Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 16 by Kelly Link Gavin J. Grant Read Free Book Online Page B

therefore most suck.
    Love, Aunt G
    Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda,
    Will you tell me a story?
    Love, An Annoying and Small Child with a Runny Nose
    A: Dear Annoying and Small Child with a Runny Nose:
    One day an annoying and small child with a runny nose found out that runny noses signal deadly cancer, especially in small children. The child was soon dead.
    Love, Aunt G
    [Back to Table of Contents]

The Pursuit of Artemisia Guile
    Scott Geiger
    We believe it was in the middle of May, while our lawns greened and the red-orange eyes of daylilies debuted, that the graffiti first appeared in our lakeside Ohio town. Mere vandalism, we thought at first, nothing more. Just those two curious words scribbled across a restroom wall in black marker. Or the initials “AG” written in crabbed miniature on doorframes or haphazardly along the undersides of restaurant tables. Someone's private nonsense, we thought. Nothing more. So who can say how many of her signatures we scoured from bathroom stalls, phone booths, lampposts, and sidewalks before we understood? Then there was the German Club Toilet Paper Roll, that lone survivor of the early days. Now it's under glass in Bill Bliss’ attic museum. Found on the morning of the second last Saturday of May by a janitor at Etna's German Club, the Toilet Paper Roll is what you might call the legged fish of Artemisiana, the amphibian forebear of those dinosaur messages to come. “Artemisia Guile” appears on the Roll's double-ply tissue twenty-seven times at intervals of six-point-five spins. Where the ink bled through to underlying layers of paper, those are called “ghosts."
    "It's got this monkish quality,” Bliss likes to tells his visitors. “It's spooky but really neat. Like, what would make you sit on the can and write on the TP then roll it all back up again?"
    Notwithstanding the popular belief of those like Bliss, a few dissenters argue the Water Street Bridge Message came first. Copycatting and forgeries occurred in its wake, they say. Their charge is a reminder of this key point: our affair with Artemisia Guile didn't start with May's flirtatious prelude but exactly on the first Thursday of June, the day we woke up to the Water Street Bridge Message.
    A Lake Erie fog caught Etna that morning. The world outdoors went opaque, as if our windows had cataracts. When Bliss backed his car out of the garage, he found himself adrift in a cloud. Most of us lingered over our breakfasts, letting our coffee cool while we nursed primitive feelings about uncertainty. We wrung our hands until we could only call in late to the Cusco offices at the Merwin Building on Huron, to the GeoPlastics plant and the machine shops by the airport, to the fulfillment warehouses along the highway. But down in the marina below Water Street, Tate Malcolm and Bernie Vargas, both in their seventies, began another day of maritime retirement together. That is, a day at anchor way out on the lake, alone, shirtless, drunk on Canadian whiskey. Through the thinning fog, Vargas piloted the yacht toward the harbor's mouth, over which spans the Water Street bridge. At some point the pair looked up. And there across the bridge's southern profile in broad white letters ran an imperative: “ADORE ARTEMISIA GUILE."
    No colors, no cartoons. None of what you sometimes imagine when you think of graffiti. Just the words and nothing more. By afternoon, when the fog had furled back into the sky and word spread through town, a crowd gathered on the pavilion where Water meets Mercantile. From there you could see both the marina and the southern side of the bridge. We peered down at the strange words in uneasy silence, not knowing what exactly they asked of us. But when the utility workers came out the next morning with power washers we felt the faint disappointment of a missed opportunity, a misinterpreted gesture.
    * * * *
    News of the Water Street Bridge Message appeared on the metro page of the Sun-Gazette . Our own Randy Michaelmas