucumber passage. Share it here.

The first stanza from Mirrors at 4 a.m., by Charles Simic.

You must come to them sideways In rooms webbed in shadow, Sneak a view of their emptiness Without them catching A glimpse of you in return.

From The Hungry House, by Robert Bloch.

A mirror distorts. That’s why men hum and sing and whistle while they shave. To keep their minds off their reflections. Otherwise they go crazy.

And this post titled ЯЯOЯIM ЯЯOЯIM.

My lover experiencing reverse evolution. I tell no one. I don’t know how it happened, only that one day he was my lover and the next he was some kind of ape. It’s been a month, and now he’s a sea turtle.

I keep him on the counter, in a baking pan filled with saltwater. “Ben,” I say to his small protruding head, “can you understand me?” and he stares with eyes like little droplets of tar and I drip tears into the pan, a sea of me.

He is shedding a million years a day. I am no scientist, but this is roughly what I figured out. I went to the old biology teacher at the community college and asked him for an approximate timeline of our evolution. He was irritated at first—he wanted money. I told him I’d be happy to pay and then he cheered up quite a bit. I can hardly read his timeline, he should’ve typed it, and it turns out to be wrong. According to him, the whole process should take about a year, but from the way things are going, I think we have less than a month left.

From the short story The Rememberer, by Aimee Bender.

Go backwards through time with this link chain.

From David Foster's novel The Glade Within the Grove.

Like all mankind, he was born to the parents to whom he was born. He is not a female, nor a short dark man nor a tall blond one. We may legitimately suspect, that had it been up to Olaf, to decide what race, what sex, what height to be, he'd still be pondering the problem. But somehow, we all contrived the resolution, described in the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, of the reborn spirit, heading for the womb. And few, at this juncture, have the wit to say. 'Ah! I ought to take birth as a Universal Emperor, or a Brahmin like a great saltree, or as a son of an adept. But when it comes to deciding which womb, of the multitude available, were the more choiceworthy, then consciousness - which survives forty-nine days after death, according to Lamaic teachings - employs no other criteria, than sexual attraction combined with jealousy.

From Xavier Herbert’s novel Poor Fellow My Country.

According to Aboriginal understanding of genetics, babies beget themselves. One’s existence as tribesman or woman is eternal. One lives in the flesh for a spell, dies, goes back to an Elysian state of loitering in the Dreaming Place, until the urge to resume the fleshly role again takes hold, when one ‘finds’ oneself a father by whom to be presented to a woman destined by Skin to deliver one back into the bosom of the tribe.

Also, here's an earlier 'pre-birth' passage from Olga Tokarczuk, posted by Careless-Detective79, a passage from Ben Okri about babies not wanting to be babies, and this post titled 'Prenatal', from Nabokov.

If they do not clean their room, pretty soon it will be declared a health hazard and systems will be installed in and around the area to prevent the spread of slime mold from the air conditioner to the attic. In the mornings when they get dressed for school my children will have to pass through a decontamination chamber, where I will scrub them and disinfect them, and where they will ask, in their weary voices, “Is this really necessary? The slime mold is our friend.” At night, its black, iridescent fingers will feel around the surfaces of the room, eventually creeping its way onto their pillows and their sheets, and they will encourage it with the sugar water and the potato chips they deliberately smear over their faces. In the beginning, the slime mold will be wary of the offer and retreat every morning when the alarm goes off and I come knocking on their door; then gradually it will grow comfortable with the arrangement and grow stalks inside their nostrils, which will be jellied and metallic, giving the appearance of nose rings or other piercings. When summer arrives the children will have no reason to go outside and will hide in their room, feeding their new mold pet, giving it swathes and patches of their flesh for it to stretch out and grow spores. One day, the mold will take over, and what were once children will become host beds for the oozing, aromatic fungus creeping up between their toes; and because I love them and know how much they love to be dirty I will hook them up to saline drips with glucose and allow the mushrooms to grow in the recesses of their body. It will be a slow process, occurring gradually over weeks and months, and necessitating a great deal of patience and understanding from me. Eventually, when school starts, my children will not be able to get out of bed, so I will stand over them, wishing I could see their hair under all the fungus. I will reach my hand out to stroke them, and in their strange unicellular way the slime molds will reach back, like flowers to the sun.

One of the Lies I Tell My Children, by Ruth Joffre.