2. how we hate the rain
We join Ted, Lana, and Caesar in the café again, where it’s raining cats and dogs.
The world was caged in gloom.
Gloom is one of those words I consider relatively cheap in the grand scheme of things. It’s easy to try and force atmosphere with certain words when the real trick is to actually craft atmosphere. It doesn’t help that he uses ‘dreary’ to describe the rain in the very next sentence.
I’m reminded of a sentence from Evangeline Walton that Toryll posted a while back on the Paolini/Sanderson sporking:
“Outside the drizzling rain had begun again. It pattered around the house, and on the roofs and eaves, like a million, tiny, stealthy feet: softly, as though the night were teeming with a host of minute, dark beings.” In my opinion, this is the correct way to build atmosphere. She tells you the rain is drizzling, but she doesn’t just leave it there. The rain is likened to the tiny, stealthy feet of dark things in the night. It flows well and even has a sort of rhythm.
This chapter, Ted daydreams about the rain and thinks about inconsequential bullshit like what a sailor sailing a rain puddle would look like.
Outside, the downpour had puddled on the asphalt like little black mirrors reflecting the sky, oceans with their own raging tides. How terrifying it would be, I thought, to be a sailor on that sea, with drops the size of houses hammering down. To ants, perhaps, on a boat made of leaf, this might seem like the end of the world.
But then, ants had survived enough of these storms that I’m sure they were no longer fazed. They were, after all, the inventors of the storm cellar. I wondered, for a moment, whether theirs flooded or not.
This right here is the novel’s biggest flaw. Miller can’t find the point. Instead of weaving a plot, he has his protagonist philosophizing (I use the term loosely here) about rain puddles and ants.
Ted draws a smiley face on the glass, but Lana doesn’t look up from her drawing. Ted likes the rain, but Lana hates it. It changes her somehow, as if, when it rains, ‘all the best parts of her retreat’, and she ‘saves those parts only for the sunshine’. I know he’s trying to build Lana up as moody and troubled, but this can describe literally anyone. My depression flares in darker weather, the same as millions of other people. This is not a profound revelation, and is not what I would call the greatest characterization method.
Lana is rude and elitist to Caesar over a Video Game he’s playing (Capitalized because it’s presented this way in the book for some reason). We’re told Caesar’s eyes are ‘glued open and staring’, which mean the same thing, and we seriously get two pages of them bitching about this video game that has literally nothing to do with the actual story. She berates Caesar for liking a video game full of what she considers shit. When he says he likes that the video game lets you skip past the tutorial, she makes some snide comment about skipping the only parts that could even possibly have any substance, to which Ted points out that if Caesar is skipping the tutorials, he's technically spending less time playing the video game than if he didn't skip past them.
She scowled at him--and me, by extension--but had no other words to add. So she looked back down and blocked [her] notebook with her arm.
Pictured below: Lana
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After Lana huffs some more (She’s presented as icy and moody throughout most of the book from what I remember, and we aren’t really given a reason why until nearly the end. It’s also very stupid and not handled well at all, like everything else), we get this exchange:
“Are you going back to Atlantis?” Lana asked, after a few minutes.
“I probably should,” I said.
Everything eventually leads back to Ted’s writing, somehow, like it’s the thing that keeps Lana and Caesar, who frankly seem like they can’t stand one another, tethered.
Also, though the Atlantis plotline has several segments, they are all clearly separate stories with different titles. So, while he plans to go back now, he didn’t originally. He intended for the eyes of the world to be a standalone. Let that sink it for a moment. A standalone story in which a queen smells a lion and tastes the wind, and a strange traveler talks to her adviser about dirt.
Caesar says he wants a werewolf story again, and Lana says, “Oh my word, Michael. Are you ever going to give that one a rest?”
A quick note: Michael is Caesar's first name. I can't 100% remember, but I do believe it's explained why Caesar is his nickname during the second half of the book. Now, if you’re thinking Lana doesn’t exactly sound like an actual teenager here, just wait. It’s about to get worse, because she steals Caesar’s video game and forces him to do his homework, which is to read Henry V. Caesar is annoyed and asks them if they’ve even read the play, and no joke, this is their exchange:
Lana and I looked at one another, and I raised my eyebrows. “Once more unto the breach, my friends, once more—Or close the wall up with our English dead.”
“There is some soul of goodness in things evil,” quoted Lana, “would men observingly distill it out.”
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Phew. I’m glad he cleared it up by using ‘quoted’ in the dialogue tag to show that Lana was quoting Shakespeare, or I’d have never known!
We then cut back to Ted wanking on about the rain again. He feels each raindrop has a story. They all fall the same, but they totally have their differences, man. Some hit dirt. Some fall on cars. Some get struck by lightning. Some become rivers, ‘trickling down the gutters, launching little cigarette-butt canoes and leafy warships’.
Drowning ants. Maybe the ants knew how to swim, by now. Maybe they were manning little boats, shoving off in frigates and men-of-war, breaking tiny bottles of champagne and cheering, off to discover new lands.
And I have to share this bit, just to show you how much Miller fell in love with this insects in the rain angle:
For some reason, worms crawled onto the street to die. Sacrifices to appease whatever angry worm-gods were sending the destruction. I imagined their slimy pink councils meeting somewhere to discuss which members of society to offer up. Perhaps the old; perhaps the young. Little worm-virgins, for the dragons (or volcanoes) of the sky. They were drinking themselves to death. (And they were getting run over by cars).
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No, it couldn’t possibly be that worms come out during the rain because it lets them breathe and move around, that would be fucking stupid. WORM-VIRGINS, THAT’S WHY. This is what he chooses to spend time writing about in lieu of an actual plot.
But now he’s found the words to write, and they’re desperate, yearning words.
I didn’t resort to poetry often, because it was always hard to force; but when it came, I didn’t stop it. I set the pen down, and stammered out the few lines that I could:
Oh, that’s right, Antis. We get a poem now.
By the way, all of that inconsequential bullshit took ten pages.
letters in bottles:
Like rain, we all are born the same.
If you were like me, you wouldn’t be writing about worm-virgins.
To fall, and land—and there remain.
We pool, and splash; and for a while,
Forget we fell in single file.
What does this even mean?
Like bottles full of desperate words,
We bob along, until we’re heard.
Like ants upon this earthly skin;
By ‘skin’, is he referring to the earth? So…earthly earth? Because if so, that is some Eye of Argon shit.
Breathe out. And then breathe in again.
Personal opinion here (And I am by no means a poet), but I feel like the pause and word choice here screws the rhythm.
Once more unto this breach, my friends
Use your own words.
‘Twixt earth and sky, ‘twixt start and end.
Why? Just why?
Once more unto the break of day,
Where all shall soon be wash’d away.
Dude, just say washed.
(So mount your cigarette canoe.
I’m just an ant. But so are you.)
This part feels so decidedly modern that the use of ‘twixt’ and ‘wash’d just seem even dumber now. I mean, it certainly doesn’t help that it was dumb before.
It has no substance, and there is nothing even remotely memorable about it. The comparison of humans to raindrops is clunky at best, and I still don’t know if he said ‘earthly earth’ or not. Being able to rhyme is one thing (Though preferably consistently), but you need to be able to organize your thoughts enough to actually say something. The last chapter only existed to excuse Miller being able to put this poem in, and it's embarrassing how obvious that is.
3. the place where i was me
For once, Ted is at the café by himself.
Lana’s on vacation, an annual event she despises. Meanwhile, during third period, Caesar apparently told Ted he was upset because his cousins are coming to stay with him and his family, “Which means that Mom will make me wear that stupid freaking mask, so I don’t get sick.”
I had seen him wear the mask before; it was like putting on a lead jacket. It dragged his soul into the ground, even as it pulled his thin eyebrows into a scowl. The elastic straps made his ears stick out even more than usual. I suppose it was his version of Lana’s rain, but as he said, “At least rain doesn’t make her look like a chimpanzee.”
Just putting this here to let you know this incredibly important (Seriously, no sarcasm here. This is absolutely crucial information that is criminally unexplored throughout the first half of the book) exchange will not be elaborated upon for, oh… another 120 pages, when the plot finally decides to show up. Oh, but Baaar, surely if it was that important, the author would clearly find a way to work it into the book more? NOPE TOO BUSY BUSTING OUT THESE DANK ASS STORIES, BRO.
Ted’s mother happens to work at the café, so she comes over to give him some coffee. He explains that three years ago, his mother gave up cigarettes so she could spend her ten-minute breaks with Ted instead, and that the cigarettes were just one of many things she sacrificed for him. Well, that’s actually pretty sweet. It would be nice to see Ted interacting with an actual human for once—
Just kidding, we immediately segue into how Ted basically thinks of his mother as the vehicle for him first coming to his café, and how now he ‘belonged in that booth, and the whole world knew it.’ That spot, in that place, was everything I ever could have called home: the tear in the padding beside my leg with the yellow foam oozing out and the initials (RD) carved into the tabletop by someone’s fingernail. (We’d once spent a solid month trying to discover whose initials they were. But they might as well have been mine, now.)
So, we’ll ignore how odd and frankly cruel it seems to view your hard-working single mother as the thing that gave you your corner booth in a shitty diner, because it arguable gets worse. She asks Ted how his day was, and this is the narcissistic response we get:
There, in the flickering shadow of the neon light, where the air smelled like safety—and coffee—and the world was securely on the other side of the glass—this was where I belonged.
The place where I was me.
I shrugged in response to her aging question. “Yours?”
This is really one of the only interactions we see between these two. Now, if Ted was written by a competent author, this could potentially be a brilliant scene used to show a person’s narcissism. But Ted is never treated as even remotely pretentious, let alone narcissistic. Every single character aligns with the implication that Ted is an intellectual, because Miller himself thinks that Ted is an intellectual.
What happens next? His mother immediately asks if he’s written another story. He says no, and she tries to make some small talk about his friends and whether he wants something to eat or not. They don’t really interact like a mother and her child who are supposed to have a good relationship. Everything on page, dialogue speaking, is awkward and stilted. But then he asks her what he should write, because Ted gonna Ted.
She tells him to write about ‘this place’, and he thinks about her name-tag that she just straightened.
It was my mother’s name. A very old, dusty name, handed down in lieu of any actual inheritance. She had never been fond of it, but it grew on her, very slowly.
Like this place.
Like black coffee.
‘The blankness in his mind snaps open’ with the crack of his notebook, and the words ‘bled out black and natural, like a sigh spilled into the afternoon’.
Ladies and gentlemen: Ted, your modern day Shakespeare.
So now, we get the second short story of the book.
the society of esthers:
Admittedly, there are actually parts of this one that I like.
In another time, she might have made an excellent Viking. In another, an excellent sort of nursemaid for unruly boys, a drill-sergeant for cats. Her yellow coat, the color and smell of apricot marmalade, she wore like armor.
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I’m not gonna lie, I think that’s a nice opening.
So, there’s this woman who might have been bitchin’ enough to drink mead with Odin, but she might also have been a drill-sergeant for cats? She wears a coat that looks and smells like apricot marmalade and wears it like armor? That’s bananas, and I actually kind of like it. She’s like an even stranger Mary Poppins, and I’m all about Mary Poppins. With three sentences, this character already has more character than Ted has had with nearly forty pages.
Unfortunately, for every interesting thing Miller does in this story, there are like seven terrible things he does as well.
He cannot stop describing the woman. We already had an interesting glimpse into this person, but he loves his own writing so much that he doesn't know when to temper himself.
She was, at barely over five feet, not the most impressive figure. But whatever she lacked in height, she made up for with her wardrobe shoulders and and the flat-lined mouth that she kept tightly closed, even when she smiled--which she didn't very often. And yet, despite the collective ferocity of her countenance, it was a somewhat understated one. When she approached the Cafe, it was in a quiet way. She did not stand out with her steel gray hair and her sturdy chin.
This is the very next paragraph.
All the quirky fun of the opening completely obliterated by an info-dumpy, well...dump. What the hell are 'wardrobe shoulders' anyway? Is she square like a wardrobe? Does she have those horrid 80s shoulder pads? But her wardrobe shoulders and her tight-lipped smile make her fierce? If her facial expression is 'collectively fierce', how can it also be understated? She is wearing a coat that both looks and smells like apricot marmalade, and it's also mentioned that she holds her black umbrella like a sword. I think she's bound to stand out just a little, even with her gray hair and sturdy chin.
The cafe was tiny from the outside. She could only assume that it was just as tiny within.
Lady Marmalade is a woman of astute observation. We can add that to her resume, right after cat sergeant.
But then we get this line:
The aging, flickering sign, traded winks with the throbbing yellow traffic-light across the road; they had been flirting in the same manner for years.
Aside from the fact that Miller really needs to focus on cleaning up his sentences, I actually did like this line. I think it's quirky and simple, refreshing after so many weird horse metaphors and 40 pages of purple prose. But this is why this story in particular was one of the more frustrating ones to me. There are glimpses of some genuinely fun and engaging concepts, but the execution is simply not there.
This story is also written using third person omniscient. To Miller's credit, it's handled slightly better here than in the last story, but it's still pretty rough. Hergrim mentioned on the last spork that a good writer can reveal a lot about characters using TPO, and we do get some more insight into this character than we got with the others. He's also clearly trying for a more whimsical approach, which, in some places, you can see. The opening has some whimsy, and there's a line about how the cafe smells like grease and bad coffee, but it also smells like pie, and plenty of horrible things can be endured for pie. I think that's a cute line.
There's even this weird ass line that tires so hard to be whimsical that you can almost feel your body dying as you read it:
A pitiful variety of cacti decorated the counter (Dreaming of dust and heatstroke).
The woman sits at a booth and goes through this weird ritual 'with no room for deviation', which includes propping up her umbrella, taking out a 'severe-looking pen' from her coat which apparently has 'many pockets', her spectacles which she 'perched with both hands upon the tip of her nose', a pocket-watch that looks and weighs as much as a doorknob, and a small black notebook, which is 'very black and very square'. She lines all these objects on the table and takes a deep breath before opening the notebook, 'for which she opened her mouth a small, catfish amount'.
Here she reads the words 'Esther Hollens. Waitress/Cook'. We then get our first genuine insight into this woman's thoughts, when she realizes that she had come for a pancake-flipper, a coffee-pourer. A floor-sweeper. She may as well have been dressed in rags and sporting a pair of shackles. But this was of little consequence really, and no real inconvenience; the name may as well have read Cinderella. And the woman in the marmalade jacket may as well have been a Brick-Shaped Fairy-Godmother. She felt rather like one, and she rather liked the feeling (though she allowed no indication).
I think if I read one more 'may as well have', I'm going to throttle something. So, I guess 'wardrobe shoulders' means that she's literally brick-shaped after all? The Cinderella angle is confusing at best, because we have virtually no insight into Esther Hollens' character. She has a little bit of dialogue, but we know nothing about her. We have no idea if she's this poor and downtrodden waitress waiting to be rescued by someone, so how is Lady Marmalade like her fairy godmother? What about her makes her even remotely fairy godmother-like to begin with?
Fair questions, right? Well, too bad, because they'll never be answered.
A waitress named Katie comes to take her order. She has a thick accent and calls Lady Marmalade shugga four times in the span of one page, because everyone knows waitresses in diners always have thick southern accents and call everyone shugga. Lady Marmalade orders 'tea, with lemon, an egg, fried, and pie'. She asks if the berries are fresh, and when she's told they are, she says, "They will suffice. Tea first."
Now, I know he's trying to build this character up as no-nonsense, but the problem with that is the opening description of this character does not align with this angle. There's an element of whimsy in a person wearing a coat that looks and smells like apricot marmalade, someone who could have easily been a Viking or a drill-sergeant for cats. Someone who wields her umbrella like a fucking sword. There are all kinds of lines with whimsical (Albeit sometimes stupidly so) touches, like enduring unpleasant things for pie and cacti dreaming of dust and heatstroke. The cafe sign flirts with the traffic light across the street.
But in the actual story, she's just kind of a jackass and there really isn't a lot of whimsy shown to us. She makes pretty snide assumptions about Esther Hollens without even knowing her. She makes fun of Katie for her accent and how nice she's being (Having worked in customer service, it's literally her job to be nice to Lady Marmalade). She lies about being Esther Hollens' relative to get her to come speak with her. She fantasizes about being the fairy godmother to Esther Hollens' Cinderella, a person she doesn't even know. How fucking deluded and narcissistic is that?
The pie arrives while she's waiting for Esther Hollens, and we get a line that makes no sense. For something so bright and yellow to devour something so dark purple, without slowly turning to some shade of green, was remarkable. This line confused me so much that I had to reread it and analyze it. If you mix yellow and purple together, you're going to wind up with brown, not green. If he means green as in sick, what does the pie being purple have to do with anything? She would get sick because she ate so much pie, not because the pie itself is purple. Help me detective, Antishurtugal.
So, Esther, believing she's coming out from the kitchen to meet a long-lost relative, introduces herself to Lady Marmalade, who says, in perfect Miller dialogue:
Yes," she said. "The baker of pies."
Esther gives her a 'quiet smile', as opposed to a bone-shattering loud one. She asks how they're relatives and Lady Marmalade says they're relatives 'in a manner of speaking'. Her name is Esther Mae Melbourne. Esther says she doesn't meet many people who share her name, and Lady Marmalade says what is perhaps one of the weirdest lines so far.
The older looked woefully at the sky. "Indeed. The greater generation is behind us. A dying breed, but faithful."
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Lady Marmalade gives Esther a tiny piece of paper and says, "We Esthers need to stick together. There are more of us than you might think. But less than there once were." The card winds up being an invitation to join something that is never actually disclosed, and Esther goes back to the kitchen. Lady Marmalade finishes her pie, checks her watch, and walks back out 'into a world too gray to fully support her coat's choice of shade'.
What a weird fucking thing to say.
At the bus stop across the road, she sits down 'beside a very tall woman with hair the texture and shape of cotton candy and the definition of periwinkle'. So...just periwinkle? This woman is also named Esther, and she is dressed entirely in mismatched plaid for some reason. She asks Lady Marmalade if Esther Hollens will be joining them, and we get this cryptically disappointing ending:
"Not yet," replied the one with the steel [hair]. "But we shall see. In time, when she realizes that she has nowhere else to go, perhaps we may make the acquaintance of young Lady Hollens once again. Desperation shall, as ever, be our ally."
The bus trundled in. And the bus trundled out. And the town was two Esthers less.
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Seriously? This isn't a short story. It's a weird drabble with some interesting concepts that could potentially be fleshed out to be something, but it's nothing as is.
Why do the Esthers dress the way they do? Why are they all named Esther? Why is there a society of them? Why did Lady Marmalade hunt Esther Hollens down in the first place?
Nope, that's it. No hint of what the society of Esthers even does, or why they all have the same name. They just get on the bus after talking about the waitress Esther becoming desperate when she realizes she has nowhere to go, and they leave.
Oh, remember how I said all these stories are woven around the framing device of Ted and company chilling in the cafe? They're eventually supposed to all tie together. I'm curious to see how some of you think the society of Esthers could possibly connect to the Queen who sniffs lions.
Pages read: 44
We join Ted, Lana, and Caesar in the café again, where it’s raining cats and dogs.
The world was caged in gloom.
Gloom is one of those words I consider relatively cheap in the grand scheme of things. It’s easy to try and force atmosphere with certain words when the real trick is to actually craft atmosphere. It doesn’t help that he uses ‘dreary’ to describe the rain in the very next sentence.
I’m reminded of a sentence from Evangeline Walton that Toryll posted a while back on the Paolini/Sanderson sporking:
“Outside the drizzling rain had begun again. It pattered around the house, and on the roofs and eaves, like a million, tiny, stealthy feet: softly, as though the night were teeming with a host of minute, dark beings.” In my opinion, this is the correct way to build atmosphere. She tells you the rain is drizzling, but she doesn’t just leave it there. The rain is likened to the tiny, stealthy feet of dark things in the night. It flows well and even has a sort of rhythm.
This chapter, Ted daydreams about the rain and thinks about inconsequential bullshit like what a sailor sailing a rain puddle would look like.
Outside, the downpour had puddled on the asphalt like little black mirrors reflecting the sky, oceans with their own raging tides. How terrifying it would be, I thought, to be a sailor on that sea, with drops the size of houses hammering down. To ants, perhaps, on a boat made of leaf, this might seem like the end of the world.
But then, ants had survived enough of these storms that I’m sure they were no longer fazed. They were, after all, the inventors of the storm cellar. I wondered, for a moment, whether theirs flooded or not.
This right here is the novel’s biggest flaw. Miller can’t find the point. Instead of weaving a plot, he has his protagonist philosophizing (I use the term loosely here) about rain puddles and ants.
Ted draws a smiley face on the glass, but Lana doesn’t look up from her drawing. Ted likes the rain, but Lana hates it. It changes her somehow, as if, when it rains, ‘all the best parts of her retreat’, and she ‘saves those parts only for the sunshine’. I know he’s trying to build Lana up as moody and troubled, but this can describe literally anyone. My depression flares in darker weather, the same as millions of other people. This is not a profound revelation, and is not what I would call the greatest characterization method.
Lana is rude and elitist to Caesar over a Video Game he’s playing (Capitalized because it’s presented this way in the book for some reason). We’re told Caesar’s eyes are ‘glued open and staring’, which mean the same thing, and we seriously get two pages of them bitching about this video game that has literally nothing to do with the actual story. She berates Caesar for liking a video game full of what she considers shit. When he says he likes that the video game lets you skip past the tutorial, she makes some snide comment about skipping the only parts that could even possibly have any substance, to which Ted points out that if Caesar is skipping the tutorials, he's technically spending less time playing the video game than if he didn't skip past them.
She scowled at him--and me, by extension--but had no other words to add. So she looked back down and blocked [her] notebook with her arm.
Pictured below: Lana
After Lana huffs some more (She’s presented as icy and moody throughout most of the book from what I remember, and we aren’t really given a reason why until nearly the end. It’s also very stupid and not handled well at all, like everything else), we get this exchange:
“Are you going back to Atlantis?” Lana asked, after a few minutes.
“I probably should,” I said.
Everything eventually leads back to Ted’s writing, somehow, like it’s the thing that keeps Lana and Caesar, who frankly seem like they can’t stand one another, tethered.
Also, though the Atlantis plotline has several segments, they are all clearly separate stories with different titles. So, while he plans to go back now, he didn’t originally. He intended for the eyes of the world to be a standalone. Let that sink it for a moment. A standalone story in which a queen smells a lion and tastes the wind, and a strange traveler talks to her adviser about dirt.
Caesar says he wants a werewolf story again, and Lana says, “Oh my word, Michael. Are you ever going to give that one a rest?”
A quick note: Michael is Caesar's first name. I can't 100% remember, but I do believe it's explained why Caesar is his nickname during the second half of the book. Now, if you’re thinking Lana doesn’t exactly sound like an actual teenager here, just wait. It’s about to get worse, because she steals Caesar’s video game and forces him to do his homework, which is to read Henry V. Caesar is annoyed and asks them if they’ve even read the play, and no joke, this is their exchange:
Lana and I looked at one another, and I raised my eyebrows. “Once more unto the breach, my friends, once more—Or close the wall up with our English dead.”
“There is some soul of goodness in things evil,” quoted Lana, “would men observingly distill it out.”
Phew. I’m glad he cleared it up by using ‘quoted’ in the dialogue tag to show that Lana was quoting Shakespeare, or I’d have never known!
We then cut back to Ted wanking on about the rain again. He feels each raindrop has a story. They all fall the same, but they totally have their differences, man. Some hit dirt. Some fall on cars. Some get struck by lightning. Some become rivers, ‘trickling down the gutters, launching little cigarette-butt canoes and leafy warships’.
Drowning ants. Maybe the ants knew how to swim, by now. Maybe they were manning little boats, shoving off in frigates and men-of-war, breaking tiny bottles of champagne and cheering, off to discover new lands.
And I have to share this bit, just to show you how much Miller fell in love with this insects in the rain angle:
For some reason, worms crawled onto the street to die. Sacrifices to appease whatever angry worm-gods were sending the destruction. I imagined their slimy pink councils meeting somewhere to discuss which members of society to offer up. Perhaps the old; perhaps the young. Little worm-virgins, for the dragons (or volcanoes) of the sky. They were drinking themselves to death. (And they were getting run over by cars).
No, it couldn’t possibly be that worms come out during the rain because it lets them breathe and move around, that would be fucking stupid. WORM-VIRGINS, THAT’S WHY. This is what he chooses to spend time writing about in lieu of an actual plot.
But now he’s found the words to write, and they’re desperate, yearning words.
I didn’t resort to poetry often, because it was always hard to force; but when it came, I didn’t stop it. I set the pen down, and stammered out the few lines that I could:
Oh, that’s right, Antis. We get a poem now.
By the way, all of that inconsequential bullshit took ten pages.
letters in bottles:
Like rain, we all are born the same.
If you were like me, you wouldn’t be writing about worm-virgins.
To fall, and land—and there remain.
We pool, and splash; and for a while,
Forget we fell in single file.
What does this even mean?
Like bottles full of desperate words,
We bob along, until we’re heard.
Like ants upon this earthly skin;
By ‘skin’, is he referring to the earth? So…earthly earth? Because if so, that is some Eye of Argon shit.
Breathe out. And then breathe in again.
Personal opinion here (And I am by no means a poet), but I feel like the pause and word choice here screws the rhythm.
Once more unto this breach, my friends
Use your own words.
‘Twixt earth and sky, ‘twixt start and end.
Why? Just why?
Once more unto the break of day,
Where all shall soon be wash’d away.
Dude, just say washed.
(So mount your cigarette canoe.
I’m just an ant. But so are you.)
This part feels so decidedly modern that the use of ‘twixt’ and ‘wash’d just seem even dumber now. I mean, it certainly doesn’t help that it was dumb before.
It has no substance, and there is nothing even remotely memorable about it. The comparison of humans to raindrops is clunky at best, and I still don’t know if he said ‘earthly earth’ or not. Being able to rhyme is one thing (Though preferably consistently), but you need to be able to organize your thoughts enough to actually say something. The last chapter only existed to excuse Miller being able to put this poem in, and it's embarrassing how obvious that is.
3. the place where i was me
For once, Ted is at the café by himself.
Lana’s on vacation, an annual event she despises. Meanwhile, during third period, Caesar apparently told Ted he was upset because his cousins are coming to stay with him and his family, “Which means that Mom will make me wear that stupid freaking mask, so I don’t get sick.”
I had seen him wear the mask before; it was like putting on a lead jacket. It dragged his soul into the ground, even as it pulled his thin eyebrows into a scowl. The elastic straps made his ears stick out even more than usual. I suppose it was his version of Lana’s rain, but as he said, “At least rain doesn’t make her look like a chimpanzee.”
Just putting this here to let you know this incredibly important (Seriously, no sarcasm here. This is absolutely crucial information that is criminally unexplored throughout the first half of the book) exchange will not be elaborated upon for, oh… another 120 pages, when the plot finally decides to show up. Oh, but Baaar, surely if it was that important, the author would clearly find a way to work it into the book more? NOPE TOO BUSY BUSTING OUT THESE DANK ASS STORIES, BRO.
Ted’s mother happens to work at the café, so she comes over to give him some coffee. He explains that three years ago, his mother gave up cigarettes so she could spend her ten-minute breaks with Ted instead, and that the cigarettes were just one of many things she sacrificed for him. Well, that’s actually pretty sweet. It would be nice to see Ted interacting with an actual human for once—
Just kidding, we immediately segue into how Ted basically thinks of his mother as the vehicle for him first coming to his café, and how now he ‘belonged in that booth, and the whole world knew it.’ That spot, in that place, was everything I ever could have called home: the tear in the padding beside my leg with the yellow foam oozing out and the initials (RD) carved into the tabletop by someone’s fingernail. (We’d once spent a solid month trying to discover whose initials they were. But they might as well have been mine, now.)
So, we’ll ignore how odd and frankly cruel it seems to view your hard-working single mother as the thing that gave you your corner booth in a shitty diner, because it arguable gets worse. She asks Ted how his day was, and this is the narcissistic response we get:
There, in the flickering shadow of the neon light, where the air smelled like safety—and coffee—and the world was securely on the other side of the glass—this was where I belonged.
The place where I was me.
I shrugged in response to her aging question. “Yours?”
This is really one of the only interactions we see between these two. Now, if Ted was written by a competent author, this could potentially be a brilliant scene used to show a person’s narcissism. But Ted is never treated as even remotely pretentious, let alone narcissistic. Every single character aligns with the implication that Ted is an intellectual, because Miller himself thinks that Ted is an intellectual.
What happens next? His mother immediately asks if he’s written another story. He says no, and she tries to make some small talk about his friends and whether he wants something to eat or not. They don’t really interact like a mother and her child who are supposed to have a good relationship. Everything on page, dialogue speaking, is awkward and stilted. But then he asks her what he should write, because Ted gonna Ted.
She tells him to write about ‘this place’, and he thinks about her name-tag that she just straightened.
It was my mother’s name. A very old, dusty name, handed down in lieu of any actual inheritance. She had never been fond of it, but it grew on her, very slowly.
Like this place.
Like black coffee.
‘The blankness in his mind snaps open’ with the crack of his notebook, and the words ‘bled out black and natural, like a sigh spilled into the afternoon’.
Ladies and gentlemen: Ted, your modern day Shakespeare.
So now, we get the second short story of the book.
the society of esthers:
Admittedly, there are actually parts of this one that I like.
In another time, she might have made an excellent Viking. In another, an excellent sort of nursemaid for unruly boys, a drill-sergeant for cats. Her yellow coat, the color and smell of apricot marmalade, she wore like armor.
I’m not gonna lie, I think that’s a nice opening.
So, there’s this woman who might have been bitchin’ enough to drink mead with Odin, but she might also have been a drill-sergeant for cats? She wears a coat that looks and smells like apricot marmalade and wears it like armor? That’s bananas, and I actually kind of like it. She’s like an even stranger Mary Poppins, and I’m all about Mary Poppins. With three sentences, this character already has more character than Ted has had with nearly forty pages.
Unfortunately, for every interesting thing Miller does in this story, there are like seven terrible things he does as well.
He cannot stop describing the woman. We already had an interesting glimpse into this person, but he loves his own writing so much that he doesn't know when to temper himself.
She was, at barely over five feet, not the most impressive figure. But whatever she lacked in height, she made up for with her wardrobe shoulders and and the flat-lined mouth that she kept tightly closed, even when she smiled--which she didn't very often. And yet, despite the collective ferocity of her countenance, it was a somewhat understated one. When she approached the Cafe, it was in a quiet way. She did not stand out with her steel gray hair and her sturdy chin.
This is the very next paragraph.
All the quirky fun of the opening completely obliterated by an info-dumpy, well...dump. What the hell are 'wardrobe shoulders' anyway? Is she square like a wardrobe? Does she have those horrid 80s shoulder pads? But her wardrobe shoulders and her tight-lipped smile make her fierce? If her facial expression is 'collectively fierce', how can it also be understated? She is wearing a coat that both looks and smells like apricot marmalade, and it's also mentioned that she holds her black umbrella like a sword. I think she's bound to stand out just a little, even with her gray hair and sturdy chin.
The cafe was tiny from the outside. She could only assume that it was just as tiny within.
Lady Marmalade is a woman of astute observation. We can add that to her resume, right after cat sergeant.
But then we get this line:
The aging, flickering sign, traded winks with the throbbing yellow traffic-light across the road; they had been flirting in the same manner for years.
Aside from the fact that Miller really needs to focus on cleaning up his sentences, I actually did like this line. I think it's quirky and simple, refreshing after so many weird horse metaphors and 40 pages of purple prose. But this is why this story in particular was one of the more frustrating ones to me. There are glimpses of some genuinely fun and engaging concepts, but the execution is simply not there.
This story is also written using third person omniscient. To Miller's credit, it's handled slightly better here than in the last story, but it's still pretty rough. Hergrim mentioned on the last spork that a good writer can reveal a lot about characters using TPO, and we do get some more insight into this character than we got with the others. He's also clearly trying for a more whimsical approach, which, in some places, you can see. The opening has some whimsy, and there's a line about how the cafe smells like grease and bad coffee, but it also smells like pie, and plenty of horrible things can be endured for pie. I think that's a cute line.
There's even this weird ass line that tires so hard to be whimsical that you can almost feel your body dying as you read it:
A pitiful variety of cacti decorated the counter (Dreaming of dust and heatstroke).
The woman sits at a booth and goes through this weird ritual 'with no room for deviation', which includes propping up her umbrella, taking out a 'severe-looking pen' from her coat which apparently has 'many pockets', her spectacles which she 'perched with both hands upon the tip of her nose', a pocket-watch that looks and weighs as much as a doorknob, and a small black notebook, which is 'very black and very square'. She lines all these objects on the table and takes a deep breath before opening the notebook, 'for which she opened her mouth a small, catfish amount'.
Here she reads the words 'Esther Hollens. Waitress/Cook'. We then get our first genuine insight into this woman's thoughts, when she realizes that she had come for a pancake-flipper, a coffee-pourer. A floor-sweeper. She may as well have been dressed in rags and sporting a pair of shackles. But this was of little consequence really, and no real inconvenience; the name may as well have read Cinderella. And the woman in the marmalade jacket may as well have been a Brick-Shaped Fairy-Godmother. She felt rather like one, and she rather liked the feeling (though she allowed no indication).
I think if I read one more 'may as well have', I'm going to throttle something. So, I guess 'wardrobe shoulders' means that she's literally brick-shaped after all? The Cinderella angle is confusing at best, because we have virtually no insight into Esther Hollens' character. She has a little bit of dialogue, but we know nothing about her. We have no idea if she's this poor and downtrodden waitress waiting to be rescued by someone, so how is Lady Marmalade like her fairy godmother? What about her makes her even remotely fairy godmother-like to begin with?
Fair questions, right? Well, too bad, because they'll never be answered.
A waitress named Katie comes to take her order. She has a thick accent and calls Lady Marmalade shugga four times in the span of one page, because everyone knows waitresses in diners always have thick southern accents and call everyone shugga. Lady Marmalade orders 'tea, with lemon, an egg, fried, and pie'. She asks if the berries are fresh, and when she's told they are, she says, "They will suffice. Tea first."
Now, I know he's trying to build this character up as no-nonsense, but the problem with that is the opening description of this character does not align with this angle. There's an element of whimsy in a person wearing a coat that looks and smells like apricot marmalade, someone who could have easily been a Viking or a drill-sergeant for cats. Someone who wields her umbrella like a fucking sword. There are all kinds of lines with whimsical (Albeit sometimes stupidly so) touches, like enduring unpleasant things for pie and cacti dreaming of dust and heatstroke. The cafe sign flirts with the traffic light across the street.
But in the actual story, she's just kind of a jackass and there really isn't a lot of whimsy shown to us. She makes pretty snide assumptions about Esther Hollens without even knowing her. She makes fun of Katie for her accent and how nice she's being (Having worked in customer service, it's literally her job to be nice to Lady Marmalade). She lies about being Esther Hollens' relative to get her to come speak with her. She fantasizes about being the fairy godmother to Esther Hollens' Cinderella, a person she doesn't even know. How fucking deluded and narcissistic is that?
The pie arrives while she's waiting for Esther Hollens, and we get a line that makes no sense. For something so bright and yellow to devour something so dark purple, without slowly turning to some shade of green, was remarkable. This line confused me so much that I had to reread it and analyze it. If you mix yellow and purple together, you're going to wind up with brown, not green. If he means green as in sick, what does the pie being purple have to do with anything? She would get sick because she ate so much pie, not because the pie itself is purple. Help me detective, Antishurtugal.
So, Esther, believing she's coming out from the kitchen to meet a long-lost relative, introduces herself to Lady Marmalade, who says, in perfect Miller dialogue:
Yes," she said. "The baker of pies."
Esther gives her a 'quiet smile', as opposed to a bone-shattering loud one. She asks how they're relatives and Lady Marmalade says they're relatives 'in a manner of speaking'. Her name is Esther Mae Melbourne. Esther says she doesn't meet many people who share her name, and Lady Marmalade says what is perhaps one of the weirdest lines so far.
The older looked woefully at the sky. "Indeed. The greater generation is behind us. A dying breed, but faithful."
Lady Marmalade gives Esther a tiny piece of paper and says, "We Esthers need to stick together. There are more of us than you might think. But less than there once were." The card winds up being an invitation to join something that is never actually disclosed, and Esther goes back to the kitchen. Lady Marmalade finishes her pie, checks her watch, and walks back out 'into a world too gray to fully support her coat's choice of shade'.
What a weird fucking thing to say.
At the bus stop across the road, she sits down 'beside a very tall woman with hair the texture and shape of cotton candy and the definition of periwinkle'. So...just periwinkle? This woman is also named Esther, and she is dressed entirely in mismatched plaid for some reason. She asks Lady Marmalade if Esther Hollens will be joining them, and we get this cryptically disappointing ending:
"Not yet," replied the one with the steel [hair]. "But we shall see. In time, when she realizes that she has nowhere else to go, perhaps we may make the acquaintance of young Lady Hollens once again. Desperation shall, as ever, be our ally."
The bus trundled in. And the bus trundled out. And the town was two Esthers less.
Seriously? This isn't a short story. It's a weird drabble with some interesting concepts that could potentially be fleshed out to be something, but it's nothing as is.
Why do the Esthers dress the way they do? Why are they all named Esther? Why is there a society of them? Why did Lady Marmalade hunt Esther Hollens down in the first place?
Nope, that's it. No hint of what the society of Esthers even does, or why they all have the same name. They just get on the bus after talking about the waitress Esther becoming desperate when she realizes she has nowhere to go, and they leave.
Oh, remember how I said all these stories are woven around the framing device of Ted and company chilling in the cafe? They're eventually supposed to all tie together. I'm curious to see how some of you think the society of Esthers could possibly connect to the Queen who sniffs lions.
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