The OdOr

Of The hOax

Was GOne

Ella Longpre

Monkey Puzz le PressHarr i son, Arkansas

The OdOr

Of The hOax

Was GOne

Copyright © 2013 Ella Longpre

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief excerpts. Printed in the United States of America.

MONKEY PUZZLE PRESS424 N. Spring St.

Harrison, Arkansas 72601www.monkeypuzzlepress.com

ISBN-10: 0-9886077-2-7ISBN-13: 978-0-9886077-2-9

Cover and Interior DesignJordan Antonuci

Excerpts from these poems havepreviously appeared in Summer Stock.

This book is for Dorothy.

Translator’s Notes

I still have the notebook.

I translated its illegible stories into blocks of words. Its word blocks lay down in front of me, closing their eyes.

The notebook contains mostly short stories, but also drawings, shopping lists, math, variations of common misspellings, class notes, journal entries, names, phone numbers, and family trees. There is a page with four different versions of a “Chapter 1” and notes from others who had found the lost notebook before it came to me. Some of the notes came from “wrtiers too!” who jotted down positive reinforcement for the person who originally owned this notebook who will most likely never own it again.

Which brings me to ethics. My boss at the library stood by my desk holding a blue notebook with a dark blue binding that, according to the price tag on the back cover, cost $6.95. It was three-quarters full of someone else’ writing. And when I asked my boss “Is this from the lost and found?” She replied,

“I’ve had it forever and never had any luck tracking down the owner. I thought you would like to have it.”

I thanked her and wrapped it in a manila envelope and took it home.

The first thing I did was search the notebook for a name or address, or a hint of who may have originally owned it. Though the notebook is full of numbers and words, none of them point to a positive identification. Not just of “who,” but “when”—there are no dates in the notebook.

There is one readable phone number and name, in a clean handwriting that sticks out from the dominant writing in the book—someone named Annie. She is the one who is a “wrtier, too!” But Annie no longer answers the extension she left in the notebook.

I set out to transcribe excerpts from the notebook, and distribute them in order to find the original owner and return the notebook. I did not work out the logistics of distribution (should I publish the transcriptions? flier my neighborhood? post them on Craigslist?) before determining her writing indecipherable.

When reading the story on the first few pages I calculated that less than 40% of her words were legible.

Attempts to read a paragraph aloud sounded like this:

Something-something… hm? Me. Something-something me, I what to who? even as we something and… ‘baten?’ yadda yadda comma, something that starts with ‘a’, period.

After the first page, I grew excited by the few words and punctuation marks I could make out. I planned to roughly translate the writing to get a general sense of the subject matter. But even this seemed impossible. For example, in the first story I determined that the narrator mentioned her mother more than once, and that there was a secondary character involved in the action, but even with this I couldn’t decipher the meaning of the story, only the structure of the sentences. A sample sentence:

The [?] [noun] of the [noun] on the [noun] [?] [adjective] of [noun] and [noun], [verb] to anyone who [verbed] to the [adjective] [noun] on the beach, the [noun] were a [collective pronoun? proper noun?] [period].

Continuing to read through the text my brain continued to trip over the piles of signs with no signifiers. It wasn’t long before my brain began to insert meaning and interpretation where there was none to be found. And for words I couldn’t read, I substituted a word that resembled that shape. bath

For example, the same sentence as above but with approximate graphic translations:

The [?] [noun] of the [noun starts with s] on the [noun that looks like patriarchy] [?] [bounce] of [trees and grass?], [protruding] to anyone who [called] to the [silky] [mound] on the beach, the [lawn] were a [happy family].

=

I continued through the nonsense to substitute graphic approximations. When I had constructed the phrase, “a pot of boiling water in milk hands,” I grabbed a Post-It to scribble it down and stuck it on the page over the illegible words.

In a few days, I opened a second pack of Post-Its.

Gradually, the innards of the notebook became speckled with the incision marks of skinny yellow Post-Its and, worried about losing them to a strong wind or humidity-induced loss of adhesion, I began typing them out to maintain the integrity of their placement on the page. The blank spaces on my computer screen indicated words I had omitted. Both the words from the original text that were legible and the phrases from the Post-Its I thought were too nonsensical to transcribe. It occurred to me that I was omitting words from the transcription that appeared in my own translation. This transcription, therefore, could be true to neither the original nor the translated text. I then began repeating certain phrases and shapes as the illegible blocks directed. In spite of the omissions and changes, I did all this with a voice in the back of my head, preoccupied with a childlike understanding of fairness, insisting, “These are not my poems.”

Whenever the notebook was open, I could not avoid considering the original owner of the notebook. As someone who carries several notebooks with her at all times, I would not forget that I was holding something incredibly valuable to only one other person. When I first started using the Post-Its I developed rules for translation to keep myself from stealing from an anonymous writer who was already unlucky enough to have lost her primary notebook.

Guidelines:

Omit lines or sentences where more than 40% of the words are legible. Legible words are “words,” illegible words are “shapes.” Only graphic translations of shapes are permitted. If a shape is graphically translated and later found to better resemble another word, keep the original graphic translation. If a certain part of speech is implied by contextual meaning, stay true to that part of speech.

-Exceptions include cases where a mistranslation would be truer to the previously translated shapes in that section, thus contributing to a greater theme or motif.

-These exceptions are allowed even if the part of speech is incongruous with other items in a list. For example, noun, noun, verb, and noun is permissible.

These rules of course were no help in cases whereblank + blankappeared to be eitherham + eggsor, free + eyes,and therefore,ham + eyesor, free + eggs.

In these cases, I refused to let common sense dictate my choices and instead followed thematic discretion. The parameters of my graphic translations only rule began to bend like the shapes themselves, and I found myself consciously selecting thematically relevant words. I drew the line at translating or including any lines or sentences that I could read without any substitution.

Out of the entire notebook, there is only one near legible paragraph. Its clarity added a real dimension to this bumbling voice I’d created in my head. This is not just someone who owns a notebook, remember, this is someone who writes. I include it here to conclude my notes:

A friendship like this The color would be sea-green, clear + foggy as sea glass. The world around us the color between us. [---] as [---] sisters. She would never say she believes in heaven or hell, but in the trees and in the sky and the planes in the wind no one else can hear.

The OdOr Of The hOax Was GOne

1

[1]

Slipping behind them, telling Eden to slip behind me.

Hidden, our mother turned on the shoe enemy: a pot of boiling water in milk hands.

There was sandat the deep, and A reach, aI learned in my sleep. soft boot step

ella lOnGpre

2

The livery, beyond the desks and jobs?Where was it?

She gave her enamel glance. Know a dolphin, how to raise him.

As she tired, I lay my head against her belly, to heat me.

The lost person who held me, I felt myself feeling bits of sleep, as if he

wore only a dream.

I lifted my heel from her shoulder, I could see her failing the other side of the heart, but her body only moved across the cool.

He just blinked.

3

“Where is he?” she said again, paint in her voice.“He is with him, fate and his mother.”

I shouted, I sang. Paints wasted him. Blue sky with white—you were gone.

“Listen,” she wisped. “We are leaving tonight.I hear a car parked outside.”

A drunk night.Don’t hurt the light in hereI shut my head.Hear me, not the gale.

The OdOr Of The hOax Was GOne

4

Closing the dinquietly behind me

Outside all theanimals weredead. The quick, the cool,the grass wet—

The odor of I held my mother’sthe hoax was gone. sweater tightly around me, then I shirked her warmth.

I could hear the soul of my heart in her night.

The light tripping across a long room to my shins.I shook my teeth,

giddy, while his

barley turned.

ella lOnGpre

5

A lost earring, a small flint like a flame on a meteor that lights the night, then dies.

The light was, after they carried each other, rekindled. They looked at each other as if magnified in the rain.

The only window, open to the rain

theonly picture

of the wind

The OdOr Of The hOax Was GOne

abOuT The auThOr

Ella Longpre is a writer and musician who lives and works in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in elimae, Everyday Genius, Summer Stock, NOÖ, Dino-saur Bees, and other locations.

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