Crocodile Words

by Dex Quire (April 2011)

Living in Sunbreak City life seemed to be getting better by the month. Joffrey had been here since last summer. Every month he seemed to make more friends and they seemed to be interesting friends. It was now mid-winter.

Best of all, he was living in Sunbreak City.

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Joffrey sat at his desk in his room at Dayfresh House and wrote out the following letter in longhand:

To: Snowden Branch, President of Sunbreak City University and my fellow students of the same:

Again, I sincerely apologize.

The Barney Frank Koran:

SunbreakCity UniversityDaily. God, what was the circulation? 25,000? 30,000? The readers would glance at Joffrey Simpson O’Day’s Barney Frank Koran or Valley Girl Koran and they would laugh. Would they notice the famous writing professor’s name across the literary insert? That it was her class? Sponsored by the Theodore Roethke Writer’s House? Would they laugh and then look around themselves furtively? Ease the insert back into the Daily? The Pig Latin Koran indeed, The Pornolized Koran indeed.

Hers.

Barney Frank Koran to spite me? Who knows? Who cares? The emphatic lines and planes of his face appeared to her mind. The dark eyebrows. Savage! something shouted inside her. She remembered his brash self-introduction that first night of class. My name is Joffrey Simpson O’Day! He made the famous writing professor laugh. The other students, five others, laughed too. Standing in front of the class, bobbing with good cheer, Joffrey himself laughed. Why not? He didn’t seem like a malevolent jerk at the time. If anything, he came off as Class Star. He sheathed a daring chipped-tooth smile, like a concealed weapon, inside long, parted, black, shoulder-length Indian (make that Native American) hair; he was tall with muscle-bumped arms and (presumably) a wedge torso, nicely chiseled and filed. He damn near ungayed me she remembered joking to her lover arriving home that night after class.

O God, how things change.

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This president had smiled the university into millions of government money and grants. He had smiled the medical school into a major research center for cancer research. He had smiled the computer science school into prominence, smiled the schools of mathematics and engineering to join in some kind of famous venture. He had smiled his way onto the board of directors of a half-dozen northwest companies tipping his yearly income into the seven figures.

Go Huskies! The only other hanging thing was a splintery-looking dream catcher. Probably a gift from the United Tribes. The famous writing professor fastened her soul upon it, perhaps foolishly, perhaps not. It was the one hospitable, human-crafted thing that would sympathize with her lust to survive.

Suite Bergamasque upon his invisible piano. Branch was an audiophile. You could detect the wood of the instrument. The toy train. Stereo gear, this powerful man's toy train.

The famous dimple was so clean. It now spoke:

The president and the professor looked at each other.

The famous writing professor nodded.

President Branch stood up and walked to the window behind his desk. The professor understood that the conversation would now dive to a deeper level. The president needed to declaim, to defend his school. Snowden Branch fingered the chubby leaves of a jade plant. He dusted the leaves with his thumb and forefinger while he spoke:

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st century black American man would have traveled through the criminal justice troughs and eaten the extreme slops. Traversed academia or local politics and into business—-another set of slops but, again, an extreme range of exposure to everything American, its sexual extremities and crannies and multiple personality disorders; all that would have been tasted by American black man.

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they could do worse than receive the oversight of a seasoned and prestigious senior professor. Great. It came to her unbidden that when a fan wrote Walt Whitman asking why he hadn’t made a visit to Washington territories Whitman wrote back teasing and said why would anyone want to visit a place where you can’t pronounce any of the names. The world-famous writing professor would be a kind of higher-ed missionary then, bringing the enlightenment of freshman composition to the natives in the unpronounceable boondocks. And when visitors came to the main campus from Dubai or Saudi Arabia she would be, conveniently, nowhere in sight.

The Valley Girl Koran:

The Barney Frank Koran, The Pig Latin Koran, the Adult Koran. Why did he have to write up four versions?

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Dex Quire is a Seattle writer and posts at dexquire.com.

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