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Big Corey |
The Story Of Big Corey, How He Became Big, What Differentiates Him From Little Corey, And How He Fought The Terrible Fustilugs And Won
by Corey Mesler
It all started innocently enough. A word between friends; a misspent word. The talk circulated like a penny and The Story grew from what we thought was best left unsaid, The Story of Big Corey, the one I can tell you part of here -- only part because I don't know you and can't trust you. I just want that clear at the get-go. I'm not hiding anything. We, the keepers of The Story, hope that it is not tarnished from too much handling.
Big Corey was born in Sue Falls, North Catatonia, in nineteen-something. He was raised by Canadians, many hockey players -- women hockey players. Big Corey, though, even when he was little, was a non-athlete. That is, he did not like physical competition and avoided it at all costs. He was bullied. I wasn't going to mention this until later but perhaps it's best to let that out here while we're still fresh and unsullied by The Story's grimier components.
In those days, there were bullies: bug-eyed kids with fists like hammers and arms like wolves. Little Corey spent too much time cowering, covering up, hiding. Even in plain sight, hiding. Little Corey thought a deadly thought: I do not belong in the world.
At school, a public school where anyone can attend, there were many opportunities for disgrace. Little Corey gobbled them up. He lived in disgrace. Afternoons at home he would throw a girly arm over his face and cry into his bedclothes. Tears on the counterpane. Having just learned about death -- his first thought was No! How unjust! -- he began to think of an exit strategy. He may -- it was possible at least -- he may just want an easy out.
Yet, Little Corey persevered. He made good grades. He got kissed by cute girls who thought him cute. He had some boys in the neighborhood who were kind and friendly even though Little Corey couldn't join them in their reindeer games: street football, Monkey Grab, corkball.
Or, Little Corey did participate. Though balls bounced off him like radiation, Little Corey tried. To his everlasting credit, he tried. Eventually he learned how to control a cork covered with medical tape. Eventually he learned how to pretend his plastic gun was a mitrailleuse. Eventually he learned that a ball kicked high into the air would not shatter his face like a wax mask. The neighborhood boys -- Bob and Lark and Manny -- patted Little Corey's girly shoulders and smiled at him. When he made a catch, they acted as if he had reversed gravity or won the heart of The Prettiest Girl.
So Little Corey's world was not all misery and anxiety, chicken-heartedness and dread. No, there were things about the multivariate world that Little Corey relished. Lo, there came unto him a benison unheralded and unexpected: the interest of indeed The Prettiest Girl.
The Prettiest Girl in Mrs. Coleman's fourth grade class at Tristan Tzara Elementary was a young butterfly named Euphonious Moniker. Everyone called her You. She was as sweet as a boysenberry pie and had eyes that were gemstone grey. She wore flippy skirts and white panties and when she spoke, every boy in Tarantella County grew a mustache. She was stuff.
When she showed up at Little Corey's house one day after school, it was as if a unicorn or a dragon had appeared out of a dream. Little Corey's mother, Elspeth, opened the screen door and trilled, "Won't you come in? Corey doesn't have many girl friends." Maybe she put the space in. Little Corey surely hoped he heard a space. All he could do was gape at You. You glittered like a lollypop, sweet as a snooky.
"Wh-wh?" Little Corey asked as his mother loomed over them like a creature from Chagall.
"Hi, C," You tinkled.
"Wh-wh?" he reiterated.
"Mrs. Little Corey," You simpered, "could you leave us alone, please. It's so nice to meet you and I haven't much time but I did want to speak to your son briefly in private." Elspeth shook like bad TV reception. She moved backwards as if charmed. Out!
Euphonious looked at Little Corey who stood there frozen, a white knock-off, a facsimile child. She reached across the universe between them and took his soft hand in hers. Her hand felt cool to Little Corey, like a chilly washcloth when you're green about the gills.
"Little Corey," she spoke. "Though the strictures of Fourth Grade Protocol bind me from a declaration of my true heart's intent, let us mark this day as the date which began our relationship, a relationship that can only grow like yeasty dough, can only advance and never retreat, that can boomerang into the darkness and return stronger and happier. What do you say, young Lochinvar, shall we give imperfect romance a chance, kick the mad-dog depression into the yard with the fowl, grab a handle and fly, you and I, You and I?"
It was quite a speech. Needless to say, though we shall say it anyway due to the requisite expansion of The Story, Little Corey and Euphonious Moniker became a team, a dyad, a twosome. At school they walked together, heads bent sideways, almost touching, a heat between them that seemed like a force field. The halls parted as they wafted by. Their friends spoke of them in ticklish whispers. The bullies simultaneously peed themselves and were sent home. Bob and Lark and Manny became philosophers -- the other schoolmates asked them for stories, for cuffer, for legend, for anything that had to do with the glittering couple. Corey and You.
So, your polyphagic mind wants to leap ahead like a gnu. It wants to ask, did this childish romance last? How could it? They were sucky-calves, bairns, buttercups. Did they kiss? Did their parents give them their blessing, allow them to be alone and free spirits, respect their romance as did their peers? What about You's white panties? Why did you mention them so that now we cannot get them out of our heads? Who are you anyway? It wants to ask, what's gnu?
The Story will come as stories come. You cannot push the river. The Story hesitates at such importunities -- hesitates like the still spot in cicada song then resumes. It is The Story's raison d'etre.
The afternoons in Bluefield Woods were like the part in the fairytale before the hero's thigh is wounded, before the princess sips a sleeping draught, before the appearance of the Ogre or Baba Yaga. The children stripped to their underwear. There they were, You's bright white panties like lily petals -- not to play at adult diddles, but because their immature bodies, fey and sprite-like -- You was a sylph, a vision like a prophecy -- craved the self-determination of enchanted transpiration. Our pair became forest-folk and they danced with the fairies and imps. Believe it or don't, our couple was as innocent as pixies.
This was the beginning of the progression that would transform Little Corey -- the first crack in the cosmic door. On the other side, Little Corey would find the challenge that would transmute our champion. He would have to wrestle wolves. He would have to walk through fire. All The Metaphors gathered for a conference and The Story sanctioned what was decided. The Story allowed Metaphor to interject, to inter-splice, to inspire. But we digress. (The Story digresses, but you didn't hear it from me.)
Corey returned from the forest not quite yet Big Corey. Something in him was percolating. He was wooly. He was ambiguous. His visits to the numinous made our hero glow like the last light of the longest night off the ice at the Pole. By his side, You walked in glory, too. If they were a pair before Bluefield Woods and its fairy-folk, afterwards they were as one, married by Celestial Harmonies. Two hearts beating together, quite literally, though the workaday, walk-around world could know nothing of this, of course. You're going to have to take my word for it.
Oh, how Corey relished his fairytale life! Things went along like things do, rackety-packety, hither and yon. Some days rackety, some days packety. Some days more hither, some days more yon. Our couple grew older, grew closer, became legendary, became the subjects of urban myth, deep myth and Hit or Myth. They passed grades, they spent summers swimming naked in Lake Windemere, they made few friends, they grew into that nut-brown season known as Young Adulthood. Little Corey was still Little Corey (but, friends, magic was afoot!) and Euphonious Moniker became beautiful, so lovely one had to look at her with pinhole contraptions, like an eclipse. She walked in grace, some said. She stepped in grace the way some of us step in dog offal, awful as that sounds.
Still, there were some in the Kingdom of Bali-Ratlet, where these events took place, who did not respect our toothsome twosome. (Have we mentioned this before, the Kingdom of Bali-Ratlet? It's a whole other story. We may be up for it at a later date, how it was hewn from the ragged wilderness by men with backhoes and small families, how it grew to be a Garden, and how like all fairytale kingdoms, fell to desuetude under the spell of an Evil Developer.) There were a group of Rough Boys, also known as Bullies, also known as -- wait for it -- The Terrible Fustilugs!
These Fustilugs, Brit and Bret and Brut, were uncommonly unpleasant, breaking noses as much as wind, doling nuggies, Injun rubs, arm-twists like bankers with foreclosure notices. They relished their very unpleasantness. In former days, they caused no shortage of uneasiness and downright terror in our hero, Little Corey. Some mornings his stomach hurt, no fooling, as if the Final Days were made manifest in his minute psalterium. This was before You, of course, though some small after-image, like a fossil print on his soul, of his earlier dread remained.
It was one sere afternoon on the playgrounds of Bali-Ratlet when it occurred. One day, bright as a thousand gypsy teeth, You and Little Corey were huddled together on the monkey bars, sitting atop them like wedding figures on a cake or gods of Monkey Island. This was in the before-time, when playground surfaces were neither shredded tires nor pliant polypropolene (or whatever the Tot Turf is vulcanized from). When it was, instead, unforgiving concrete and packed dirt with a side order of sharp rock shards. Head to head they sat, our pair, cooing, bussing, whispering. Somewhere nearby, the fairy folk hummed and whizzed, buzzed and spun. Nature leaned in closer, eavesdropping. The air asked for more space.
They appeared on the horizon like a black Mariah, walking in syncopated stride, their ragged clothing the habiliments of bullyrag and bluster. Brit and Bret and Brut. They seemed to blot out the sun, a roving eclipse (see above), a Wandering Crew. They were bent on mischief, though they were bent long before their first mischief. They spotted You and Corey atop their perch and sighted them as if they were deer in crosshairs. "Huh," they said almost in unison. Almost.
"Poultry," Brit yelled at the couple.
"Gull and boy," Bret yelled at the couple.
"I can see your white underpants," Brut yelled, though in truth he could not.
Our couple de-perched. A slight quiver ran over their young skin as if tightening for flaying. Fear, that atrabilious ouphe, burbled and cleared its tiny throat. The paper sun cooled.
"Uh-oh," Little Corey said.
"Hm," said You.
The trio of miscreants surrounded the young couple. If they had not already darkened the air, one might mistake their positioning for an ingenuous sport, something blithe and chirpy, something gamesome and ludic. But no, the miscreants were pre-programmed for miscreancy. The Fustilugs' tough, oily muscles glowed like light off a knife-blade. Their green grins spoke danger, spoke it fluently.
"Ok," they said. It was agreed by all five principles that this was the go-code, the start of whatever this was to be.
"Serpiginous slime," Brit said.
"Tinea cruris," Bret said.
"Girly girl," Brut said.
"Goop," Brit said.
"Poof," Bret said.
"Girly girl," Brut said.
Brut twisted Little Corey's girl-like arm behind his back. Behind Little Corey's back, that is. It hurt like a vulgarism. It hurt like hell.
"Ah," Corey said, his face puckering.
"Stop," You said firmly, the way Wendy spoke to the Lost Boys. "Stop," she repeated in case they did not hear her.
"Huh, huh," The Fustilugs said.
Things looked bad. Things looked daunting. Things were looking down.
It was then, Readers, friends, that Little Corey broke the curse. It was then that he took from his Bag of Tricks the thing that we still cannot speak of except in vague outlines. We cannot because its magic is ancient and unknowable. Its magic goes back and back and since its inception it was only available on Faith. Faith was the currency that worked, the work of Faith by the Faithful, and through Faith in the unknowable the magic is worked, though infrequently as you might imagine. Is this clear?
Corey pulled out Metaphor. Capital "M" Metaphor. He had it all along like Dorothy's shoe-click. Somehow he knew he had it and that somehow had to do with You Moniker and her Sweet Love. If this fairytale talk makes you uncomfortable, what are you doing hanging out with The Story in the first place? Pfft!
The Metaphor that Corey used has since been handed down in folklore like a golden ball. It temporarily blinded The Fustilugs. It made their limbs limp as swandown, useless as a candle in a skull. Their formerly terrible visages became the visages of small animals, weasels and stoats and rats. They covered their mammalian faces with their squirrelly hands and, without looking back over their hunchback shoulders, they ran over the hill and far away.
Because in The Story, Metaphor is the strongest juju. Because The Metaphor that can be spoken of is not The Metaphor.
You looked at Corey. She smiled like a kitten.
"You've had that all along," she said. It wasn't a question.
"I suppose so," Corey said, feeling, should we say it, bigger? Not quite Bunyanesque but bigger than life and twice as natural. She took his hand. Is there a sweeter line in all of Romance, Readers? She took his hand. Together they walked away. Together.
This didn't in and of itself remake our hero, making small big, nor did it break the spell. Big Corey became "Big" by accretion, slowly -- the way raindrops build dams, gradually. That's the secret -- there is no one anti-spell, no charming kiss. "Big" becomes "Big" the way The Story becomes The Story. You could see it all coming to a head, Readers, you can see the steps in the forest: the necessary steps, the trail of pixie dust from playpen to playground. Yet the battle for our souls is ongoing, is always just around the corner, is the only battle, yet the no-battle. It is repeated again and again, like a dream, like a dream. It has no The End, meaning none at all, The End.
Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published two novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002) and We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006). He has also published numerous chapbooks and one full-length poetry collection, Some Identity Problems. His book of short stories, Listen, came out in March, 2009. He has been nominated for a Pushcart numerous times and one of his poems was chosen for Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. With his wife, he runs BurkeÍs Book Store in Memphis, Tennessee. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.
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