Lance Olsen: Sewing Shut My Eyes

INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH THANKS GO TO JEFFREY DESHELL, LARRY MCCAFFERY, AND RON SUKENICK FOR EDITORIAL FEEDBACK AND SUPPORT ALONG THIS NARRATOLOGICAL AUTOBAHN, AND TO CURT WHITE, RALPH BERRY, AND FC2/BLACK ICE BOOKS FOR KEEPING THE ALTERNATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE UP AND RUNNING THROUGH THE HEART OF THE DAYDREAM NATION.

THE FOLLOWING STORIES APPEARED PREVIOUSLY — IN SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT FORM — IN ANYONE IS POSSIBLE: NEW AMERICAN SHORT FICTION (RED HEN), CAPRICE, CRIMES OF THE BEATS (AUTONOMEDIA), DICK FOR A DAY (VILLARD), FICTION INTERNATIONAL, FRYBURGER, FUGUE, GARGOYLE, HOUSE ORGAN, NOBODADDIES, POSTFEMINIST PLAYGROUND, SPITTING IMAGE, WEBER STUDIES, WISCONSIN REVIEW , AND WORDWRIGHTS .

THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. NAMES, CHARACTERS, PLACES AND INCIDENTS ARE THE PRODUCT OF THE AUTHOR’S IMAGINATION OR ARE USED FICTITIOUSLY. ANY RESEMBLANCE TO PERSONS OR EVENTS, LIVING OR DEAD, IS ENTIRELY COINCIDENTAL.

Itty “The Human” Snibb encountered the face of god, or at least the wed all-star notions of sublimity and the transcendental signified, at somewhere around thirty-three thousand feet above and about six miles due west of a point roughly triangulated by the towns of Iron Lightning, Thunder Butte, and Faith, South Dakota, in a part of that fortieth state so mind-numbingly flat you could in all likelihood get out of your car on the two-lane highway there in the early afternoon, unzip your bowling ball pouch, and begin rolling that ball in an easterly direction, get back in your car, drive ahead twenty miles, stop, get out, sit by the side of the road and partake of a pastrami sandwich, a beer, even a lengthy nap, and before nightfall probably catch sight of that ebony orb revolving slowly toward you silhouetted by a stunning sunset colored mandarin orange and frog green with dust airborne by the continual and sometimes pushy Great Plains breeze.

But he didn’t mean to.

It was an accident, the last thing, in fact, on Itty’s mind, as most people who encounter the face of god will tell you is the case, if they’re being honest with themselves.

Itty “The Human” Snibb was about as undevout a guy as you can imagine, which is why among other things people called Itty “The Human” Snibb Itty “ The Human ” Snibb. They were being ironic. The truth was there appeared to be very little human about him. His head, for instance, vaguely reminded most people of a fleshy anvil turned sideways with a curl of black hair where the forehead should’ve been and a pair of pink sores where most people would have drawn the eyes. His fingers and toes looked more like tiny callousy hammerhead sharks than conventional fingers and toes. And his stubby thirty-three-year-old body sported just a hint of a hunchback as it struggled to stretch just a smidgen over three feet into the biosphere, miscalculating genes having done a major number on the algebra of his bones and muscles and having led Itty both to his lack of devotion and to his potent if grantedly paranoid belief that he was really the normal one around here and that the rest of the world was inhabited by a race of grotesque giants whose job it was to persecute him — if, that is, he didn’t persecute them first, which, actually, he did, the only way he knew how: by going to business school, where he studied with the ferocity of a Great White bearing down on the Platonic ghost of Jacques Cousteau, and thus graduated, if not at the top of his class, then certainly high enough in the rankings to do some real damage to the U.S. economy by dressing in snappy if understandably ill-fitting suits and beginning his own chain of convenience stores called IttyBigMan’s, or IBM’s for short, which he built on the most desolate patches of highways he could find in places like Nebraska, Idaho, and South Dakota, patches where motorists got (with even the slightest innuendo) easily anxious about such things as starving to death and/or running out of gas and being visited by a nice-guyish serial killer stopping to lend a hand, and by sticking up a thicket of gently but steadily intimidating signs (concocted by a crack team of psychologists in Itty’s employment), and by charging the unwary and mildly desperate patrons stellar prices for items nobody would buy except in limit-situations, such as those dried brown sticks of leather masquerading as meat byproducts or those dumb red plastic mugs printed with state mottoes (“Equality Before the Law,” “Esto Perpetua,” “Under God the People Rule”) that you fill with ice water and then spill the first time you need to change lanes abruptly because of that Winnebago veering into your path like some tin-and-tire sperm whale into the path of an oncoming speedboat.

Which is what brought Itty to somewhere around thirty-three thousand feet above a point roughly triangulated by the towns of Iron Lightning, Thunder Butte, and Faith: he was in the process of flying from his home base on a barren bump in the cornfields of mid-Illinois to a franchise-owners convention in a low-slung motel somewhere in the central wastelands of Washington State for the purpose of receiving a silver plaque in recognition of his ground-breaking concept of Anxiety Purchasing, and he’d been awake all night with his stable of PR men drafting his acceptance speech, which began “I guess what I’ve got to say is that I don’t really feel I deserve this award, but, then, I am almost one-hundred-and-ten inches tall and have a hunchback and I don’t really feel I deserve these things either,” and which went on to insinuate in the most charming terms possible the presence of a vast conspiracy of lanky people whose mission was to undermine the confidence and financial success of short people throughout the world by doing stuff like making sinks just high enough so the faucets were out of reach and manufacturing chairs so far off the ground that short people like Itty never looked credible at board meetings. The outcome of his sleeplessness was not only a golden-tongued oration bound to garner yet more media attention for his fast-growing string of IBM’s, with the needless-to-say concomitant rise in quarterly earnings, but also a champion case of the flu, mean as that monster in