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    The Divine Farce
    The Divine Farce
    The Divine Farce
    Ebook76 pages1 hour

    The Divine Farce

    By Michael S. A. Graziano

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    About this ebook

    “A Dante/Beckett reduction of human struggle to its lowest common denominator.”—Michael Mirolla, author of The Formal Logic of Emotion and Berlin

    “One of the most original and thought-provoking stories I have ever read...true literary art...Not a word is wasted in this masterpiece. Yes, I call it that. I have read many classics, and I can tell you that The Divine Farce should be counted among them; the finest in American literature.”—Geekscribe

    Three strangers are condemned to live together in darkness, crushed together in a concrete stall so small that they can never sit down. Liquid food drips down from above. Waste drains through a grid on the floor. So begins one of the strangest, most surreal comments on the human experience, on love and hatred and the human ability to find good in any situation, no matter how difficult. Michael S. A. Graziano delights in the macabre and surreal, yet it is his optimism that lifts this little novel. Like The Love Song of Monkey, this book is deeply thought provoking, horrifying, and funny.

    Praise for The Love Song of Monkey:

    “Imaginative, intelligent narrative. Twin ideas of forgiveness and mercy twist through this strange, moving, patiently wrought novel.”—Publishers Weekly

    “Fabulously imagined, seriously considered, and very funny. A kind of fairytale antithesis on the meaning of existence. . . . Fantastic.”—Spirituality and Health Books

    “Strange but wonderful . . . like nothing I’ve read before. A very short book, but the scope is epic in detail. . . . I enjoyed the heck out of this book.”—Geekscribe

    “Should be required reading in the writing grad schools. . . . There’s nary a word wasted. What’s left is comedy, retrospection, betrayal, tenderness, meditations on loneliness, a love story that survives all attempts to suppress it . . . not bad within 149 pages.”—Barnstable Patriot

    Michael S. A. Graziano, Princeton University neuroscientist, is the author of the novella Hiding Places (New England Review, 1997), the novel The Love Song of Monkey (Leapfrog Press, 2008), and The Intelligent Movement Machine (Oxford University Press, 2008).

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLeapfrog Press
    Release dateNov 1, 2009
    ISBN9781935248088
    The Divine Farce

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      Book preview

      The Divine Farce - Michael S. A. Graziano

      The Divine Farce

      Also by the author

      The Love Song of Monkey

      (Leapfrog Press)

      The Intelligent Movement Machine

      (Oxford University Press)

      The Divine Farce

      Michael S. A. Graziano

      Image4061.tif

      A LeapLit Book

      Leapfrog Literature

      Leapfrog Press

      Fredonia, NY

      The Divine Farce © 2009 by Michael S. A. Graziano

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be

      reproduced, stored in a data base or other retrieval

      system, or transmitted in any form, by any means,

      including mechanical, electronic, photocopy,

      recording or otherwise, without the prior

      written permission of the publisher.

      A LeapLit Book

      Leapfrog Literature

      Published in 2009 in the United States by

      Leapfrog Press LLC

      PO Box 505

      Fredonia, NY 14063

      www.leapfrogpress.com

      Distributed in the United States by

      Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

      St. Paul, Minnesota 55114

      www.cbsd.com

      Cover Painting: panel from The Last Judgment

      c.1445-50 (oil on panel)

      Rogier van der Weyden (1399-1464)

      First Edition

      E-ISBN 978-1-935248-08-8

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Graziano, Michael S. A., 1967-

      The divine farce / Michael S.A. Graziano.

      p. cm.

      ISBN 978-1-935248-04-0

      1. Humanity--Fiction. 2. Self-actualization (Psychology)

      --Fiction. 3. Forgiveness--Fiction. 4. Optimism--Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

      PS3607.R39935D58 2009

      813’.6--dc22

      2009030901

      For Florence B

      Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      The Author

      Chapter 1

      We were in darkness. It was our home. The vertical, cylindrical hollow was about two feet in diameter—tight for three adults, just large enough for us to breathe up against each other or to shuffle slowly in a bumping, awkward revolution.

      The curved inside surface of the wall had a nubbled texture against my fingertips like painted concrete. The slick feeling reminded me of a water-resistant finish, perhaps a high-gloss bathroom sealant or a hard resin. I couldn’t scratch it. I couldn’t see the floor in the dark, and I didn’t have the maneuvering space to bend down and touch it with my hands, but I prodded it with my toes and decided that it was probably a grid of metal bars welded together. The grid spaces were not quite large enough for a toe to get stuck.

      The flat ceiling, a few inches above my head, was made of the same nubbly solid material as the walls. It was punctured with perfectly round holes like bullet holes, each about the width of a finger. I stuck my index finger up into a hole as far as I could, but all I felt was a narrow shaft. Air and fluid bubbled continuously out of the holes and made a mumbling garble of sound that filled up the space around us. Without the air trickling in we would have asphyxiated. Without the liquid dribbling on our hair and running down the sides of the tube, we would have dehydrated.

      At first I thought the liquid was blood. They, whoever they were who had put us in here, had a refined enough sense of malice to feed us blood. It was warm but not hot, viscous but not oily, and I imagined that it had a salty and sweet smell, although I had trouble distinguishing the odor of one thing from another in that cramped space. Maybe the salt smell came out of our own naked and perspiring bodies.

      Thankfully, the fluid turned out not to be so horribly arterial. When I put aside my dread, I was able to identify the stuff. It was, of all bizarre things, pear nectar, and had the slightly grainy texture of pureed pear. It was ambrosia, of a sort. It was food and drink and dermal moisturizer in one. As soon as I realized the identity of the liquid, the smell of pear became overwhelming. In time I adapted and couldn’t smell it anymore.

      Arguably we should have been grateful for the nectar, but it didn’t succeed in mollifying us. We stamped, we shouted, we pounded on the walls. Of course we did. We felt sick with panic. We shook with rage. We sobbed. But none of it helped. If I hit the wall, slamming it with the soft part of my palm, lunging at it with my shoulder, I accomplished nothing more than a wet slapping sound, a dull ache, and a bruise that I could feel afterward for a while. None of us could hear any indication of a hollow space behind the wall. Its solidity was so absolute that I lost the ability to imagine emptiness outside our microcosm. In my mind the universe was filled up infinitely with concrete, and at its center was one tiny bubble in which our randomly assorted souls had been entombed.

      I wanted to jump up and land hard on the metal floor, to dent it with my heels if I could—but my head cracked into the ceiling, and when I landed, the floor was so slippery with pear nectar that my feet went out from under me. I flailed, bashing against concrete and flesh, and my two prison-mates shoved me back onto my feet again. None too gently. Our tempers were brittle.

      Rose was the only one of us who could manage to sit down. She had a more delicate build and could fold herself into the slippery space between our bodies. She felt over the metal grid of the floor and reported that there were no bolts, no screws, nothing that could be unfastened. Everything was welded solidly. We asked her to grasp the lattice and give it a hard shake, but she said no, she couldn’t, the spaces between the bars were too narrow for her fingers. She bent down her head until I felt her cheek bumping my foot, and then she hollered, her voice resonating down through the pipes, but we never heard any sound back.

      Why? Why are we here? she muttered as we helped her to stand up again. Surely the most fundamental of questions. Why are we

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