Thomas Wiloch was one of the top practitioners of the prose miniature or what is referred to as a prose poem or micro-fiction. As a tribute to this mostly overlooked, nearly forgotten author, below are pieces published in Asylum Arts, first a short-short story (one of my all-time favorite stories that I've read again and again) and then four nursery rhymes retold Wiloch-style. Enjoy!
THESE WORDS
Sometimes I wonder about who reads these words. I know where the words come from. They start inside of me, at a point inside my head, just behind my eyes and between my ears. That’s the point where, when I want to make words and don’t want to use my mouth to form them, I am able to “say” the words without their being heard by anyone but me.
That’s where these words come from.
Where they go I can only guess at this point. I will send them to a magazine that likes to print words of this kind, words that come from inside somebody and are written down on paper, are later typed up neatly on clean white sheets, and mailed out in an envelope. There are magazines out there that print such words. And people who buy those magazines because they like to read words like these.
It is a December night in the late 1980s as I write these words in a spiral notebook in my house. When I go to the office tomorrow, I will type these words during lunchtime and mail them out to a magazine. They will be read by the magazine’s editor, and by his typesetter and his printer, and eventually, when the magazine appears in a few months’ time, by people who buy the magazine. Perhaps you are one of those magazine buyers who are reading these words. If so, hello.
But it doesn’t stop there. It goes on. That magazine will still exist long after the last copy is sold. It will be on shelves and in boxes and stuffed into desk drawers all over the world. Years from now, when the magazine buyer has long forgotten that magazine, someone else can run across it, and leaf through the pages, and stop at this page, and read these words.
It even continues. Maybe I will gather these words together with other words I have written. I will call that big group of words a book. There are publishers who print books filled with words like these, and there are people who buy and read such books too. Perhaps that is who you are, a person who has bought that hypothetical book of the future. If so, hello.
After a time that book will go out of print. Years later, a stray copy of that book could be on a shelf in a secondhand bookstore. A customer is browsing, scanning the book titles for something of interest, something to kill a little of his time. He sees a book and glances through it, stops at these words, and reads, them.
Maybe it is some time in the middle of the next century, in a store in a distant city, and this book browser is standing in an aisle with a book in his hands (rather dusty and battered by then!), and he is reading these words silently to himself, pronouncing these words with that little voice he has inside his head, behind his eyes and between his ears. And he wonders to himself, who is the guy who wrote these words? What was he like? What was his purpose in writing these words?
If that is you, a dead man says hello. What’s the next century like?
And so these words will continue to live, reincarnating afresh within each new person who reads them, all of us strangers to one another, but sharing the secret of these words.
FOUR NURSERY RHYMES
JACK IS AN AGILE YOUNG FELLOW
Jack is an agile young fellow.
Jack possesses the ability to maximize his locomotion rate,
Jack launches himself in a trajectory designed to overfly the wax-burning light source.
DIMINUTIVE JACK HORNER, ESQ.
Diminutive Jack Horner, Esp., reclined in one of the sanctum's right angles, consuming the fruit pastry he had received in homage of his spiritual savior's nativity.
He inserted his first digit into the aforementioned pastry and shortly thereafter withdrew a globular fruit of the genus Prunus and exclaimed, "What a morally-acceptable young man and I."
THE BOVINE CATAPULTED HERSELF OVER THE LUNAR SATELLITE
Attention time wasters, the feline and the stringed instrument,
The bovine catapulted herself over the lunar satellite.
The bovine's apogee was such that it peaked at the heaven's summit,
And the porcelain tea-container eloped with the concave sterling silver eating utensil.
MARY, MARY, RATHER ORNERY
In what manner does your field of edible plants propagate?
With spiral abodes of gastropod mullusks and hollow devices formed of semi-precious metal which resonates sweet tones and undersized young females arranged into a single continuous queue.
American author Thomas Wiloch, 1953-2008
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