Free If All Else Fails by Craig Strete Page A

who
watched the deer. He had dreamed his second wife in his dreams. He had dreamed that. But she had
been real. She had come when emptiness and bitterness had possessed him. When the feathers of his
youth had been torn from his wings. She filled him again with bright pieces of dreams. And for
him, in that second half of his life, far from his son and that first one, he began again.
Flying. No­ticing the world. His eyes saw the green things, his lips tasted the sweet things and
his old age was warm.
    It was all bright
and fast and moving, that second life of his and they were childless and godless and were
themselves children and gods instead. And they grew old in their bod­ies, but death seemed more
like an old friend than an inter­ruption. It was sleep. One night the fever took her.
Peace­fully. Took her while she slept and he neither wept nor followed. For she had made him
young again and the young do not understand death.
     
    "Ill help you put
it on the stretcher."
    They opened the
door.
     
    And the old man
watched the boy and did not understand death. And the young boy watched the deer and understood
beauty. And the deer was watched by all and the Great Being above. And the boy saw the deer for
what she was. And like her, he became great and golden and quick. And the old man began dreaming
that-
     
    Frank Strong Bull's
hand, his son's hand, closed on his shoulder and shook him, none too gently.
     
    They opened the
door. The body was gone.
     
    The last time it
was seen, the body was chasing a deer that pushed its beauty through the world, disappearing from
an old man's sight into the depths of the forest.
     

Where They Put The Staples And Why She Laughed
    Peter Renoir makes
an entrance into her apartment. He is impelled by a desire to rebuild a dream in which he can
lose himself. It is a conviction indisputably expressed in his choice of a tie. His tie is as
broad as the Mississippi delta. It glows in the dark. It is invisible.
    Semina was
spread-eagled on a quilt in the center of the living room. She has just returned from a canceled
engage­ment at a beauty parlor and is suffering the consequent withdrawal symptoms.
    She opens her eyes
as he enters and says, "You can achieve enlightenment only by following through to the end an
ob­session that has its source in a spiritual sickness."
    The scene shifts
subtly and we can see that Peter Renoir is now spread-eagled on the quilt and it is Semina who is
making her entrance into the living room.
    She circles the
centerfolded man cautiously. She thinks she knows the truth and thus has more of an opportunity
to face that amount of it, traditionally denied her. Self-awareness has occurred to her. With
startling abruptness, she has become a factor in Peter Renoir's world. Peter Re­noir is stunned
and experiences a flashback.
    He is deeply in
love with a girl named Norma Jean, but while still in love with her, he realizes that he himself
is Norma Jean or rather that Norma Jean
is potentially within him. He is fourteen years old and his voice is changing.
    An old man in a
park terrifies him. The old man repre­sents the pitiful inadequacy of human illumination to
com­bat the all-encompassing metaphysical darkness of the world. The old man sat in the park
waiting for little boys who looked exactly like Peter Renoir to come along. The old man had
escaped from a circus. The old man broke light bulbs between his teeth and did not laugh as he
chewed the broken glass and swallowed it. This was the old man's spe­cialty.
    Peter ran through
the park, late for his violin lesson and he saw the old man. The old man made him sit down on the
bench beside him. The shadow cast by the old man covered the boy's face, at one point almost
obliterating him.
    The old man talks
very pleasantly and entices the boy to tell him about his dreams. As the boy begins to talk, his
voice cracks. The old man laughs. And it is then that the old man