saint franken: a halloween story

ruby, cecily, & rose

cecily, aka mini-me, aka princess bubblegum, has written a terrific halloween story.  hope you enjoy! and have a great halloween night.

Saint Franken

by

Cecily Asplund

Saint franken paced around his room wondering the same thing over and over again: ”What am I gonna’ be for Halloween!?”

You’re probably thinking it would be easy to think of a Halloween costume, but Franken was a Stein and you know, Steins live forever. So Franken was stuck in this dilemma every year on the day before Halloween.

His sister Emma walked in carrying her costume-a red cape and basket full of goodies--you can tell who she was being. “You could be yourself. I’m sure you’d scare all the kids away!” she squeaked.

“Why you little--” Frank was interrupted by the sudden thought--What am I gonna’ be??

He sat down on his swivel chair and thought some more. Would I really scare the kids? he wondered.

He picked up the piece of broken glass he used for a mirror. He saw that same scar across his forehead, and an almost green undertone to his skin. It seemed like his green undertone only grew greener and greener every month.

“Time for dinner!” his mother called out from the kitchen. He climbed down the stairs and sat down to the table.

“What is this?” he questioned.

“Umm, turkey roast, why?” his mom asked.

“It doesn’t look like turkey roast, ” Frank replied.

“Hmm.” his mom said. They blessed the food and started digging in.

“Wait, what did you say?” Frank asked in disgust.

“I said, please bless the oozing crushed souls and eyeball salad,” his mom said, dishing herself up a big helping.

“Wha??” Frank murmured.

“I said, please bless the nutritious turkey roast and veggie salad.”

That made much more sense to Frank. He poked his fork into the-crushed souls? Eyeball salad? No. This couldn’t be true! Frank blinked and he saw his turkey roast. He blinked again and saw the souls and eyeballs, but well...they looked sort of appealing. Actually really appealing--especially the souls. So, he stuck his fork in and took a bite.

“First time i’ve ever seen you eat my crushed souls.” His mom said in a surprised tone.

“Hmm?” Frank mumbled looking up at his mom.

“I said, ‘First time i’ve ever seen you eat my turkey roast,’” she repeated.

“Ohh.” Frank replied.

That night, Frank forgot about his Halloween costume and thought about the incident at dinnertime. He fell sound asleep and woke up at midnight-his face looking as if he had spray painted it green, and his scar even broader than before.

“WHERE ARE MY SOULS!?!?” he found himself yelling.

He crashed out of the window, into the shed and took out his father’s biggest axe. His mouth watered at the the thought of dead souls. He made hungry growls and stomped over to the neighbor’s house. He pounded their door open with his axe and stormed into the little boy’s room. He roared in the boy’s face and the boy’s pale screaming soul came floating into Frankenstein’s hands.

He chomped up the soul and repeated the same steps throughout the neighborhood. Soon he was found stomping around eating everyone’s souls throughout the town.

You can still find him stomping through the forest with the rusty axe in his hand and his mouth wide open.   

i vowed and vowed and vowed and vowed

my dream costume

all during the months of august, september, and october of 2013

not to get up in the internet's grill about feminism,

mormonism, and all that fraught hot mess.

then i did.

&

it was painful. as i had feared.

&

i'm now in recovery mode.

&

***

so, i'm now going to turn to something that just brings me pure pleasure:

my dream halloween costume.

every year i think to myself:

"lara, next year, surely, you're going to sell a screenplay or get an nea grant, so you can afford to have this snow white's wicked step mother costume custom made. in really expensive fabric.  and it will fit perfectly, ensuring that you never gain weight (because it was so expensive), so you can wear it every halloween until you die.  and maybe even be buried in it."

wouldn't it look great on both a live body and a corpse?

i'm still waiting.

***


i give you the first three stanza's, which i made into a prose poem just for fun, of anne "sexton's snow white and the seven dwarves".  click on the link if you want all nine stanzas plus line breaks (i didn't find them all that useful, personally.)

sexton looking very sextonish

No matter what life you lead the virgin is a lovely number: cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper, arms and legs made of Limoges, lips like Vin Du Rhône, rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut. Open to say, Good Day Mama, and shut for the thrust of the unicorn. She is unsoiled. She is as white as a bonefish. Once there was a lovely virgin called Snow White. Say she was thirteen. Her stepmother, a beauty in her own right, though eaten, of course, by age, would hear of no beauty surpassing her own. Beauty is a simple passion, but, oh my friends, in the end you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes. The stepmother had a mirror to which she referred-- something like the weather forecast-- a mirror that proclaimed the one beauty of the land. She would ask, Looking glass upon the wall, who is fairest of us all? And the mirror would reply, You are the fairest of us all. Pride pumped in her like poison. Suddenly one day the mirror replied, Queen, you are full fair, 'tis true, but Snow White is fairer than you. Until that moment Snow White had been no more important than a dust mouse under the bed. But now the queen saw brown spots on her hand and four whiskers over her lip so she condemned Snow White to be hacked to death. Bring me her heart, she said to the hunter, and I will salt it and eat it. The hunter, however, let his prisoner go and brought a boar's heart back to the castle. The queen chewed it up like a cube steak. Now I am fairest, she said, lapping her slim white fingers. 

rahsaan roland kirk

c. showed me this video last night, and now i have a new obsession.

it's not that often you see something so--

so--

simultaneous.

i love it when impossible things reside together, and work despite their impossibility.

things like playing three flutes with your mouth at once & then adding a nose flute all while circular breathing

plus

playing amazingly layered music--

both hip & moving

& so very present--

so virtuosic yet somehow void of narcissism and ego.

maybe this is just my interpretation (the part about an absence of narcissism & ego, which seem to be burned away by the music itself), but i'm really glad c. made me watch this at the close of halloween night 2012.

legwear: charcoal tights

inspiration:  simultaneity

looking forward: to an update from julie.  so worried about her and others.  please keep her and her family in your thoughts.

full draft

i finished a draft of my first paper of the semester.  so much anxiety, now gone!  it's so scary to write a critical paper after years away from the critical paper racket.  i sat on my bed all day in my nightgown, only going out to get our traditional saturday morning donuts (one chocolate frosted with sprinkles, two cherry turnovers, and a pecan sticky bun) and then in the afternoon for a fish taco from beto's with c., eaten in the car on the way home.

i forgot to eat dinner, so i'm making some popcorn now to celebrate the completion of the draft.

i also missed the neighborhood halloween parties tonight, one of which i've attended every year since we moved her ten years ago.  that party has a disco ball, strobe lights, and club music, and it's pretty much the one time a year i dance any more.  sad.  ingrid suggested i dress as isabella stewart gardener, one of john singer sargent's portrait subjects, and that c. go as john singer sargent.

alas, we are lame in the costume department.  one of these years i'll get my act together.  it's all i can do to see that the kids are outfitted.  i have to live vicariously through ingrid, who was dali parton this year. pictures to come.  last year she was babraham lincoln.  she's a halloween genius.

i'm sad i missed the parties, but so freakin' relieved to have pumped out that draft that i hardly have room for a second emotion.

legwear:  bare plus footie socks

inspiration: letitia landon, puffery, and phantasmagoria

looking forward to: brunch with a dear, dear friend

cheery cherry tights

cherry tights for cheer.

i donned last season's cherry tights, brought from paris by one of our first awesome guest bloggers, in hopes of infusing some cheer into the day.  it helped for a while,  but the melancholy has taken a firm hold.

at least i'm pretty sure i'll feel better tomorrow.

trying to think of something fun to do tomorrow with moses and cecily.  it'll be just the three of us for sunday, which is weird.  there's usually such a crowd.

misty zion canyon.

our last day of zion's was raining.  the mists were beautiful.  i'm glad i got to see it both ways--bright blue one day & misty gray juxtaposed against the fern greens and clay reds the next.

one more thing, since i'm naming things that make me happy, in the hopes of getting a bit happier tonight, is that it's nice to be home to my kitchen, a home cooked meal, and my new ikea chef's knife, $21.95, that i swear is better than my $150.00 messermeister.  can anyone explain that?

school shoes from j.c. penney.  old school.

also, cecily's school shoes.  i love them.

also, moses' knight costume.

ready for halloween.

hey.  i feel a tiny bit better. thanks for listening.

I'll Miss this House: Withdrawal from Habit

I always enjoy watching the play when the lights come on in the house.

Lara, I went to two hours of Habit today, one not long after I'd returned form work.  I then came home to interview our guest blogger over the phone and then went back for the last hour . . . of the entire week--the very last performance ever.

The crowd was probably near capacity tonight.  Clumps of people stood at the windows watching the action inside, the imploding lives of characters who have run out of options and can't leave their crappy house, the characters who have to relive this story over and over again for an eight-hour stretch, the characters who have to utter the same heinous lines, unable--according to the rules--to add or subtract a word.

Today, I noticed a fresh baked pan of brownies on the counter, the Duncan Hines mix had been used.

I saw a character say one of his lines while chewing a piece of Halloween candy.  (In the script, the characters feel compelled to decorate--however garishly--for every holiday so as to better "fit in" in what we assume is their lower middle class housing development.

Yesterday, I watched a character lop off two words, finding himself unable to repeat one of these sentences again

I really got to know the script.

At promptly 9:00 pm the lights in the house went dark.  The play was done for the day and really done.  I would not be going back.  S and I milled around for a little.

While doing so, I ran into one of the actors from the other cast (their are two that take turns performing).  I told him how much the play had started to mean to me, how much it began to be woven into the fabric of my own life.  He was visibly touched--unless he was just acting.

I'm assuming this week will be one of withdrawal for me.  It might get a little painful.

The actors finally get to break the 4th wall.  The director is on the left.