Matt Briggs blogs from between Seattle and Tacoma in the Pacific Northwest.
The Funnel | Fiction by Matt Briggs (Mar 19, 2014)
“I observed immediately that dating was identical to looking for a job. You needed to send out a lot of resumes. You needed to interview to find a promising match. But you didn’t need to make a career of it. I essentially created a sales funnel.”
by Matt Briggs
WHEN PAT TOOK BOARDWALK, PARK PLACE WAS STILL IN PLAY. He couldn’t resist touting his slumlord skills. He would lock us in tenements at the edge of the Monopoly board so foul that he wouldn’t have to call the exterminator because not even vermin would live there. “I’ll charge you a fortune and use the cash to buy useless things like gourmet marshmallows to feed to the pigeons.” In the middle of his rant he turned to Hanna, my wife, and said, “I guess I like women.”
by Matt Briggs
ELISSA NEVER TOLD JASON ANYTHING. Rather Elissa’s texts became shorter and less frequent. At her peak, Elissa had been a three-times a day texter. She sent him a short note in the morning telling him something about her dreams. She had vivid and violent dreams. She dreamt she was a starling that had gone on a rampage against the squirrels in her neighborhood. It was a re-occurring dream and had become a running joke between them. When her dreams were peaceful, she would say her dream had been “starling-free.” She sent mid-day texts in the middle of meetings where she was seized with boredom. Must die. She sent texts in the evening that were vaguely amorous. I am not wearing any pants.
by Matt Briggs
A DEPAKOTE DREAM IS UNLIKE A PAXIL DREAM. It is unlike any of the dreams I don’t remember from before I began my chemical regimen. I don’t remember my old dreams exactly, but I know I had them. I would wake with a flash of something: a boat on a clear lake, the sound of a train on tracks. When I woke from my Depakote sleep, I woke with nothing. I didn’t remember sleep. Rather, the alarm made a noise. I pressed the sound off, and then I climbed out of bed and consulted my memory. With Depakote, I had no idea how I feel. This was a state I desired for those sleepless months before I went to the hospital. I wanted all sensation to end. It was too much. Now all sensation had stopped, and I felt as if my mind was a pond that had been frozen since before the last Ice Age.
by Matt Briggs
MY WIFE MARTY WAS IN AL-ANON. Marty always took my with her on what I thought of as her meet-and-greets. Marty wasn’t trying to sell anything. She wasn’t running for office, but rather I figured she was looking for something about herself in these meetings. These were retired boozers like she was, and they had moved and assembled lives out of whatever was left of their health, of their marriages, families, out of their cars that were still sometimes banged up in inexplicable places because of the type of collisions you have when you are blacked out. We were visiting Ralph and his wife Samantha who went by Sammie. They lived in an actual cul-de-sac in the suburbs. Ralph had a five-year-old Chevy Impala, one of the new editions, and he had somehow dented the roof of the car and then tried to pull the dent out so that it had a metal cowlick.
by Matt Briggs
AT COSTCO, WHILE WAITING FOR MY TIRES TO BE FIXED, I went for a walk along the Green River. I am at the Tukwila CostCo on a road named after the warehouses. I am in the parking lot of an office park of small businesses in warehouses. A stand of cotton-wood trees surrounds a pond that at first, I take to be an oxbow of the Green River, a slough of wet land. I walk along the Green River flowing from the south. The river runs from the slopes of the Cascades south of Black Diamond from the Cedar River Watershed in the jungle of passes where I-90 passes over the central Cascades. The Green River used to be joined by the Mount Rainier glacier fed White River and then the two rivers empties into the Black River at Lake Washington, but things changed the flow. A massive log jam flipped the White River from the channel going north to the west, where it emptied out into Commencement Bay in Tacoma. The lowering of Lake Washington caused the Green River to shift into the Duwamish River channel. The Green River now changes names in Tukwila to the Duwamish. The entire valley floor of the Kent valley feels the echoes of these changes. This is land given over from the cultivation of vegetables to office parks of little warehouses.
The orbital spiders began to go to work in late August. The mornings still held the warmth of the previous night. The moths came out of the marshland across the street. They hit the deck lamp at the back of the house. When I walked the dog to the elementary playground and back at dusk, I could see the moths arrive like a snowfall in reverse. Their bodies white in the glare, drifted from the swampy ground into lamp light. An orbital spider had set her snare. From her prime location, she’d grown much larger than the competition. A spider must have logical limits of growth, and yet this spider’s size seemed determined by how many moths she ate. There was no logical limit to that. I have looked for her in the daylight to remove her so as not to make her angry. I don’t want to run into her golf ball sized abdomen in the dark. She has eat moths by the pound. At her current size she could consume sparrows, bats, stray chihuahuas. Read Message From the Moths by Matt Briggs in Pacifica Literary Magazine
Along the sleepy banks of Poverty Bay, I wouldn’t know that it was so. Russian and Vietnamese men fished for squid from the pier, and I walked into the rehabilitated forest, dripping and silent under the occasional squall of an airplane headed toward Sea Tac airport. I had been taking this walk since the park reopened a few years ago. I found the forest peaceful. Mushrooms and moss grew from the sides of the trees. Much of the forest had grown back from the initial logging. It was perhaps second or third growth. My brother asked me once, why do you always say, “second growth,” and I said because the forest is not virgin growth. It has been cut. And he didn’t get this. But the trees are there. They are standing. But you can see the stumps among the trees, I said, and this seeing the stumps among the trees, was the salient fact of a forest in the lowlands where I grew up. All forests not only had stumps but everywhere I looked, there was the accumulation and waste of the process the original pillagers of the forest had used to get rid of the trees. There were piles of rotting limbs, mounds of dirt and moss. I could find grades cut into the side of muddy hills where temporary tracks had been laid so that small steam engines called mules could hull the trees out of the forest. There were moldering trestles, and discarded metal objects rusted to sheets of flaky russet metal. The image elsewhere of Seattle’s rainy paradise was that the area was pure and wild. This image was false. The term second growth for me captured the essential nature of the degradation of my homeland. Everything I saw everywhere in my homeland was the leftovers, the sloppy remains of cutters, diggers, and shippers. Seattle presented itself, traumatized, yet wearing a North Face fleece and drinking a cup of herbal tea sweetened with honey as a kind of high tech, pure, and at heart moral and upstanding place. The reality, though, was this was a region of depredation and systematic and even recent violence. The natural order of the Pacific Northwest was the company town with the veneer of middle-class life on Main-street, the company run comfort stations above street level, and the threat of violence against anyone who disturbed the peace of this cheap lacquer. Seattle, the company town of the Boeing Airplane Company has been handed on from company to company: Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, and whatever is next. At the heart of Seattle’s prosperity is the same culture as any little mine town in Idaho.
by Matt Briggs
I woke on the Sunday before my work week began after a week off during the Fourth of July with a massive shape in my left eye. It appeared like a hole in my field of vision. That is, it appeared like something that wasn’t.
As I stared at it, I could see through it like a slip of cellophane stained with spaghetti grease. The shape obscured an 1/16 of my vision in the lower left-hand side of my left eye. It disappeared as suddenly as it appeared when I wasn’t staring at the wall near my bed. When I closed my eye I could see a halo of this visual disturbance in my inner eye, on my eyelid, or whatever it was that I was looking at when I was looking when my eyes were closed. I vaguely remember seeing this object before I went to bed, but I couldn’t be sure. In any case in the early morning it seemed to have vanished like other objects in my eyes have vanished before. I thought it has some artifact from my reading light like I had stared into the book light without realizing it. I didn’t want to think about it.
by Matt Briggs
When I returned from Basic Training, I started looking for classes to take in writing. I was just past the registration date for the University of Washington Experimental College where there was a short story class taught by Richard Berman, M.F.A. The title at the end of his name, tacked on like P.H.D. seemed to indicate a professional status as a writer, certification by a board that confirmed his abilities as a genuine writer, although I was unsure what it meant. I had missed the registration date, but I called the school in the off chance there might still be a spot. They took my name, and I thought that was it, I had missed my chance this quarter to study writing. I viewed this as a major setback because I only had nine months before I went to Whitman College in Walla Walla and I intended to have a novel finished before I went. Every week counted. I had to prove to myself that I could become a writer. I had a schedule to follow. As I understood it, it was a lot of work to write a novel.