Fractals

I told a girl in my math class about fractals. And Katie, who understands numbers as much as I do, and art, significantly less, nodded, and smiled, and said, "OH, cool!" with her eyes wide and confused-but-pretending-to-be-interested way that she has. I smiled back at her, but stopped talking. Fractals. They're infinite mathematical patterns on an x-y axis, and no matter how much you zoom in on them, they always have some other shape you've never seen before. They're beautiful. And endlesss. they're always curving into their present shape and disappearing into minutia. Like C. S. Lewis says about God; further up and further in, the inside is bigger than the outside. Like they sing at church for Christmas, "Glorious Impossible."

Navigating the hallways at my school is like navigating fractals. They curve around in big, lazy loops, and tight, spiral staircases. Even the ground is not flat, the art department hallways ramp up and down, a nightmare for perpective drawing. It took an actual trip to the hallways to convince my dad that my skewed pen and ink was true to life.

I guess the creative writing class likes fractals too, because when they published their favorite peices in a spiral bound notebook, the fractals across the cover almost made up for the loud, tantrum-red all-caps title: "Creative Writing; 2007-2008." They were sitting on the floor, grumpy and abandoned. A post-it note above it, pasted to the white wall, was written in friendly, loopy handwriting, and read, "Free! Take one!"

I looked at the fractals. I considered the probably poor quality of the insides. I grimaced at the poor choice of font. I glanced at the hopeful post-it note. I rolled my eyes. I took a step away. But it had fractals on the cover. I scooped it up and put it in my bag.

I was right about the quality of writing. The opening story started with, "The forest was dark and the leaves rustled in the wind." Every story had a murder, or a lover, or the muder of a lover. All the characters were lonely, a few were delusional. One was haunted by a woman who had never been alive, another by a woman who was living still. Clumsy spirals instead of fractals.

A fractal has layers, and unexpected turns that bring unlikely elements together. I would like to write spirals that resemble fractals; glorious impossibles.

also, I thought you might like to preview a few of my thematic illustrations. The following are croppings of the original works, and now you are officially the only person (with the exception of my classmates) who has seen them. They're still quite rough; I have a lot of work to do!

amputee

he graduated from the University of Texas

and took a black Honda Civic, a more-than-less girlfriend

with red hair and matching

bra straps, and their incubating son

to Minnesota where he secured a job building

artificial limbs. Artificial Limb Co.

said that people could live normal

lives with metal claws and feet and artificial

knees and affixed digits, in which case,

Cassy said, give me one

of each. Matthew was born and everything

worked. Keith kept working; he designed

a hand that could be a fist or point

a finger or grasp-and-not-let-go. He thought

about steel hands and silver and aluminum.

He thought about magnetic hands

and Swiss army knife hands.

Cassy left after a year, in the winter, with Matthew

who didn’t say mamama

or dadada, just ah for attention and ah

for food. Keith thought about a hand

with buttons, a hand with a joystick, a hand that stays

98.6 degrees in December. See, he said,

The best prostheses are the ones

that let people forget

what they’re missing. And Cassy said,

the week before she finished

Minnesota, why

would you want to forget.

*SO...this started as a short short story for my fiction class. We had to write an entire story in a couple paragraphs. I only recently broke it into lines, and the effect is a Billy Collins-esque poem: very narrative. You have to read it out loud, of course. :)