asakiyume | Entries tagged with case studies

In the summers, Dyani's father took her to work with him because he didn't trust babysitters, and however dangerous it might seem to others to have a ten-year-old on a building site, Dyani's father felt most secure when he could glance over and see her.

She entertained herself with magic markers and the drywall, drawing (for example) fleets of flying frogs, held aloft by inflated bladders extending from their necks on thin stalks, or cars in flooded parking lots, their roofs colored metallic sandbars just barely visible, or children, spreading their fingers in front of their faces like fans, but so many fingers--many more than ten.

Her father didn't say anything about the artwork--didn't praise her or scold her--just put the panels into the houses, pictures facing inward so they wouldn't be painted over. In later years, some homeowners discovered these artworks when they made repairs or improvements, and the art of Dyani Alissa Hernandez was briefly a minor sensation on local news, with some homeowners speculatively making holes in their walls to see if they might have a hidden drawing. But many of the drawings are still undiscovered, surreal visions communing with insulation and wiring in early twenty-first-century subdivisions.

Pictures to come (maybe), but here is one I discovered online **after** having written the story (source)

Current Music: Popskyy: Soar Higher

Sometimes people aren’t led to fairyland by ghost-pale lights or bewitching smiles . Sometimes it simply swallows them up, gulps them down. They fall into it without realizing. They’re lost and don’t even know it.

Like Maddie, walking home from the train station after a long day at work. She stops to admire a crabapple in full bloom, ghostly in the black-and-white of nighttime, luminous—from the starlight? Like the petals are cups filled up with it.

Her head becomes completely filled with petals and starlight, and then at some point she blinks and starts and thinks, Did I just doze off ?

And,

Where am I, again?

There’s a lake up ahead, filled with water lilies. Some are breaking free from their stems and rising off the lake, spinning lazily into the air.

Is she maybe dreaming? Did I maybe leave out the part where she got home, collapsed on the couch without brushing her teeth, and fell asleep?

Maybe I’m the one that’s dreaming, or maybe you are.

It gets worse. Who am I, again? she’s thinking. She knits her brow, trying to pull together some thoughts, trying to make some sense of things, but the only thought that comes to her is something about bells—is it that the lilies can be rung, like bells, if you catch one?

Maddie has that nagging feeling that she needs to remember something. It’s important, so she strains to, shuts her eyes squint-closed and presses her lips together hard, but it’s no good.

When she opens her eyes, someone with black and white fur on their cheeks standing in front of her, someone with a red tattoo in the shape of a star between their eyes.

“Lanterns, or bells?” this person asks, holding out both hands, and in both hands are lilies, tugging to be free from this person’s grasp. Those on the right are glowing slightly; those on the left chime, subsonically, when they brush against each other.

“Bells,” says Maddie, and the person smiles and hands her a lily, and she smiles and takes it.

A texting driver made a widower of Jorge Medeiros, and perhaps it’s not too far-fetched to say that it was the association of text—words—with death that pushed him in the direction of faith in numbers.

In any case, left with the care of his two elementary-school-aged children, Jorge’s indispensible aid became a book of random numbers, a souvenir from the middle of the last century that his wife had picked up at a yard sale as a curiosity.

He started out using it for household tasks: How long should he run the dryer for? Its serial number was 4214289, so he opened the book at random and ran his finger down the columns until he came to a number that began with 421. The next two digits were seven and six. Seventy-six minutes? Seventy-six seconds? Seven point six minutes? The dryer dial said “Max Dry” next to the 70, so he decided on seventy-six minutes. The clothes were very dry.

He used the number book to determine what temperature to set the oven to keep the pizza warm, how many rolls of wrapping paper to buy for the school’s fundraiser, and how much was an appropriate amount to spend when the kids were invited to birthday parties. The results were varyingly successful and disastrous: 512 (degrees Fahrenheit) resulted in thick black smoke, a visit from the fire department, and no pizza for dinner; 96 (rolls of wrapping paper) delighted the PTO at Linsey Elementary School.

He even used the book of random numbers for the kids’ bedtime stories, at first just reading off the numbers, only to be pressed by the boys to explain the what, who, where, when, and why. Four thousand fifteen whats? Grains of sand. Twenty who? Fishermen. Three hundred fifty where? Miles off the coast of New Bedford. Eighty-eight when? Years ago.

But why?

“Thirteen,” their father said, and then, by way of further explanation, “The twenty fishermen carried the 4,015 grains of sand divided between their—” (here he consulted the book) “—five boats to ward off the bad luck of the number thirteen, when they had to go out fishing on the thirteenth day of the month. It’s a bit of the shore with them in the boat, see? So they’ll never drown. They'll always make it home.”

And so on.

This his sons have accepted as natural. Three months ago, for their father’s thirty-fifth birthday, they pooled their funds and bought him Pi to Five Million Places. He told me the gift brought tears to his eyes.

Since then, he’s abandoned his original book of random numbers and now relies entirely on pi for his number consultations, taking smaller or larger doses of it as needed, mining it from its never-ending, nonrepeating decimal tail.

“It’s a continuous stream, see? Go on, open to any page.” I opened to page 147 (of 588), and sure enough, nothing but row upon row of uninterrupted digits, zero through nine.

“Just like life . . . and irrational, too, just like life.”

Current Music: Jonathan Coulton: Mandelbrot Set

Lauren Gray is the owner of a fictionalized life, the result of a decision she made on a day in 1973, after overhearing her mother and her nana talking about her nana’s diaries. “I’m discovering all sorts of things from your childhood and before that I simply don’t recall at all,” her nana was saying. “I’ve been reading them aloud to your father. ‘Do you remember being evacuated from a sinking ferry in 1936?’ I’ll ask him. Some things he remembers, others are news to him too. It’s almost like reading someone else’s diary.”

“You’ve had a more exciting life than you thought,” observed Lauren’s mother.

Lauren went upstairs, took her own diary out from her sock-and-underwear drawer, and began to read.

Today in art we worked on clay. Mine is very good. I hope I like it when we are done. Mr. Williams got mad at me for fooling around when we were meant to be working on our projects. After school the Browns came over.

Lauren sighed. It didn’t exactly set your heart racing.

Previous entry: Today in gym I ran. My time is awful. In language arts I wrote a report. After school I did my homework. When I was finished I played with Lisa.

Downright boring. When she got to be Nana’s age and reread her old diaries, what would there be to surprise and delight her? As things stood, nothing.

Lauren took a pencil from the milk-carton pencil holder she’d made in art last year and contemplated an entry for the day. She thought of the filmstrip they’d seen in social studies, “Krihisiwa: Child of the Amazon,” about a boy from the Yamomamo tribe in Brazil. She chewed on the eraser end of the pencil. At last she started to write.

We have a new kid in school. His name is Krihisiwa. He used to live in the Amazon rain forest.

She thought about the details of the filmstrip.

He told us that where he comes from, they eat grubs, she wrote. Everyone said that was gross but I told him I wouldn’t mind eating a grub. Lauren wrinkled her nose. That was not true, but maybe her future self would be impressed by her dietary adventurousness. She wrote on.

After school, he asked me if I wanted to learn how to shoot a big bow, like the kind they use where he’s from.

Lauren smiled to herself. She could see—could practically remember—Krihisiwa, could see the astonished faces of her classmates, could hear Krihisiwa’s voice. He’d have some kind of accent, but she’d be able to understand him. Her toes tingled and her cheeks felt warm.

She was going to have the most exciting life ever.

Current Music: Molly and Maggie: Greasy Coat

Tilly Mahan collects angel skeletons, and she is happy to show them to anyone who asks. The problem--as religious authorities, newspaper reporters, and local children have discovered--is that Tilly's conception of angels and skeletons differs from most people's.

Her collection includes the following:

a plaster cast of a tire rut, taken from a not-yet-paved road in a stalled housing development
three charred fragments from a lightning-struck white pine
an old-fashioned brass key whose wards do, it must be said, resemble angel wings
a plastic soprano recorder with a crack in its head joint
a fringed suede moccasin, worn through at the sole, but with a jingle-bell sewed at the back
an unused bittersweet-orange zipper, 20 inches long, still in its packaging
a railroad spike with a glisten of snail trail across it

You get the idea. No photos of snow angels, no boxes of angel food cake mix, no swan feathers or anything like that.

You may be imagining Tilly Mahan as a dotty old lady, living alone, or maybe with a cat or two, or a saluki or two. Maybe in a tumbledown cottage by a fen. But in fact, she lives above Ernie & Bert's Pizza, and she's only thirty-two. It's true she lives alone, but she doesn't seem particularly dotty. She'll talk to you in a very ordinary way about finding the various skeletons; it's only if you question the word skeleton itself, or the word angel, that she stops talking and just stares at you. Just stares, as if from the other side of a chasm that once a bridge spanned.

The song of the wood thrush: it’s entrancing, enchanting--and nourishing? Consider the case of Brian Blessing, the new music teacher at Powell Middle School. Maybe being a music teacher had something to do with it, or maybe not. Maybe it would have worked out the same for you or me, if we’d been in Brian’s position (God willing, we’ll never be in Brian’s position).

And that position was, bundled into Allan Wilson’s car, with one of Allan’s brothers on either side of him, headed for the spur of track that serves the sawmill. There Allan intended to make Brian understand, in a visceral way, that it was a bad idea for Brian to flirt with, let alone go out to dinner with, Allan’s ex-wife Marnie, who taught seventh grade in the classroom next to the music room.

Just when it was seeming that assault and battery might progress to homicide, a police car turned onto the sawmill access road, spooking the Wilson brothers, who shoved Brian into a decrepit shed beside the tracks and took off.

Back in town, no one knew what had happened to the music teacher, and as for Brian himself, even when he managed to find his way back to consciousness, he couldn’t muster the strength to lift himself up, and his broken jaw and cracked ribs precluded the sort of loud hollering that might possibly have caught someone’s attention, if they had happened to be walking along the spur line behind the sawmill.

So Brian lay in that shed all night, and all the next day, and the following night, and the day after that. No food, no water. Several times a day the shed shook as railroad cars loaded with lumber rolled from the spur line to the main tracks. The rest of the time, Brian could hear the sounds of the sawmill’s operations--and birdsong. From before the sun rose, cardinals and song sparrows, catbirds and starlings, robins and orioles. And the wood thrush. Adrift in a sea of pain, Brian clutched at the wood thrush’s song. It soothed his wounds and thirst like springwater; it filled him and satisfied him like bread.

Finally, five days after the Wilsons had grabbed him, Brian was discovered, a delirious wreck, so the medics first assumed, when Brian tried to tell them how he had subsisted on thrushsong, and yet at the hospital the doctors confirmed that he was not dehydrated. His blood sugar levels were normal, and there were no ketones present. Very strange, everyone agreed.

Brian was never quite the same after that, and I’m not talking about the limp. I’m talking about his diet. He’d always bring a sandwich to school for lunch, often something from Subway. But during the green months, from May to September, if you caught him at home in the early morning or around suppertime, you’d see him sitting outside, facing the trees, an empty plate balanced on his knees and an empty mug in his hand, listening to the wood thrush.