Writing and surviving in the Netherlands

Some middlefingers have a story

2008-10-09T01:20:00.000-07:00

One day our accountant visited our house. I saw in one boring glance this was a hell of a boring man. He was dressed in gray, and his hair was gray, but his face intelligent. I liked his face.
So, I thought: how can anyone smart look so boring? He had a suitcase in his hand, you know the kind of suitcases accountants always have on their hand. But then I noticed something very exciting. He had only 4 fingers on that hand. Gosh, It made me feel so good. I wanted to shake that hand. So, I offered him my left hand (the middle finger was missing on his left hand), so he had to replace that suitcase to his right hand, to shake my hand. Then I took his hand and didn't let go of it, while he repeated his name. I held the hand real tough and shook it over and over again, and then I said: My name is Daphne Buter, how nice to meet you. But you know what I really like about you? (I still held his hand).

'Feel free to say so ma'am,' he answered.

'Well, I am so pleased you miss one finger on this hand.'

Then I let go of his hand and smiled at him friendly and added as fast as a could: 'Don't get me wrong. I do not insult you. I don't make fun about your hand, but I have great memories to a hand like that. When I was a child I had an uncle who had only 4 fingers on one of his hands. And he could do wonderful things with that 4 finger hand. He could act like he lost one in the morning. Or he could put the stub in his ear and act like he tickled his brains. And you know what? Because of all that, he was my favorite uncle and I adored him because he had only 9 fingers.'

So, this accountant gazed at me, then he smiled insecure and answered: 'Good lord, not in my entire life I've met someone who had the guts to open any conversation with me, about my missing finger. But I like it. Thank you.'

'Good,' I said. 'You should like it. It is great you have only four fingers on that hand. It makes you special, no matter how you lost it.'

Then we went upstairs and when we were there, the man looked pale and he couldn’t breathe very well. So without asking I went to the kitchen and brought an ashtray back and placed it on the table.

'Feel free to smoke,' I said.

He looked at me and asked: 'Ma'am, this is the first time we meet. How can you be so sure I smoke?'

'Well,' I said, 'you are maybe 50 years old. You've just climbed one stair and you look pallid as a ghost and you have problems breathing. So, there are only two options. 1. You are very ill, but then you wouldn't be here but at home in bed or in a hospital. 2. You smoke and your heart is giving up soon.'

(I know this was very confronting. But it was just one of these days. I was flying. Live looked okay. The man was so boring I had to open his soul. I had to dig it to find a bridge to his real person.)

He gazed at me again, then he shove the ashtray aside and said: 'Well, well, well... I swear to you ma'am, after this visit I'll never smoke again. I promise you that.'

'You've just made yourself a promise, 'I said, 'don't promise me a thing, I don't need it. You do.'

Then he did his job. Talked about money and things. He didn’t smoke during the visit. Later he left, shook my left hand again and you know, I could tell we liked each other. He was a good man. I asked him or I could have a closer look at his missing finger and he allowed me. And I held his hand in both my hands, smiling, and I was allowed to touch the stub. Then I’d let go of his hand and said: ‘that is a great hand, believe me.’

A few months later he phoned me. He said: 'Daphne Buter I phone you to tell you that I did quit smoking that day. I didn't smoke one cigarette after that day. And you know something else? I also look different at my funny hand. I do no longer hide it. I make jokes with it now for my grandchildren.'

We had a very amusing conversation about how life can change things sometimes,
Later that day a bunch of flowers arrived with a message on a card that said :

Thank you for taking my addiction from me, but giving my invisible finger back.'

Bird Of Chalk

2008-07-22T15:34:00.000-07:00

Once I made a drawing on a blackboard at school. I must have been maybe seven years old. It was a drawing of a bird. A huge bird with a long beak. I shall never forget that bird. I shall never forget all the other kids said how beautiful the bird was. I knew this bird was a part of me. All the colours and the hungry wings spread out… It came out me and there it was. Free as a bird of chalk.
When the teacher came in she was real angry with me. She obeyed me to take the brush and she made me wipe out the bird. The bird became powder. The powder fell onto to floor and the bird became dust. The bird disappeared for ever from the blackboard, it had to vanish from there, but it never disappeared back into me. Once things come out, they cannot go back where they come from completely.

Never Trust A Toddler

2006-01-21T22:19:00.000-08:00

Picture by me.

Some toddlers are, let’s say, odd. Like the toddlers of my friend B. She has six of them. And her toddlers are, let’s say, special. I don’t know which word would fit them. It’s on the tip of my tongue but the word won’t arrive. Anyway, last week my friend B. asked me to look after two of her, lets say, weird toddlers. And as soon as B. had left our house the funny toddlers started whining for candy.

“We want candy, You must give us candy. We want candy, You must give us candy. We want candy. You must give us candy…”

It sounded much like a bewitching mantra.

I said, ‘hey, listen to me you little peculiar toddlers, first you have to eat your puffed rice, and after that you can have some candy, just like a regular toddler.’

Well, I don’t know what happened next, but a little later I was eating puffed rice and the toddlers of B. were eating candy.

Heck. Now I know the word I was looking for. My friend B. has a bunch of hypnotizing toddlers.

Frigg Magazine Is Up

2006-01-19T01:29:00.000-08:00

Artwork by me.

Enough about death for now because the winter issue of Frigg Magazine is up. Frigg Magazine was the second magazine that accepted stories I wrote in my funny English. You can find these here: Five Flashes

I became friends with staff editor Ellen Parker. Now and then I make some artwork for Frigg. Sometimes a bit like the piece above this text.

This issue I was invited to submit 5 pictures as featured photographer. You can find them here: Five Pictures

Frigg Magazine is my favourite zine. Take a look at the whole magazine here: FRiGG Magazine

And don’t forget to enjoy the beautiful artwork of EnoaraF. His name is a mystery, sorry. Frigg Magazine is an explosion of good work, no doubt about that in my mind.

Spinning Over The Stiff Earth

2006-01-12T01:15:00.000-08:00

I shot this grave, and then it died.

My brother and I were at the graveyard where we had buried our mother two days before. We were still in disbelief about her sudden death. It was on a shadowy day in February. The sky had the color of one of Amsterdam’s frozen canals. The branches of trees were covered with translucent blue ice. The air had no taste but frostiness.
We passed all kind of tombs and started to read the inscriptions. Some crypts were so old that the names were hard to read. We examined an inscription with metal characters that read:

Safe in the holy arms of God, rests here my beloved wife and our wonderful mother: Jack de Wit.

It was obvious the metal character y had fallen off.
My brother and I started laughing. We laughed so loudly our laughter echoed over the graveyard. We laughed out of control and tears were running over our faces.

“O my God,” my brother bawled laughing insanely while he fell on his knees, “I’m so glad mom’s name wasn’t Jacky!”

“Yeah. Right,” I yelled hysterical back while I collapsed to my knees as well, “but the problem is, her first name was John…”

My brother and I never laughed like that before. We were laughing like idiots. We revolved over the frozen earth, embracing each other and crying with laughter. We couldn’t stop laughing for at least five minutes, spinning over the stiff earth like fools. At one point we hardly moved anymore. We just lay there on the rigid planet under that icy February sky. Two big daft orphans on an ice-covered graveyard in Amsterdam, holding each other like exhausted lovers.

PS. Visit the link hidden in the orange title of this text, and you'll feel much better.

Believing In Men Like Santa And God

2005-12-26T05:03:00.000-08:00

Picture by me.

This morning the heavens turned into a dark emerald and a bright strike of light escaped from the sun, hiding behind a few clouds. Then hailstones, large as marbles, began to fall in our garden. The light was out of this world and the hailstones sparkled, and it was all so beautiful, almost as if a supernatural being was planning it. We walked outside with our girls, and we began to dance in our garden. We spun in circles, holding hands, bare feet, while the hailstones kept falling, turning the world into a white psychosomatic swamp.
Then we spoke about our friend M. who’s eighteen and dying of cancer. We were just dancing there, raising our arms to the sky, and asking the universe to have compassion for M.
Doubtless we were praying in our own way.
I felt the same kind of happiness and sadness this morning when we were dancing there, which I sometimes experienced when I was a child thinking of life as something enduring. When I still believed in magical men that brought me presents or eternity, like Santa and God.

I've Got The Door In My Suitcase

2005-12-21T03:14:00.000-08:00

My dream looked something like this.

I gazed outside my attic window and noticed that above the houses of Amsterdam, animals that looked like artificial dinosaurs hung stationary in the sky. Some of them had elongated necks and tails, others just protuberant bodies with heavy legs, that dangled above the trees. The creatures had dark colors, like purple and shadowy red. The sky grew darker and I thought the end of times began. Suddenly a bright streak of light fractured the sky. I saw a door in the heavens, made of clouds. While all the artificial animals started to move in circles, the door in the sky opened like a jaw and swallowed the earth. For some reason my house was still there, but outside my window was nothing but a thick blackness. I stretched my arms out of the window and touched the blackness, it felt like a never-ending emptiness.
I turned around and noticed my room was gone, changed into another place. In the middle of a hallway sat my mother on a throne, dressed in black old-fashioned clothes. A dress made of black velvet; a hat that looked like a bag. I looked at her face and noticed she was blind. I left the room and walked into another room. There was a man with a suitcase, who asked me or I knew a way out of this place.

"I’m lost myself," I said.

The man smiled at me mysteriously and his face came very close to mine when he said "I’ve got the door in my suitcase."

I tried to follow the man with the door in the suitcase but the faster I walked the further he went. I decided to go back to the room with the throne with my mother on it, but behind me was nothing but a blooming forest.
Suddenly I recognized the gardens of my youth. The trees surrounded me with white blossoms. I felt a huge happiness filling my mind. I had never seen the gardens so vivid and bright. I looked for the house where I was born, but the house was not there. Under one of the trees I saw the suitcase of the man and I wondered if the door to the house where I was born was inside it. I just stood there, wondering how another world behind a door could fit in that suitcase. After some time, I walked to the suitcase and opened it. Now the cover of the suitcase seemed to be a door itself, and behind it was my attic room. I walked inside and noticed that the dinosaurs were still soaring through the sky.

This flash was published in print magazine Sleeping Fish.

A Man Who Had Lost His Head

2005-12-18T01:54:00.000-08:00

Picture by me.

This morning my husband told me his dream. First he had been lost in a building. Next he lost his head in that building. There he was, a man who had lost his head, lost in a building.

Capitulate When I Arrive Into Your Bright Green Haunt

2005-12-15T00:42:00.000-08:00

The other day I was thinking about T., and why he was murdered in Amsterdam some years ago. Vivid memories are haunting me lately. My life is a container of things that are no longer here. Like the night in this poem, vanished:

Capitulate When I Arrive Into Your Bright Green Haunt

The key unlocked the front door of your parents house.
I saved it in a locker many years, until one day
I lost it to the kids.

Yet our love affair took place in a dimmed attic room.
Cosmic expectations proved we were still young.
Rather I remember Cassius wrapped up in oil and satin;
On the wall – his penis grew from golden-haired moss

You spit a piece of tinsel in the mouth
of my wet hand.

Your parents slept next to your little brother
in a lonely land.
He looked so shy, a younger you.
His face a collection of bleached stamps.
A recollection.

I should have kissed the dried lips
Of your father to console the
Arctic future that was waiting as a whole,
but unaware I climbed the stair
to sweltering shadows
flaming powder,
anorexic in a steep jaunt
while spiders hid in silent laughter.

Capitulate when I arrive into your bright green haunt.

I’ll complain this time your skin
smells like our cat
who died soon after.
And that it was a sign
of the organic laws,
for all the shells and salt we ate
that night fell from a firmament
of pulverising jaws

Words make love
repugnant as the two of us.
Moonlight over dusk on top
of things we hissed.
And wavering shadows stalking
on the inside, too.

I know we both and not just you,
are dead and gone and fed to legends.

Conversations In Amsterdam

2005-12-05T02:30:00.000-08:00

Conversations In Amsterdam
Artwork: Daphne Buter

I was in a Pub and I walked to the bar to get a drink. A skinny man who had drank too much started to talk to me.

‘You don’t look happy. What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing’s wrong. I am happy,’ I answered a little annoyed.

That man shook his head very slowly, like he didn’t know how to shake it off his neck, and repeated, ‘You lie. You don’t look happy at all. No no no! You don’t look happy at all. You are a beautiful woman but an unhappy one…’

I tried to convince that man he was wrong, but it didn’t work. He kept stalking me, repeating I didn’t look happy. He even offered me his body. It would give me all kinds of magical pleasures, he assured me. I refused, while he was licking my neck.

After one hour of listening to his dizzy tongue in my ear, I had never felt more miserable in my whole life and I said to him, ‘I think you are right, man… I’m not happy at all. You made me feel like shit!’

Then that man gazed at me for a long time, like he had forgotten who I was, and he asked, ‘are you sure you feel that bad? You look incredibly happy to me…’

That’s what I dislike about Dutch Pubs. I understand zilch about the conversations.

2005 Pushcart Prize Nomination On A Hazy Day

2005-11-29T02:41:00.000-08:00

I'm wondering who this picture took...

Everything is hazy. You can see in this picture how hazy things are. This picture was taken in 2004 but I forgot who took it. I do remember that I wondered why in the world life is so obscure, when the picture was shot.
I don’t know where to go today. I talked to a beautiful voice on Skype. Even during that conversation things went hazy. A huge electronic squall began to muddle up the talk. I don't think it was a supernatural being who did that. I think, in the end, we blamed it all on Bill Gates.
Later I wrote a letter. I tried to explain something hazy to someone. Then I thought: what the fuck am I talking about?

However, this morning I received a clear letter. Kathy Fish, one of the editors of Smokelong Quarterly wrote me:

"The editors of Smokelong Quarterly are thrilled to nominate your story ‘He Wrote Sixteen Pencils Empty’ for the 2005 Pushcart Prize. This is a yearly prize for the best stories published in American small presses."

How cool is that? Nevertheless, since I received that letter, life is more hazy. I sit behind my Dutch cloudy desk here, much like in this unclear picture, and I gaze at the ceiling and I think about my blurry life and things.

*

PS. I would appreciate it if a lot of adds about penis enlargement and snoring problems, would appear as comments to this hazy message. I'm trying to get used to that.

The Frozen Lips Of The Idol To Touch

2005-11-21T02:37:00.000-08:00

Picture: Daphne Buter

Once upon a time there were two writers. A man and a woman. One lived on one side of planet Earth, and the other lived on the other side of planet Earth. The writers started writing letters to each other, and after some time they fell in love with the words. They created worlds by words, magical worlds where they could be together in real, and the worlds they created floated through the universe. It was a small world where the writers made love with words, and God knows they were in love with nothing but words.
Anyhow, one day it had to stop. Who wants to be real in a story only? Things like that just cannot go on forever, because, try it; being in love with nothing but words is a dire thing. It is much like being in love with Betty Boop, or like being in love with Elvis Presley, or like being in love with God. You can never touch the superstar that you adore so deeply. And at night you reach out your hand in the darkness of your bedroom, just to imagine someone is there – the frozen lips of the idol to touch – but there are nothing but words, nothing but visions, and all these things come from the inside of you.
So, the two writers who were so deeply in love with the words, quit writing love letters and next they couldn’t write stories anymore. They couldn’t write stories for a long time because craving for each other’s words had eaten all their words that were meant for their stories. All they could do was gaze outside their windows, fixing their eyes to the skies, both on their own side of this planet, and then they whispered each other’s name.

The good thing about this story is that their love was over, and there wasn’t one word in the world, spoken or thought, that could renovate that.

For as far as I can remember, both writers are still alive and they don’t miss each other at all. They just write their stories again, because that’s what writers are for. To just write their stories, without being taken into custody by them.

Based on a true story.

Waking Up The Birds

2005-10-27T02:53:00.000-07:00

Tricky, she dreams about the dead birds.

Sometimes I wake up very early to wake up the birds. I go outside and meander across the lonely streets. I pass the closed curtains of all our neighbors. I smell the scent of fish. I watch the fainting night. We have a little park nearby our house and I walk there. I walk there to enter the swamps of the Dutch morning murkiness. In the park I start to whistle like a bird. A little later, at least one bird awakes and answers me. I whistle back. We whistle back and forth. In a little while more birds whistle back and forth. Soon the swamp is filled with an orchestra of twiddles, and I’m a part of it. My heart fills with huge contentment if I do this. The idea I wake up the birds earlier than they wanted to wake up, gives me the feeling I make a difference to this world. I cannot figure out why it gives me the feeling I make a difference to this world by waking up birds, but I started this happening when I was eight years old.

Dead Birds

2005-10-22T14:36:00.000-07:00

Birds. Picture: Daphne Buter.

Yesterday our birds died. We had two birds, and they were very much in love. We aren’t sure what killed them, but we believe it was an aggressive virus that exterminated them both in one night. Okay, I'm pissed off about this, so, that's it for today. I have nothing more to say.

Amen.

A Terminal Winter

2005-10-20T15:06:00.000-07:00

Ok, this is me, but photoshop made me look better than in real. Who cares. The internet is a hoax. Picture: Lente Buter (13)

It was winter and I stood in front of a frozen lake. I had gone there on my bare feet, to feed herons. It wasn’t a normal winter. I don’t remember a winter as arctic as that one. It felt like my mother had already died. It felt like I wasn’t there. It felt like I had no feet. I was incarcerated by a cruel terminal winter.

I had bought glistening fishes and they looked so perfect. I couldn’t stop touching their silvery skin. It began to snow and Herons ate tinsel from my fingers. I remember the sound of their wings. It was a brushing sound, and in my visions it was the sound of brushing lips. I closed my eyes to resurrect into an image. I began to fall in love with somebody, but I forgot his face, his name, his dick. The sound of brushing lips exploded from the heron’s wings. It was the kind of detonation I sometimes experience on the inside of my cranium.

Big Bill Broonzy Shot In Amsterdam

2005-10-18T14:54:00.000-07:00

One Of The Stupid Pictures My Father Shot Of Big Bill Broonzy In Amsterdam.

Interestingly enough my father didn’t want me to become a writer. He said, ‘why in the world would you like to be a writer? Every sonofabitch can write. Writing is only a matter of holding a stupid pencil in your stupid hand to write something stupid down on a stupid piece of paper, and that is how writers write their stupid stories.’

Now, just think about the fact my father was a photographer. All he did was hold a stupid camera in his stupid hands while he pushed with his stupid fingers on stupid buttons, and that is how he shot his stupid pictures.

The Fishy Bird

2005-10-12T04:42:00.000-07:00

One Of The Paintings I Made When I Was In A Good Mood...

I Was A Child And I Dreamed This Same Dream All Over Again...

I was in a labyrinth of doors. I knew there was a way out, but I also knew a creature that looked like a fishy bird soared through the rooms behind the doors. I knew it was a bird of stone. If the creature found me, it would destroy me. Every time I opened a door, I entered a room with 6 others doors in the walls. I had to choose one of them, but behind any door was a room with 6 other doors. It was a never-ending labyrinth of rooms with doors.
All the walls of all the rooms were a cerulean color and looked like skies or water. I opened door after door, walking trough cerulean room after cerulean room, while I felt haunted by the bird of stone. Unexpectedly the bird of stone swam or soared through one of the walls, like the walls were no walls at all but made of soft tissue, and it attacked me. It attacked me by speeding in my direction and putting its beak around my face. It tried to swallow me and I fought with it until I escaped. A huge fear of death filled me up. I ran from door to door into room after room and whatever door I picked, I always entered another room with 6 doors.
Finally I opened a door and all of a sudden I was no longer in the labyrinth of doors but on the shore of the North Sea. The sky had the color of dust and the Sea was wild as on a stormy day, although I didn’t feel any wind blowing. I noticed I was naked and looked around me if anyone was at the beach could see my naked body. The beach was completely deserted and a thick mist covered the view. Even though there was no one there who could see me, I felt ashamed and fragile being naked. I started to run in the direction of the untamed sea. Now I felt a strong urge to hide under the surface of the water, to hide for the bird of stone. While I was running over the endless beach I remembered I had nearly drowned when I was three years old, and that I was afraid of the water since then. Nevertheless I wanted to shelter in the gray waves that looked like heavy jaws, like hungry maws.
I ran naked through that colorless landscape of sand and mist as fast as I could. I ran until I stumbled because something grabbed my ankle. I fell on the beach and saw a hand pointing out of the sand, holding my ankle. I felt panicky, recognising the hand as my mother’s. I squeezed her hand six times to let her know I understood she needed help and she let go of my ankle. Rapidly I started to dig away the sand around the wrist, trying to save her now that she was buried alive. While I was digging the sand from around her wrist, the fingers of her hand opened and closed like a flower, as a signal I had to hurry because she was suffocating. After a little while, when I had only hollowed out the sand around her elbow, her fingers stopped moving and I knew she had died in the sand and that it was my fault. I kept digging sand away, crying, and when I looked up I noticed maybe a thousand hands sticking out of the surface of the beach that were opening and closing their fingers like flowers.
I looked at the sea and the waves came to rest. Above the water the bird of stone hung motionless in the sky, and it accused me with the look in its blistering eye.

Tuindorp Hustler Click

2005-09-26T19:08:00.000-07:00

My Cute Little Brother Chain. If You could only Hear Him Cuttin Things...

This is my brother CHAIN. It is about time I introduce him to you. I know he looks like a serial killer, but he isn’t. He’s a serial father. Someone screwed up his picture with Photoshop, and it wasn’t me. It probably was one of his kids.
Chain is a DJ for THC in the Netherlands. Look in his eyes. If you look in his eyes you’ll realize you are anxious because your life is actually about fear. But as I said before, he really isn’t a serial killer,

…yet.

Tuindorp Hustler Click

A Flying Object

2005-08-08T16:31:00.000-07:00

This Isn't An UFO But Just Some Kind Of Flying Object My Spouse Couldn't Identify.

My husband is such an amazing guy, he always sees things no one can detect. During summertime we live in a small house on the beach.
Last night he left the house to watch the stars. I stayed inside and observed the dancing fire of candles, and the shadow of my body casting the image of a giant on the wall.

After some time my husband came back in and he looked pale around his tinted nose when he said: "I saw something remarkable in the skies. A colored light that spun in circles, and then it became smaller and thinner and it faded out. Next it started all over again. This happened three times, until it disappeared completely."

"What was it?" I asked.

"I can’t tell," he answered still lightly confused.

"Listen, do you mean you saw an UFO?"

"You know I don’t believe in UFO’s."

"Okay, then what was it?"

"How could I tell?" he added, "it was just a flying entity I couldn’t categorize."

"O my God, you saw a UFO," I said out of breath.

He looked at me puzzled. "Don't tell me you really believe I saw an UFO."

"Well, it sounds like you saw one…"

"Okay, I agree it sounds like that," he said after some time, tapping his lips with his fingers. "But you know what, woman? Things aren’t always what they seem."

"Did you check the dunes?" I asked with a voice deep of hope for some mystery in my life.

"What should I check the dunes for?"

He closed the door of the beach house and smiled at me friendly.

"For circles of course. Aren’t there any circles in the dunes, or symbols? You know what I mean? Strings of DNA in the grass, shaped by aliens. Or cryptic codes from outer space that only Dan Brown can crack one day?"

"O damn, now I understand what you’re talking about. You mix the idea of dune circles up with rye circles," he said. He beamed relieved. "But no one ever reported circles in dunes, honey… Don’t break your skull about stupid things like that."

"I see," I said disappointed. "It probably wasn’t a UFO then, right?"

"That’s what I said," he continued, sighing. "It was just a flying object I couldn’t identify. No more, no less… Let’s get some sleep now, okay?"

Composed In The Pasture Of Your Skull

2005-08-07T01:46:00.000-07:00

I Am The One Who Shot These Horses

Where do we go? Where is the road we’re taking? What did you say? Did you say something? Shut up for a second, OK? What are words? Give me a break, man. You see that large meadow over there? Here: look outside my window for a second. You see a grazing land. A paddock, but I mean an endless one. You see the horizon? But there is no horizon, baby, just something hazy in a distance. Use your imagination. This talk is about a solid ground with hovering mist above it, and eleven stationary horses. The horses are starving, and composed in the sub-zero pasture of your skull. They are ice covered horses. White and glistening with frost. Dutch beasts with huge legs. No one feeds them. Their mantra is a bursting gasp. Can you hear them? Those horses over there, with black eyes that gaze into you. Do you see them?

You hear them and you see them, don’t you?

Well, they aren’t there. They are nowhere but in you. This Blog is nothing but a goddamn apparition.

I Think You Should Write About This

2005-07-13T06:15:00.000-07:00

I Took This Picture When Holland Was Hit By A Meteorite With The Size Of Amsterdam

We walked on the beach and the sun dropped down. Maybe I cannot bring to mind if it was like that. Maybe it was morning and the sun just never rose. Anyway, everyone was waiting for a new day to begin. With silvery sunglasses in front of their eyes a crowd gazed to the purple heaven. On the news, someone said planet Earth was hit by a meteoroid the size of Amsterdam and that we had to be prepared to die within 24 hours. Some people started to make weird sounds. We walked to the sea but there was no sea. We walked there hand in hand, freezing in a mysterious twilight, and my spouse whispered, suffocating, ‘I think you should write about this.’

Eclectica Interview

2005-07-10T03:10:00.000-07:00

The Cover Of 'De Blauwe Prins' my first novel.

Elizabeth Glixman, the interview editor of Eclectica, interviewed me for Eclectica magazine. You can read the interview here:

Eclectica Interview

We Can Dig Them Up If We Need Them

2005-06-27T01:41:00.000-07:00

Painting: Lente Buter (13)

Once we bought a bunch of expensive floor tiles, indigo as the sky of Greece. The only problem was we were too busy to put them on our kitchen floor. The tiles stood in carton boxes in our garden, under our balcony. One day my husband said the tiles took so much space and that he had a great solution for this problem. He had decided to bury them in the garden.

“You want to bury the expensive tiles?” I asked.

“Yes. We can dig them up if we need them.”

The problem with my husband is that he's unstoppable if he has something in his head, so, the rest of the day he was busy digging a hole in our garden, big enough to bury all the boxes with tiles.

Sometimes I looked at him through the window of our garden. I wondered how in the world someone sane could believe this was a good idea.

At the end of the day the hole was big enough to bury all the boxes with tiles, and my husband looked very tired but content. One hour later all the boxes were buried.

That night we drank coffee in our garden and I gave it one final try, saying, "I really believe we will never see those tiles again.”

“Nonsense,” my husband said annoyed, “even archaeologists all over Europe still dig up tiles from the Romans.”

“Yeah. But all these Roman tiles are fractured,” I said.

There was a long silence between us after I had said that. We just sipped our coffee.

The Tune Of The Nightingale

2005-05-24T14:21:00.000-07:00

Tricky In Our Garden, in a dream. Picture; Daphne Buter.

THE TUNE OF THE NIGHTINGALE
Daphne Buter

Last night Tricky heard a nightingale and she woke me up to listen to the bird.

"He sings beautifully," I said.

"He isn't singing, but crying," Tricky said. "Don't you hear it?"

Now it is morning and I lay in my bed and I listen to my neighbors. My neighbor's voices know how to penetrate a wall. Maybe my ears are the problem; maybe my ears know how to suck unreal sounds through a wall or a window. Only God knows what the truth is. If God exists, truth exists. Life is not what it seems.

"Shall I take the river Styx?" I hear my neighbor Harry say.

"Please do it right away," his wife answers.

My youngest one is a smart little girl. We all have to watch out for her. Seven years ago we named her Gentle, but God knows why we called her Tricky two years later. Last week she asked me what color my sweater was. It was pink.

"It is pink," I said. "You know it is pink, Tricky."

She grinned, walked over to the wall, stood at the tip of her little toes and switched off the light. We were surrounded by darkness. My little girl seemed to have disappeared. I had vanished, too. Only the sounds we made were still there.

"What color is your sweater?" Tricky repeated.

Just now I did all the things I had to do. I woke up. I'd put my feet on the floor of the bedroom. I walked to the bathroom and sat on the toilet. I took a shower. I brushed my teeth. I did all these things because I had to start my day with something. If I hadn't done these things I would have fallen back to sleep. I would have dreamed about something complicated. I would have dreamed about Tricky.

I lay on a stretcher in our garden. The sun is out and blinds me. What shall I write about today? Shall I write about the sun? The sun is not there - it is a star that we named sun. A star is shining in the garden. Between that star and me a lot of things happen. Clouds raise and disappear. The sky around the star is cerulean. Actually, the blue sky I can see is not around the star, but under it, and it isn't cerulean. Tricky told me the sky isn't. I suppose she'd read Nietzsche while I was asleep one night. "Listen," she said, "listen, the light of the star makes you believe the sky is cerulean, but the sky isn't."

I start to bite my nails. I see the face of Tricky on the brink of my mind's eye. A little blonde human being. Her face has so much expression she looks more convincing than God. Her legs are so skinny they make every dog smile arrogant if we go for a walk to the park. Her legs are full of blue spots because she keeps falling from trees.

"What is a skeleton?" Tricky asked me the other day.

"It is the remains of a creature that died," I answered.

"Wrong! Under my skin lives my skeleton," Tricky said.

"If I ask myself where I am, I am only in my head," she said some time ago.

Maybe I don't lay on a stretcher in our garden. Thinking about it, I don't lay on a stretcher in our garden. I am in my head. Tricky explained to me how I should look at things. In this case, it isn't our garden to begin with. It is just a small piece of land we named a garden. And then, one day, we bought this house for a lot of debts and that is why we call it our garden. "Is it our garden?" she asked. "If it is our garden, for how long will it be our garden?"

"You were dead for centuries, now you are alive for just a short time. Soon you will be dead forever," Tricky said one day. "When you are dead forever, can I have your PC?"

Just now Tricky came out a building we named school and she walked to a house we named home, and now she walks into a garden we call our garden. Tricky looks so small she makes me feel like a giant. Maybe I am a giant.

Here, outside the house, Tricky cannot turn out the light. No one can turn out a star named the sun. Tricky isn't God. I've got her. This time she cannot win the battle.

"What color is my sweater," I ask.

"No one can answer that question."

"Come on, Tricky, what color is my sweater?"

"I think you believe it is pink."

"Well, isn't it pink?"

"Only if God exists, it is. Does God exist?"

"Well, a lot of people believe God exists."

"God exists only in their heads."

I lay on a stretcher in a garden. A star is out and blinds me. The sky has no color. I believe I wear a pink sweater. I really believe I wear a pink sweater. If God exists, no matter if it is a he or a she, it knows I am crying on the inside of my being.

Tricky wears a translucent dress. In the light outside I would swear the dress is pink as a marshmallow. Tricky is collecting bugs. She knows where to find them. Under stones and on leafs, or dangling in the wind. Her little fingers grab the insects and put them in little containers. She runs through the garden like a pink whirlwind. She is so busy it would touch the devil's heart.

Tricky has thousands of insects incarcerated. The bugs are red, yellow, golden, green, and metallic with stripes… She never hurts them. She takes them to the attic and looks at them through her microscope. After a day or so she throws them back in a garden, under a colorless sky, if a star is out to change the world into a paradise of colors, buzzing insects, odors and birds.

"Have a good time," she says with a voice sweet as candy, to the bugs. "Let a bird-beak eat you. You don't mind, don't you? You are too simple to realize you are a living dead thing. No one will miss you when you are gone. We're all just food for each other."

God help me. I am here. I lay on a stretcher in our garden. Last night I heard a nightingale chant. I am sure it wasn't crying. Above me the sky is blue as an ocean on a postcard from Greece.

"Shall I take the river Styx?" my neighbor Harry asked this morning.

"Please do it right away," his wife answered.

Only God knows or I heard it right. If God exists, truth exists. If God exists, I wear a pink sweater. Tricky is more convincing than God. We all are nothing but food for future generations of bugs. I am dying here, I'm dying. I am a dead living thing. That star in that colorless sky above me is scorching me. I start to sweat.

I put my hand as a cap above my eyes and look at that little pink butterfly over there, that pink whirlwind who is collecting bugs in a garden.

"Tricky," I say, "Tricky, do you love me?"

Tricky runs rapidly like she is haunted by a lion. "Your voice reminds me of the tune of that nightingale we heard last night," she answers.

"God knows I love you, Tricky," I say. "Would you miss me if I was dead?"

My heart is pounding fanatically. Tricky stops running and looks at my face. She lets her arms hang down. She is out of breath. Bugs crawl from her little hands to her elbows, further upwards. Red bugs, yellow bugs, golden beetles, green ones, metallic ones with stripes... I see them vanish in the puffy sleeves of her pink dress, ready to eat her. She angles her head, and smiles at me, forlornly. Her big brown eyes remind me of the hearts of sunflowers. Her skinny legs look like brushwood under her fluttering lucid dress. When she says, "What kind of question is that?" she never looked this tiny before.

*

The Tune Of The Nightingale was published by Dicey Brown last fall.

What Do You Have For Diner?

2005-05-23T02:40:00.000-07:00

The boss of a fish-shop in our neighborhood gave me this fishhead for free.

My friend Kiki phoned me to tell me her husband began a fish shop. Her husband is an electrician and he’s born in Nigeria. He doesn’t know a lot about fish. First he was enthusiastic. He let the walls of the shop decorate by an artist. Every day he opened the shop at ten in the morning, but soon he did find out he had no customers. He opens the shop at 4 o’clock in the afternoon now, but still he has no costumers.

"What do you have for diner?” I asked Kiki to change the subject.

“Fish,” Kiki answered.

Call Of The Heron, Silence Of The Snake

2005-05-18T00:12:00.000-07:00

Drawing By Me

This is one of my translated short stories. The story was translated by Edo Marinus and somewhat revised by me. 'Call Of The Heron, Silence Of The Snake', was puplished by Snow Monkey (US) and by Cadenza (UK).

Call of the Heron, Silence of the Snake

Only when darkness slid off the night, and the world turned into a moist, drab molehill, did Donja feel her despair disappear. Fear was a snake, crawling through the hairy red grass of the nylon carpet, where it remained hidden until the next attack. The weight which had pressed down on her chest all night lifted like a balloon.
She crawled out of bed and sat down on the floor. She was surrounded by empty bottles and leftovers; the carpet was stained with wine and black mould. The table overflowed with rubbish and in the washbasin flies crawled over dirty plates and pans.
She opened the attic window and poked her head outside. She looked out over flower gardens, sagging sheds and balconies with metal rubbish bins. In the middle of the block was a gnarly, knotted oak that must have pushed its way out of the earth long before she was born. Empty crows' nests were scattered among the branches.
She stepped onto the gravelled rooftop and gazed over the edge into a ravine of wet earth and clumps of grass. Last winter, a girl had jumped from the fourth floor, but survived the fall. She would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, her limp body kept upright by a kind of leash. All she could move was her head. She used her chin, which lay lopsided on her dented chest, to operate buttons on a small panel, and zoomed up and down the street. Occasionally Donja would chat with her. The girl was always cheerful; she said that she was grateful for having survived the fall, because the force with which she had struck the earth erased her memory, after which she had found God.
Sitting on her haunches, Donja looked into the dept below and leaned forward a little more. Her fingers clung to the zinc edge next to her bare feet. She sat for fifteen minutes while her heart ticked away time like a clock inside her. Over the twilit world a heron flew. Fascinated, she looked at the bird, which cried out loudly, as if it was trying to stop her from feeding her body to the abyss. She had never heard a heron's call before. It sounded raw, desperate.
For a moment she saw how she might push off and spread her arms, flying after the bird, floating on the humid morning fog for perhaps a second, then plummeting down to the city's floor.
She flinched and crawled back inside through the window.
The mess surrounded her like ruins. She picked up a wine bottle from the floor and put it to her lips to catch the last drops. Drink was the only means of controlling her fears, but her purse was empty. It would start all over again tonight. The snake would sneak up, entangle her with its cold body and keep her in its stranglehold till break of day.

The smell of excrement permeated Mrs. Kars' studio, as a sewer pipe had burst and was leaking into the earth beneath the floor. Donja came in, teetering on her high heels. A bicycle, which had been standing behind the door, fell noisily to the floor.
"The bike belongs to that new guy," said Elize. Donja's portfolio had fallen to the floor. Sheets of drawing paper stuck out of it like a fan. Donja put the bicycle back up while Elize picked up the sheets of paper. "There he is," she whispered in a hysterical squeak. She pointed with a fat finger over her shoulder.
The young man was sitting naked on a kitchen chair that was standing on a wooden table. Legs spread, he was reading Kafka's The Trial, blithely scratching in his pubic hair, causing his scrotum to jump up and down. His penis looked like a squirrel, skittering back and forth between his legs. For a moment Donja watched it, fascinated. The young man looked up from his book and bared his white teeth in a grin. Donja disliked his face. A shock of black curls framed his bright visage, though his blue eyes reminded her of mentholated cough drops. He raised his hand amicably.
"Never seen a naked man before, then, eh?" he called out.
Walking stiffly on her high heels, Donja passed the room where the sculpting group was working over lumps of rock with hammers and chisels, and hung her summer jacket on the row of pegs in the corridor.
Mrs. Kars was suddenly standing next to Donja. "That's Clemens, our new model," she said in her sharp Indonesian accent. "Don't be shy – he's a nice lad and a charming conversationalist. I'll introduce you in a minute. Get used to his bare bum, because you'll be seeing it a lot from now on." She giggled and pushed Donja through the corridor back into the studio, right up to the table. "This lady would absolutely love to meet you," she said teasingly.
Clemens offered her the hand he had used to root through his public hair. Donja frowned, decided to shake it anyway out of politeness, then turned around. She stood her portfolio upright against the wall and surreptitiously smelled her fingers, then wiped her hand on her blouse. The walls were covered with studies of the young man's body. She recognized him in black charcoal lines and grey watery spots: sitting on a chair, lying on a settee, voluptuously seen from the front or from behind. Facing the door were a number of sculptures of him in greasy clay together with some snow-white plaster moulds, sometimes just a torso without a head or just a head on a wooden stand.
Elize stood next to her. "Isn't he amazing? I bet he's the prettiest boy you've ever seen."
Mrs. Kars clapped her chubby hands. Little puffs of plaster escaped from between her fingers and her golden bracelets tinkled like a triangle. "Now we will all sit and take up the sketchpad and a piece of charcoal. We will make sure we have some feathers and our erasers at hand." Her dark-pink mouth rattled off the words as if they were an order. Donja could not get used to her tart voice, no matter how hard she tried. Sometimes Mrs. Kars would look at Donja suspiciously through her shiny rhinestone glasses. Her eyes looked like slits cut into a cardboard mask with a knife.
Mrs. Kars rapped the table with her nails, which were so long they curled. The students picked up their sketchpads and sat down on the wooden stools, which had been placed in a circle around the table. Donja sat next to Elize. Clemens was sitting on the table like an idol.
"Even his cock is pretty," Elize lisped into Donja's ear.
Donja saw the young man's head floating in mid-air. He smiled at her and licked his fleshy lips with the tip of his tongue. "I think he's revolting," she whispered.
Elize shrugged. Flakes of her psoriasis fluttered from her head down onto her clothes. She was wearing a pair of Roy Rogers jeans with big pockets on the back and legs which were too short. Next to her plump cheeks hung braids with sky-blue ribbons.
"Your shoes are amazing," Elize said after a while, looking at the red pumps which trapped Donja's feet like little torture chambers.
Donja looked at Elize's sandals – heavy shoes with crepe soles and broad buckles at their sides. "They're not comfortable," she replied. "The heels are too high."
"Really amazing," Elize said again.

During the class, Clemens regaled them with amusing anecdotes from the books of Bob den Uyl and pompously recited soliloquies from Hamlet. About Kafka's The Trial he remarked that it was an impenetrable book full of symbols, which could only be understood by someone who knew a lot about the author's life. Then he lay the book down on the table, next to one of the stool's legs, and a moment later put his bare foot on the cover. Everybody thought he was charming, brilliant and funny.
"Has anybody read The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky?" His words fluttered down from somewhere about the crystal chandelier, which sparkled from the ceiling and distracted Donja. When she looked at him to take in the flowing lines of his body, he looked back at her and smirked. In the basement, chisels were rapping on stone monotonously. Donja's fingers hesitated on the paper. She could feel him stare at her, making it impossible to think. The figure on her paper looked like a Neanderthal, a muscular colossus, while the young man himself was slender.
Though she disliked him, she wondered what it would be like to hold that perfect column of human flesh in her hands, to mould and shape him like clay.
"You're daydreaming, young lady," said Mrs. Kars.
Donja hunched over the drawing board. In the groin of the figure she quickly drew a penis, which looked like a finger.
Mrs. Kars clapped her hands.
The students got up and placed their drawing boards upright against their seats. Donja put hers facing downwards. Clemens climbed off the table, walked to the row of pegs and put on one of Mrs. Kars' flowery dressing gowns, then walked back into the studio.
They had tea in cracked mugs. Elize whispered into Donja's ear, "I wouldn't mind giving what's underneath those flowers a quick tickle."

"That's no good," Mrs. Kars said after the break. She stared over Donja's shoulder at the paper covered with smudges and lines. Her breath smelled of garlic and nicotine. "Look closely at his physique, that supple body, full of beautiful muscles..."
Her deformed nails rapped snappily at the drawing. "And you turn it into a gorilla."
Clemens craned his neck to look at the sketch, but Donja quickly lifted the drawing board. He gave an amused chuckle and she wished he would fall off the table, chair and all.
She spent the remainder of the lesson erasing lines and sketching a new figure, but no matter how she tried, it remained a gorilla.
"That's because he's such a gorgeous man," Elize said. "Makes you bloody nervous."
Mrs. Kars looked at her watch, took off her apron and snapped her fingers. "That's all for today." She draped her apron over a chair and lit a small, thin cigar.
"Oh, what a shame," Elize whined. Proudly, she showed Clemens her handiwork: a charcoal figure sitting on a chair, legs wide apart. Between his thighs she had drawn what looked like a witch's nose.
Clemens feebly clapped his hands and said: "L'art, c'est mourir un peu."

The sky was the color of dark prunes. Bats wheeled around the spire of the Westertoren, which was just striking ten. Donja let the door of the studio slam behind her. It opened again immediately.
"Shall I carry your portfolio?"
Donja turned. It was Clemens. A square of light fell from the studio's window.
"I think you're a really good artist," he said. "There's a huge amount of drama in your work; I noticed that straight away. You're enormously talented and I think you're great."
"That's because of you, you're an irresistible model," she replied flatly. "You're built like a gorilla."
His laughter resounded in the dark alley. She gave him the portfolio, and as they started to walk she could hear the scraping of her stilettos on the cobblestones.
After maybe a hundred yards, Clemens stopped at a pub. Cigarette smoke billowed from the maw of the open doorway, and behind the windows dozens of people were talking and laughing.
"Come one, I'll buy you a nice glass of wine." He dropped her portfolio on the street where it landed with a gentle thud, took his wallet out of his pocket and started to count his money. "A very nice glass of wine," he continued.
Donja took another good look at him. If she refused his offer, she would have to bear the snake without alcohol that night. She gave a hollow laugh.
"Alright, I guess I can spare a minute or two."

They sat opposite each other at a little wooden table. Stirring waves of music seemed to rise from pots of ferns on the windowsill. Messages were scratched in the tabletop in different hands: SONJA LOVES LEX; BIBI COME HOME; SUZY'S BIG BOY CAME; KILLROY WAS NOWHERE; CALL ME HANS!
They were drinking Chianti. Clemens was giving a long-winded lecture on different writers. He was delighted by The Brothers Karamazov and surprised to learn she had not read it.
"I'm disappointed in you," he said, as if he had known her for years and only now found out that did not live up to his expectations.
Donja had never read anything by the authors he spoke so highly of. She knew nothing about Chekhov, Dostoevsky or Kafka, and even Bob den Uyl meant nothing to her. She could never find the tranquillity to read.
She was afraid of silence, of perfectly normal sounds like creaking floorboards or mice scurrying in the wardrobe. The fluttering of a moth in the hot bowl of a table lamp, casting a shadow on the wallpaper, caused her to be seized by panic. Often her terror was so powerful that she barricaded the attic door with the few pieces of furniture she possessed in order to keep imaginary intruders out. She would crawl into a corner of the room and spend the night moaning, curled up like a wounded animal.
Clemens rattled on about world literature, completely unaware that he was sitting opposite a lunatic. He was probably studying Dutch at the university. After graduating, he would spend his life teaching passionately at some mildewy school.
Donja was not the only lunatic in the house where she lived. Downstairs was Brenda, a skeletal girl who starved herself by never retaining anything. From early morning until late at night she would gorge herself on vast amounts of food. After every meal she regurgitated like an albatross. The whole blessed day she ambled through the house in a pink quilted dressing gown, from fridge to lavatory, from lavatory to stove. She habitually stole Donja's food. Once she ate a pound of salmon salad which Donja had bought because she was having visitors. When Donja reprimanded her, Brenda spat it out on the carpet and said: "There you go."
Often, Donja would catch her in the kitchen in the morning, frying up a stack of pancakes. She could hardly stand on her scraggy legs from weakness. She would gobble up ten pancakes garnished with syrup, slices of apple or bacon, or heaped with fruit, ice cream and thick gobs of whipped cream. Rolling them up in her bony fingers she stuffed them into her insatiable gob while a milky juice ran down from her chin into the collar of her dressing gown. She washed her meals down with gallons of Coca Cola. Then she would go to the bathroom where she spewed the undigested food into the toilet bowl, after which she began anew. Donja felt sorry for her but also feared her. She had attacked Donja on the landing once because she thought she was hogging the phone. She often played her music loud enough to vibrate the windows of the house.
One day Brenda asked Donja to look at her back because she was suffering from strange pains. As Brenda slid the dressing gown from her undernourished body, Donja had to hold on to the doorframe, dizzied by the sight of her concentration-camp body. Her back was ruined – her skin full of pocked holes oozing pus, her shoulders covered in white fuzz as if her body was enshrouding itself in some mysterious pelt. Donja flinched at the sight of a piece of bone shimmering through Brenda's skin.
"My God, you're dying," she whispered in horror.
"Tell me something I don't know," Brenda replied.

The Chianti was making her drunk. A whining voice was asking her if she knew that Dostoevsky had written The Gambler in two weeks. Donja lethargically shook her head. His blue-eyed face loomed.
"I think you're beautiful. You're so beautiful," his voice sang.
She felt his leg rubbing against hers. Numerous legs had pressed against hers in bars before. Unimportant legs, belonging to unimportant men. Legs attached to bodies that sweated, told lies, stank. Bodies with heads that had nothing to say to her. Heads that burst into tears after several glasses of beer. Heads confiding in her the anguish of their souls and their bizarre secrets. Pretty heads without brains, or ugly heads harbouring gentle personalities. Heads that declared their love for her and then approached her with drooling lips to kiss her against her will. Stone-drunk heads that vomited on her shoes. Heads yearning for love, understanding, sex.
Every time she went into the city at night it seemed a theatre in which men were looking for a way out of the labyrinth of their sordid, deformed lives. Once the night was over she threw them away. She never answered the telephone. Love letters were torn into shreds and fed to the wind through the attic window.
Clemens' leg rubbed against her knee like a pushy dog. To sort her chaotic thoughts she put her hand on his neck, drew his head close and kissed him. He laughed and seemed incapable of stopping.
"Christ, this is like something out of Kafka," he said, panting.
"Let's go," she said, getting up and putting on her coat. She put the bottle of Chianti to her lips and greedily emptied it. He brazenly put his hands under her breasts and licked one of her earlobes.
"Piss off, windbag," she barked.
They squirmed through the laughing, chattering patrons to the door. Sweaty men's heads turned in her direction, red heads with bloodshot eyes. They were shouting incomprehensible words with breath smelling of beer. One belched a subterranean burp into her ear. His sour breath clung to her hair like a puff of noxious gas. She stamped as hard as she could as she ran, hoping her stiletto heels would shatter somebody's toes.
When at last they fluttered into the dark-blue night like two escaped birds, Clemens wanted to carry her portfolio again.
"Do you know Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler in two weeks?" he repeated drunkenly.
She looked at his beaming face. He seemed chronically carefree. He knew nothing about snakes emerging from carpets to paralyse your mind.
"I don't give a damn about Dostoevsky," she snapped. Her heels scraped loudly on the pavement, as raw as a heron's call. He walked next to her in silence. Back home, she would overpower him, feed his body to the snake until the fresh-green break of day.

My Beautiful Alice

2005-05-17T02:20:00.000-07:00

Picture: Daphne Buter

My friend Alice was five years older than me, and the right side of her face was roasted in a fire. Three days after she was born, her parents had left her alone in the house to buy meat at the Albert Kuyp market in Amsterdam. The reason they had left her alone in the house was because Alice’s father had bought meat that morning, but when he came home his wife said he had bought the wrong meat. Alice’s mother was still recovering from delivering the baby, and shaky on her legs, but her husband – who was annoyed he had bought the wrong meat – insisted she come with him to the market to buy the right meat.
Alice was asleep in her bedstead, and her parents decided not to disturb the baby’s sleep.
In the days Alice was born, people used cotton diapers for babies, and dirty diapers were boiled in a big pan on a stove, to cook them clean.

When the parents of Alice came back form the market, they saw a mountain of black smoke rise above the bridge, and a little later they saw their house had changed into an inferno. Firemen were trying to extinguish the combustion. Neighbors who were watching the spectacle, had told the fireman the house was empty, because they had noticed the couple had left to do some shopping. None of them knew Alice was recently born. Alice lay in her bedstead on the left side of her body.

When I was a child we lived in a subterranean vault in Amsterdam. On the first floor of our house my father had his studio where he shot his advertisement pictures, and I had to model for him almost every day.

The walls of our elongated living room were always clammy, and mysterious green, yellow and black moulds drew pattern of undiscovered faces on the bricks. The windows of the vault were placed so high in the walls that I could only watched through them if I stood on the other side of the room.

One day a girl appeared behind one of our windows, a child with a roasted face. Later my mother told me she had never seen anything like it. One side of the face of the child was black and purple and maimed. The girl had recently moved into our neighborhood.

I was too little to see the difference between a face that wasn’t burned and a face that was. To me Alice was just Alice, a nine year old goddess that taught me how to sing songs, that taught me how to spell and read words, that taught me how to climb stairs without falling from them…
Alice and I played almost every day. I was the only friend she had. Alice had a few dolls and she had roasted half of all their faces and to me that was just something Alice liked in dolls.
My mother allowed me to stay nights over at Alice’s place, and we slept together in her bed, while she told me fairy tales about girls with roasted faces that married princes with roasted faces. Alice made me believe that a roasted face was a beautiful thing. I never knew why she talked so much about roasted faces, I had no idea what a roasted face looked like in reality.

Many years later my mother told me that the marriage of Alice’s parents never had healed after the fire. They thought each other guilty for the fire. The mother accused her husband of buying the wrong meat, and the father accused the mother for leaving the diapers on the stove. My mother told me Alice’s father had become insane after the flames.

One day Alice and I played on the attic of their house. It was on a hot summer day and Alice’s father was sawing wood in a little room on the attic. At the wall of the room hung pictures of Brigitte Bardot. I asked her father who that lady was and he said it wasn’t a lady but a whore, like all women. Next he asked me if I would allow him to saw my hand off. He grabbed my hand and put it on a table, next he put the saw on my wrist and scratched my flesh. I started to cry and Alice dragged me away from her father, whispering, “my father isn’t okay at the moment. He sees the flames again at night.”

Alice and I played some more on the attic, but the atmosphere was loaded with danger. I didn’t even dare to cry anymore about the bleeding scratch of the saw. Alice’s father was walking up and down, watching us, tapping his lips with nervous fingers.

“Why doesn’t your father asks Alice to pose for one of his advertisement pictures?” Alice’s father asked me.

I shrugged. “If I’ll ask him, he will.”

“If you ask him he will...?” Her father repeated.

“Yes, of course. He will.”

“Well, your father will say no,” Alice’s father said. “No one wants to shoot pictures of Alice’s face, don’t you think?”

Alice and I didn’t say a word for some time. We just sat at the wooden floor of the attic, and our hands were playing a game with some roasted dolls, but our heads were waiting for something.

Alice’s father opened the attic window, saying, "it is hot as a fire in here."

I remember Alice and I looked each other in the eyes, but we didn’t move. We were just waiting.

Alice’s father said we had to come to his attic room and we did. The next moment he said Alice had to climb through the attic window, and that she had to place her feet in the gutter of the flat. I remember that day as if it has been a dream. Alice just climbed through the window and a minute later she stood in the gutter. Her father lifted me in the air, ordered me to put my feet in the gutter as well, and closed the window behind us.

The sun was sweltering on the burning tin roof and on our back. Above us the sky rose like an endless deep space to fall into. Below us the gardens were small green patterns. The world didn’t exist anymore. We had nothing to hold onto, just our feet standing in the gutter, and below us was the ravine of the city.
We didn’t cry, we didn’t seek for solutions, we just waited until one of us would drop dead. I remember an orchestra of thousand birds that seemed to shriek at us.

“It is my face,” Alice whispered after some time, “my father hates it. And it is your face as well, he hates that too. He hates the magazines with you in it. He hates us both… He believes we both are ugly. He cannot love perfect or imperfect beauty…”
I looked aside to Alice’s face, and for the first time I saw the scars, the twisted meat, her right eye that was melted into a narrow line, her mouth that couldn’t open or smile the way mine could. Now I noticed she had only one ear, and that she had only one eyebrow. In my mind’s eye I can see Alice's face the way I saw it that day, and she was my lifeline, and I never loved her more.

I was 4 years old when Alice and I stood in a gutter above Amsterdam. I was 4 years old when I realized Alice’s face was burned and mutilated by flames.

A few hours later my mother walked outside our cellar to hang laundry on the line in our garden, and she noticed us standing in the gutter of the flat. A little later fireman came to save us and the father of Alice was arrested by the police.

Alice and I lost contact after this incident. Many years later I went to a swimming pool when I noticed a woman with her hair covering one side of her face. The uncovered side of her face was so beautiful I couldn’t stop looking at her. Slowly I began to recognize Alice. I walked over to her and told her my name. We both cried meeting each other after so many years. Alice had had more than a hundred surgery operations on the right side of her face and her face looked different but still destroyed by the flames. We still are friends. One day Alice gave me a beach house as a gift. The beach house burned down last winter.

Section 22

2005-05-10T04:26:00.000-07:00

3 flowers, picture: Daphne Buter.

My mother had died all of sudden, and my older sister and my brother of nineteen and my stepfather and me, were in shock. One day after she had died we had to went to the graveyard while heavy rain was falling down on us, to look for a good spot to burry her. The undertaker, which we call ‘a crow’ in Holland, walked in front of us, dressed in black clothing that smelled like the fur of a wet dog.
After some time the crow showed us a spot in the earth that was 'still free' as he called it. He explained it would be a good grave because branches of a tree that was still naked then, would blossom lovely above the grave next spring.

I asked ‘what is the name of this spot?’

Me and my family looked at that man’s face, waiting for his answer, while raindrops kept running over our faces. I suppose all of us expected him to answer something like ‘The Lane Of Peace’ or ‘Gently Shove’ or ‘The Corner Of God’s Love’… but he answered ‘Section 22.’

My sister, my brother, my stepfather and me, started to sob at full volume in the rain, when that crow said ‘Section 22.’

Riding The Back Of Two Capricorns With Wings, In The Sky

2005-05-08T03:20:00.000-07:00

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My oldest girl was twelve and she was in love with a fourteen year old boy. She told me she had a reverie about him and her, riding the back of two Capricorns with wings, in the sky.

A few days later that boy and she were in her room and after some time they came out and their faces looked like two glowing lights. Then they went back in and after some time they came out again and only the face of the boy still looked like a glowing light, but the face of my girl looked very disappointed.

The Men In Our Family And Their Use Of Electricity

2005-04-17T10:03:00.000-07:00

One day my grandfather bought a new electric saw. My grandmother had complained for years about chalky nails on the toes of her feet. My grandfather used his new electric saw to get rid of the chalky nails on my grandmother’s toes and I can assure you my grandmother didn’t enjoy this treatment.

While touching the heating elements, my father said that the second hand ceramic oven he had just bought me, didn’t fucking work, but hell it did. It's the only time I have ever seen my father flying like mister David Copperfield.

This morning my husband said our refrigerator looked dirty and he wanted to clean it. I told him if he wanted to clean our refrigerator he first had to take the plug out of the electrical outlet, but my husband said, aggravated, he fucking knew what he was doing. So, he started cleaning our fridge with a lot of water, until I heard the big bang.

Forgive Me For Killing You with Reveries

2005-04-12T02:57:00.000-07:00

Artwork: Daphne Buter

You and I, we only had one friend. It’s been more than 35 years since I last walked you to school. I remember we passed a chestnut tree with elongated branches, and how the leaves tickled our heads, and how we laughed. I can hear you laughing, still. I don’t know why we laughed so much that day.

I remember your azure dress, and the azure ribbons in your blonde pigtails; these pearly chains of yours.

The sun was beating down on us.

I can see us walking there, under the branches of that tree, captured in a never-ending moment. Captured in that merciless haunting summer.

We will always walk there.

We will never walk there.

And now you are in my memory every day since then. You blonde little ghost. At night your face rises from mine in the dark, like a radiant accusing mask.

When the bell of the school rang I wasn’t allowed to leave. I had to finish my work. I wasn’t allowed to walk you home. Forgive me for killing you with reveries.
I can see you leaving the classroom. You turned around in the frame of the door, and smiled at me, forlornly. I know you was scared for the other kids.

What was I daydreaming about when that truck drove over you; when your bones snapped; When your pigtails broke?

When I had left the school I saw woodchips on the bridge close to my house. Woodchips soaked in blood, and the eye of God was smoldering in the skies.

"Thus We Probably Wouldn't Hold Hands Either?"

2005-04-10T02:11:00.000-07:00

Picture: Daphne Buter

They were the kind of people who lived in a city and they always whined about that city. And in the evenings, when they did not fight, they dreamed about a house in the country.

“If we lived on a farm we would be asleep now,” the man said on one of these evenings, when the couple was watching a show on TV.

“Of course we wouldn’t be asleep,” his wife said annoyed, “we would lay on our back in a meadow, hand in hand, gazing at a million stars.”

“But it is winter,” her husband said agitated. “It is ridiculous to imagine we would lay in the freezing cold this time of year.”

“Ok, whatever, “ the woman said waving her hand at him. “Maybe you are right about that. We probably wouldn’t lay down in a frozen meadow then. You are always right, aren't you? Thus we probably wouldn't hold hands either?"

"Exactly," the husband replied, "and there wouldn’t be millions of stars, because the sky would be filled with black clouds, bursting with snow." He raised his index finger for a second. "And you know what else woman? That snow would fall down on our farm.”

“I see," his wife answered. "Well, and next we would freeze to death because there wouldn't be any wood for the stove.”

The husband looked at her suspiciously and added “And why wouldn't there be any wood for the stove?”

His wife replied, "You aren't much of a woodchopper, are you?”

“This really pisses me off,” the man shouted. “How can you be so sure that I'm not much of a woodchopper? Have you ever seen me chop any wood? No, you haven't, you stupid bitch…”

“Now hear what you just said, “his wife said laughing sharply. “That is exactly why you aren’t much of a wood chopper, you fool...”

“You know what?” the man added from between his teeth. “I’m sure one day you would decide you would rather live in the fucking city and you would dream about a house in a town, and one day we would move out of that beautiful place and we would find ourselves an ordinary house in an ugly city." Then he shouted: "Actually I’m sure we would buy the fucking house we live in right now, and we would watch TV, evening after evening, fighting about stupid little things.”

Next there was a big silence between them.

“You are such an asshole,” the woman said after some time, “If that were true, then how come we are so unhappy?”

Still Dirty And Smudged By The Land

2005-04-09T00:21:00.000-07:00

I really, really like this letter, because it is such a depressing letter.

My father refused to serve in the army. In 1952 it was forbidden to refuse to serve in the army. That’s why my father had to serve in a camp for guys that refused to serve in the army. He had to work in the fields. He had to cut open the earth and carry smudge to another field. At July 31, 1952, he wrote this letter to my mother. They weren’t married yet.

Vledder, July 31 1952

Darling,

Still dirty and smudged by the land, I don’t feel like washing myself. I sit here to write this final letter.
What should I do now? I am too worn-out anyway. How can I gather the strength together to hold myself back from calling you?
What is going on in Amsterdam? Why, goddamned, am I so far away from everything?

It is hard you didn’t write me, yet.
Is it so that you think "if he doesn’t write me… well, I won’t either?" Bah…
Or didn’t you even noticed that I didn’t write you?

God, glowing God, I’m so exhausted. What a support you are to me while I rot away here.

Why should I still care?

A Good Shape

2005-04-07T01:54:00.000-07:00

Picture: Daphne Buter.

How I remember the girl that drowned in the canal across our street. She had been playing close to the edge. And soon not even her mother knew where to find her.

Winter came and frost covered the water. We tried to forget about the missing girl, so, we skated on the arctic canal plate.
But in the end we saw a shadow, hovering… The shadow of a face when the sun killed the ice and then her face rose like a moon of flesh.

How I remember the girl’s face, and that my mother couldn’t stop talking about the hat that was still on the child's head when they found her; because I think it really amazed my mother that the hat was still in such good shape.

Where Do You Keep Your Marbles, Honey?

2005-04-05T14:27:00.000-07:00

It is evening. My husband has fallen asleep on the couch. His mouth wide open. I wonder what would happen if I roll a marble into his oesophagus.

A thought like that is immoral, I think. But still I wonder what would happen if I roll a marble into his oesophagus. So, lets imagine this. Afterwards I shall decide whether imagining things are the same as doing them.
I stand up and walk to my little daughter. She is playing Twister with her little feet and hands and arms and legs in a knot. She looks like a smashed spider with trembling limbs.

I say: ‘Where do you keep your marbles, honey?’

‘In daddy’s oesophagus,’ she answers.

Okay, this is where life gets stuck between fantasy and reality. No it isn’t. It never was reality to begin with. It wasn’t a dream either, but just a thought. So it got stuck in this story. Although that smashed spider over there says she keeps her marbles in the oesophagus of her father, this doesn’t mean a thing. I am the writer here. I can make her say anything I want. So let me ask her again.

‘Baby, where do you keep your marbles?’

‘I have no marbles left. Go look in daddy’s shit.’

I am sorry. This is in fact the problem with me. If I have something in my mind I don’t feel like ignoring it. So from here we must go on. We do know now that the marbles are in fact in the oesophagus of my husband. I didn’t roll any of them inside his open mouth so he must have eaten them all. That is too bad, but still I have the marbles where I want them.
Would he eat them if he didn’t like marbles in his oesophagus?

A Great Story About Zero

2005-03-27T05:44:00.000-08:00

My notebook. Picture Daphne Buter.

I was writing something beautiful. I think it was the beginning of a great story. It was a story about air. It was about nothing special, yet. It was just the beginning of a great story about zero. After some time I began to detest what I just wrote, so, at one point I wrote that I stopped writing and that I went downstairs and watched TV and after some time I realized that there was nothing on it. Then I saw the room was just as empty as the TV screen. I felt captured by something eerie. I noticed our cat was sleeping deeper than dead.
It began to rain. The rain was heavy and fell from a profound purple sky. I watched that sky for maybe fifteen minutes. I saw things in the heavens that would make a great story.

BTW, it is still raining and the North Sea rose, and while I write this, fish swim in and out my womb.

Two Good Ways To Break a Chain Letter

2005-03-27T00:11:00.000-08:00

Writer, editor, photographer, friend Wayne E. Yang passed me this one. It is a hovering cyber-chain-letter. Well, here we go.

1.You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, what book would you like to be?

I definitely would like to be dead. I think that would be the best solution for a scorching problem like that.

2.Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character.

Yes. But I didn’t like it. I was a character in the story too.

3.The last book you read.

Collected poems by Rutger Kopland, a Dutch poet. But I have to admit I’d read it before. I only read it again because it lay open on the floor of our bathroom. Too many books lay open on bathroom floors all over the world, I guess.

4.What are you currently reading?

I extreme dislike this question because it gives me the feeling I should be reading something. Should I? Soon I’ll be currently reading my husband’s manuscript, it is about wrestling techniques of the brain.

5.Five books you would take to a deserted island.

Five big enough to keep me warm, and a box of matches.

6.Who are you going to pass the stick to (3 persons) and why?

I’ll pass the stick on to writer, editor and artist Stan Crocker because he likes chewing gum and he’s a most amazing guy; and to Susan Henderson because she’s a wonderful writer and person, and to my neighbour Harry, because I’m sure he’s currently reading a book about crop growing, and he doesn’t understand English, and he has no Blog, and that are two good ways to break a chain-letter.

Birds In A Children's Sky

2005-03-20T23:30:00.000-08:00

Three Birds. Painting: Lente Buter (12) Oil On Canvas.

Once upon a time there was a tear. It tumbled from the universe and landed in the eye of a bird. The bird lingered from tree to tree, weeping, untill the end of times.

Why Do Parents Kill The Children Of Other Parents?

2005-03-17T15:46:00.000-08:00

Picture Daphne Buter.

Once upon a time, we saw it on TV, children, about a few hundred or more, were killed by adults who believed they had a right to do so, because they just knew for sure their God agreed.

My little girl, who’s eight, walked into the living room and saw the horror on TV.

She started shivering, and I hold her.

"Why do parents kill the children of other parents?" she asked me.

I tried to explain why, so, I didn't speak a word.

My little girl, who’s bone skinny and who smells like salty flowers, went into the garden to make a bed of plants and insects. She took her music box and she lay down in our garden, framed by poppy flowers and bugs. She listened to the twinkling sounds that escaped from the box, while inside the box a tiny doll, a fragile lady ballet dancer in a pink dress, circled around on a pin.

My little girl said she had to look at the sky and that she had to think about big people, that it was why she lay there, to watch the dept of sky and to think about big people.

I watched her watching the dept of sky; I watched her thinking about parents who kill the children of other parents; her fresh eyes wide open, frozen in a frightened gaze.

After some time she asked me to lay beside her to watch the blue filled with hovering clouds and lingering birds. And we lay there, watching the clouds and the birds and the endless space behind them, where the heavens and Gods begin, and the world with all the children who ever died in the name of the many Gods who created us or we them, was our arctic nadir.

While we lay there, I feared for a moment that this world ruled by adults, isn't a safe place for children at all.

I Am The Dust That Quivers From The Words

2005-03-17T13:47:00.000-08:00

Colossal walls, a catacomb. Bleached cage
of dust with prints
Of children’s fingers on the windows.
Where chalk drew words out of my mouth.
Scrapes on the blackboard, shrieking tells me
to shut forever up
More quiet than existing undiscovered
Where no one wants to be
In lethargy
This is what I’ve learned of the

School. What was I doing there? I remember scent
Of always just geraniums – red leaves on window-sills;
I hear the closing of green doors and fire fills
A furnace that my right cheek
Swelters. I see a bucket filled with coals
that vomits horse’s eyes in metal maws
That pant and moan like predators

There where I rose. Ruined towards the inside
Of what a cosmos was. Maroon inferno –
I am the ash.

I smell a wooden table, wax, the inkpot filled
with stories, once. And see, a brush and some pink paint;
the worthless gifts that teachers do present
And which I never earned by dreaming
To coast away from so much lack of meaning
Since I was so inefficient

I see her shoulders, there, a sapphire gentle bridge;
two blonde pigtails.
I see the hair of my best friend return
in my mind’s eye. So breakable

I hear the echo of her laughter drowning in the slowly bell.
My God, it sounds like shrieking in an everlasting hell
And I who wasn’t authorized to leave, but stay
Where no one wants to be
A child like me

sat stationary in that catacomb
Not doing anything that did come close to living
So that she had to leave for home
Where until now the tormenting goes on
Because she couldn’t get there on her own

And in the afternoon an empty place
That fills her up since then
I am not free. As well in me she is
a daily near to be.

The teacher spoke, his face in agony,
to all the children of our class
while just to me,
“a weighty combination drove her dead.”

School. You live in me and I in you was driven mad.
Behind your eyes the sky can be at times a pale
or blue statuette.
I am in that place to stay
Where no one wants to be
drenched in me. That bottomless
cemetery
of ash
Where I am not,
and neither was,
but task.

I am the dust that quivers from the words
That never discontinues with convincing us
without a sight. Year in, year out,
in ranks of captured light.

Just A Story About Someone

2005-03-17T07:27:00.000-08:00

This Is A Picture Of Someone, Taken By Someone. Picture: Someone.

This is a story about someone. Someone's morning began just like all other mornings of someone. A star rose on one side of the planet, and someone noticed it. Someone woke up, and someone let the dog out. Someone came home and someone woke someone up, and someone made love to someone. Someone panted and someone moaned and someone begged and someone groaned. Someone heard someone because someone's wall was too thin, and someone shouted that someone had to stop, someone.
Someone heard the phone ring, and there was someone on the phone who said 'hello' to someone, and someone said 'goodbye' to someone. In the evening, someone became ill and someone died, and someone cried, and someone came over to someone to pick up someone and someone put someone in a coffin and someone was buried and someone buried someone, and someone rose to heaven and met there someone. This was a story about someone and I wanted to tell it to someone.

Are You Lonely?

2005-03-17T03:44:00.000-08:00

This Is A Chapter Of My Room At Night. Picture: Daphne Buter.

Last night I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t know where to go so I stayed at home. The room around me was as a big granite womb and it iced my blood. I walked over to the window and gazed into the darkness and it iced my eyes. The space around the house as a big arctic sky and it iced my mind. The universe was around everything as a big black hole and it iced my heart, and I was afraid I might die sooner than expected.
Then, out of nothing, I heard a voice singing “can you feel it?”
First I thought it was the voice of a banshee, but it was the tune of a mobile phone. When I answered the call, there was no one who spoke. I didn’t know what to do, so, I said: ‘Are you lonely?’ Then the connection was broken.

I think it was just one of those nights someone was trying to tell me nothing.

A Killing Dutch Bottle

2005-03-14T23:02:00.000-08:00

The Bottle That Killed My Mother.

When I was about five years old, my mother sometimes bought me a bottle of children’s perfume, for 25 cents a bottle. The small bottles contained water with the smell of roses. The bottles were about 8-9 centimetres high, and they had the shape of a little man or woman, or a cat or a dog, and on top of the head sat the cap. When they were empty they were thrown away. The bottles disappeared from the shops maybe in the late sixties.

A few years before my mother died it became a habit for her to visit flea markets every day. She wasn’t a very rich woman. My stepfather gave her 60 guilders (about 25 $) pocket money a month, the rest was his'. Anyway, my mother bought old things that had not much value, often things that were related to her past.

Three years before my mother died, one day I said to her: ‘Do you remember those little children’s perfume bottles you used to buy me when I was a kid? Would you seek for a bottle like it?’

My mother remembered them and she promised me she would find one for me. From that day on my mother became obsessed by finding a bottle like it. Every day she walked to flea markets around Amsterdam for her search. After some time it made me sad, because she couldn't find one. Every time we spoke each other she began talking about her search, and that she couldn’t find a bottle like it. After a year I began asking her to stop searching for it. I said ‘forget about that bottle. It has been just a thought, but I don’t want you to waste your time on seeking for something that cannot be found. Just give up.’

Then my mother would say: ‘No. I cannot give it up. I have to find it. I just know one day I'll find it.’

This went on for three years, and it made me feel guilty. I wished I never had asked her to find that bottle for me. And every time I called my mother she used to say somewhere during the phone conversation, ‘I didn’t find it yet, but I will one day.’ And I used to answer: ‘You don’t need to find it. Please give up on that stupid bottle.’

But she didn’t, until she died.

My mother died all of sudden on a day in February. Just as always she had been to a flea market that day. I heard my mother had died in the late afternoon, shortly after she had arrived home. I went there and my mother lay on the floor of the living room. My brother was there, and my stepfather, and my sister with her husband.
The undertaker arrived to take my mother away.
When she was moved from the house we didn’t speak much. I walked up and down the living room, slowly, thinking, trying to believe she had really died. And then my eye noticed the bottle, on a shelf of a cupboard. It cut my breath off, I was so shocked only by seeing it. I said to my stepfather in a whisper: ‘Christ!. That bottle over there. How did it get there?’

My stepfather looked at me and he answered: ‘It’s yours. Your mother brought it home today. She put it on that shelf and said, ‘mission completed. That’s for Daphne.’

We All Are In A Hurry To Die As Soon As We Can

2005-03-12T06:20:00.000-08:00

Picture: Daphne Buter.

We all start in this world by being little. First we want to grow taller and taller, and if we cannot grow any taller, we try to grow bigger. Not bigger in size, but bigger in importance.

When I was a toddler I remember my mother took me often to a little shop in our neighborhood, where she bought wash powder and soap, and tablets for stomach burns and headaches. If I looked around me I noticed every costumer was bigger, taller and older than I. I was the only one who couldn’t look over the counter. This annoyed me and made me feel sad. Because I was frustrated by it, I tried to make myself more important by kicking the counter with my miniature gleaming shoes.

If I see a toddler trying to look over any border, I always am touched by the struggle of children to get older, bigger, taller, more important… We all are in a hurry to die as soon as we can.

Now I am at an age many people around me are younger, smaller, and shorter than me…

A One Night Stand

2005-03-06T01:45:00.000-08:00

Cafe Bar Reijnders At The Amsterdam Leidseplein. Picture: Hans Buter.

I had a friend who’s name was Xaviera and she was used to have one night stands. She always told me stories that sounded something like this: "I had a one night stand one night with a real awesome guy who smelled like butter, but I forgot his name because he was just one of my one night stands."
I was about 23 and I never had had a one night stand. I really wanted to have at least one one night stand too, thus, one night I went to the centre of Amsterdam to find myself a one night stand. I went to Café Bar Reijnders in Amsterdam to pick a victim up.
It was my lucky night because an ice-hockey-team was drinking beer and all the guys looked like they needed a one night stand real bad. I said, "hey, puck slammers, which one of you shall I pick to be my one night stand?" Remarkably enough all those guys yelled, "no thanks, Xaviera!"

Red Light Districts Of Amsterdam

2005-03-01T16:08:00.000-08:00

Hands Of A Dutch woman. You get the picture?
Picture: Daphne Buter

We lived across from one of Amsterdam’s red-light-districts when I was a child. I liked to gaze at the half naked women who were drowning in red shadows. Their hair was red and their bodies, even their bra’s were red. All the men that went inside the little red houses became red as soon as they appeared on the other side of the windows, on the red side of the red whores. Next the whores closed their red curtains and I watched the clock. The men stayed inside for maybe 20 minutes and came outside with cute red, red-light-district faces.

Now the district is still there but the lights are no longer red. The whores drown in black-light nowadays and they look hygienic and healthy with huge tinted silicone breasts. They wear all kinds of fluorescent colored push-up bras. Green, yellow, pink, orange… Even their hair and lips and legs glow in the dark. Their high heels look like smoldering rockets, like nuclear weapons to kill all men with.

Only the men that go inside still come outside with cute red, red-light-district faces.

Me, The Insect Inside Her Womb

2005-02-27T01:49:00.000-08:00

The Anouncement Of My Birth

When my mother was pregnant with me, my father said to a friend of his, ‘I wish she bumped with that belly onto a train. I wish that insect inside her womb died.’
I suppose no one could stop me from staying alive. If my mother told me my father had said these nasty things, she always smiled and added, ‘your father was such a special man. He just hated kids.’
This is the announcement of my birth. As you can see my parents were very confused. The announcement says they have found a new house, a new cat, and a new telephone number. There is a P.S. that says, ‘we have another child.’

Cocooning in Amsterdam (two)

2005-02-25T09:36:00.000-08:00

Our Cursed House In Amsterdam

On the third floor of our house lived a woman with a face that looked like a painting of Picasso. Her face was asymmetric. Her right eye, closer to her forehead then her left eye, always gazed across the canal, while her left eye, closer to her nose then her right eye, was watching the tip of her nose all the time. Her face was a brainteaser, and her name was Sensy.
Sensy made a living as a prostitute. When I first discovered she had sex with men for money, I was even more intrigued by her asymmetric face. I asked my mother why in the world men would pay to see her naked, and my mother answered, ‘don’t you understand that? Sensy is just the kind of woman men can’t resist, because her mouth is always open.’

Sensy committed suicide on the age of 53. She took a whole bunch of aspirin with two bottles of Sherry. Then she jumped of the roof of our house and landed in our garden, where she looked like a bigger brainteaser then ever.
In her goodbye letter she wrote: ‘Men want to fuck with women’s heads.’

Cocooning In Amsterdam (one)

2005-02-22T05:39:00.000-08:00

Picture Of A Happy Evil Writer At The Age of 11

We lived in the basement of a big house in Amsterdam. I remember the smell of moldering bricks. My mother said the whole building was cursed because no one had ever been happy between the walls. At night we heard each other moaning and suffering, or we heard our neighbors trying to kill each other. In the gardens cats were howling. At night, spooky shadows created devils on the walls of my room.
On the first floor my father had his atelier. The windows of the place were covered with black velvet curtains as if he strived to keep the real world outside. I didn’t even know there was a real world. In front of the velvet hung big rolls of paper in all kinds of colors and as broad as the walls. My father used the paper as backgrounds for his advertisement pictures. I had to pose for him day after day. If I think back on my childhood I see nothing but pictures. Pictures of a little girl with make-up on her face, eating Saroma desserts, drinking Fanta or Coca-Cola, wearing pop-art dresses or modern coats from the firma Voss. A girl, eating fish fingers produced by Iglo, a girl, sucking ice-cream after ice-cream, shaped by Ola. A girl, captured in settings of happy fake families, who always had discovered some kind of new product that had made their life perfectly perfect. I see a girl that was always smiling to mammies and daddies that looked almost real. I fed them, I hugged them, I did it all while I didn’t move. I just exist there stationary, smirking at my father who had only one eye, a mechanical one. I was so cute, my childhood is frozen in adorable poses that kept me there. Behind all these fixed faces of the many girls I was, I learned to write. I wasn’t allowed to move for so many years, I traveled with words while I didn’t budge a millimeter. Now I stick people with the point of my pencil. I let characters of the past suffer in my stories. I’m evil.
I’m sure my mother was right. The whole bloody house was cursed.

Golden Shoes Will Change The World

2005-02-19T14:12:00.000-08:00

Picture Daphne Buter

My oldest girl wanted golden shoes. All she could talk about was the day she would stride on her golden shoes. She actually believed the world would be a better place to walk on, if she had golden shoes.

A Couple Of Evil Dutch Nuns

2005-02-17T15:05:00.000-08:00

Picture Daphne Buter

Our first child had just been born, a girl, and we went for a walk on the beach. It was springtime and the sun was out. The beach was forlorn. Amazingly calm was the sea - like an endless shiny sky. The firmament was cloudless and motionless. We walked between rotations. We were so happy we had no words for it, just smiles and tears of happiness. I had our perfect daughter in my arms, and her eyes were swallowing us. She was wearing a white satin dress and a little sunhat with ribbons.
Suddenly two nuns showed up on the shore. Their black dresses fluttered behind their bodies like mantles of devils. They walked over to us to observe the baby.

One of them said: ‘What a funny little boy.’

‘He goes after his father,’ the other one said, ‘God bless him.’

They walked further and we watched them vanishing in the distance.

Every God knows how much I hated those evil Dutch nuns.

I Would Kill You And Eat Your Meat

2005-02-15T03:09:00.000-08:00

Picture Daphne Buter

One day during a Christmas dinner, while my stepfather was chewing on rabbit meat in cranberry sauce, he said to my mother: “I was thinking. If you and I were without food and afloat at sea after a ship accident, I would kill you and eat your meat.”

My mother looked at him in confusion and started to sob.

“Do you really mean that? Would you kill me and eat me?” she asked upset.

My stepfather just kept chewing the rabbit meat in cranberry sauce and answered somewhat annoyed, “don’t react so emotionally. Of course I would murder and eat you because that’s how nature works. It’s called the survival of the fittest. It is nothing to get emotional about because we aren’t afloat at sea, are we? We are in Amsterdam celebrating Christmas and I’m eating rabbit meat, not yours. So why in the world do you react so emotionally? For God's sake woman, don't spoil our Christmas dinner...”

My Father's Great Friends

2005-02-15T00:31:00.000-08:00

One of my father's closest friends. Picture Hans Buter

When my father was a kid he had a tame Jackdaw who obeyed him. During his life my father never could keep a friend. Sometimes he talked about the Jackdaw of his youth as the only friend he ever had trusted. If he talked about the bird he had tears in his eyes.

When my father was an old man, all he did was taking pictures of Jackdaws. When he died he had no friends left, no contact with his children, and for 15 years he had lived in solitude on his farm, obsessed by Jackdaws. He left us more than 10.000 pictures of his great friends.

Too Much Food In The House

2005-02-14T00:41:00.000-08:00

It is evening and the night is knocking on your windows with shapfire nails. Your obese husband has fallen asleep on the cauch and he looks so much like Jabba the Hutt that you recently advised him to join the carnival in the south. The clock goes tik-tak-tik-tak, until it drives you nuts.

You are driven nuts. The night is blooming in the garden now. The clock still goes tik-tak-tik-tak, but it doesn't bother you no longer. Jabba the Hutt snores so loudly that you think you can hear from the sound that he ate too much chocolate earlier that day. For a second you feel like a detective, but only briefly, and then you smile desolate.

This is my life, you think sighing, and brave, and next you leave the room to go to bed and you let Jabba the Hutt behind, dreaming of food, on the cauch. You notice that a brownish fluid drips from his mouth to his clothing while words like the ghosts of butterflies, flutter from his troad.

You are in a bed in a room in a place on a planet in space, and yet you cannot sleep. The other bed is empty and you think about the brownish fluid and you begin to wonder if you saw it right, if it was chocolate. What if it was blood? you keep thinking.

The voice in your head is a lingering mantra.

It is almost morning and you feel like a piece of wreck. You stumble downstairs, your heart pounding, prepaired for something horrifying. You enter the living room and you scream a scream that would have killed Alfred Hitchcock if he was still alive, because you see Jabba the Hutt, swollen and pale and cold on the couch; but awake and desperately graving, swallowing chocolate bar after chocolate bar...

I mean, how bad can life be if there is too much food in the house, man?

On The Inside Of An Empty Perfume Bottle

2005-02-14T00:35:00.000-08:00

The Bottle My Mother Kept Since 1967

My father bought my mother a bottle of perfume on his trip to Paris, maybe because he was there with his mistress. When he came home my mother told him she wanted a divorce. Nevertheless, she accepted the perfume and when the bottle was empty she kept it for the rest of her life as a trophy. Sometimes, when she had another argument with my stepfather about his lethargy, she held the empty bottle in front of her tearing eyes and gazed through it, seeing something only she could see. I can still picture my mother, gazing through that bottle, her eyes searching for all that had vanished.

About A Swedish Male Virgin

2005-02-13T01:16:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the Swedish guy pops up in my mind. His first name was Per. We had fallen in love in Amsterdam and he was bone skinny and blond and his eyes were blue and translucent. His honest character struck me; he never lied. He did visit me twice a year and he wrote me funny love letters in between. We never made love. He explained to me he was a virgin and he wanted to keep his virginity for the woman he might marry, later. It was okay with me because I didn’t like bone skinny Swedish male virgins in my bed anyway. So, the last time I saw him was shortly before he left Amsterdam to go back to Sweden. He suddenly looked kind of fat around his middle. I asked him what he had been eating and he answered, ‘I ate a lot of Dutch stuff.’

A few weeks later he wrote me a love-letter from a top-security prison. On his trip to Sweden he was arrested and later he was convicted in Stockholm, because he had indeed eaten a lot of Dutch stuff.

That’s what I liked about that Swedish virgin; he always spoke the truth.

Where Are Those Afternoons?

2005-02-12T02:34:00.000-08:00

Where are those afternoons in which we walked beneath whispering trees among pastures? Where are those afternoons, drifted in their springtime blue panels and gently shoved into stockrooms full kernels? Where are those afternoons, hiding in the one you came home and smiled... In the afternoon you died... stands now a stationary table.... A table like a wooden eye... Where are those afternoons and why are they gone...? Where are those afternoons, bursting of reye?

The Best Butt Of Holland

2005-02-12T02:20:00.000-08:00

I sometimes visit a Lady that gives lessons in nude sketching. I’ve sketched several butts. This is the butt of Coco. I believe Coco has the best butt of Holland.

Coco's Butt

Wonny-Wanda's Heavy Dutch Butt

2005-02-12T02:17:00.000-08:00

Well look who we've got here. It happens to be the butt of Wonny-Wanda. Wonny-Wanda insists on it that we call her Wonny-Wanda, not just Wonny or Won, or Wanda or Wan, no, Wonny-Wanda. The butt of Wonny-Wanda tells us at least one story: she sat a lot on the thing.

Wonny-Wanda's Heavy Butt

A Bad Butt

2005-02-12T02:14:00.000-08:00

Butts are very interesting and I believe they tell a lot about people. This is the butt of Madeline. Madeline is an old lady with a moody butt. And as you can see Madeline's butt is a selfish butt, too. Her butt is a pain in the ass, but her face is even worse.

This is the butt of Madeline

I Look Forward To Nothing

2005-02-12T02:04:00.000-08:00

Today I tried to imagine nothing. Not that I tried to imagine nothing at all, no, I tried to imagine something we call nothing. Nothing worked. I can imagine things, but I cannot imagine nothing. Conclusion: nothing is nothing to me. To me the universe is endless because there cannot be nothing around it. If there can be nothing around it, anywhere, I can’t imagine nothing.

I would highly appreciate it if anyone who reads this, with the brainpower that can imagine nothing, gives me a definition of nothing by Email. I look forward to nothing at all.

FIN

He Wrote Sixteen Pencils Empty

2005-02-12T01:54:00.000-08:00

The book of my husband is growing into something grotesque. He has eight large suitcases full of notes now. He filled all of our suitcases with thoughts. He filled more than 15.000 pages with his thoughts, he wrote 16 pencils empty, and all this material was only used for the beginning of chapter one, of a book that will change the world.

This morning he sat at the table, surrounded by all those suitcases. He opened one, sighing, and put a heap of papers at the table.

"The suitcases are full," he said.

"I agree," I answered, "your manuscript is too big. Maybe you should organize it."

"Shut up!" he reacted annoyed, "you always see things different from me. Is the world organized? No! So why in the world should a manuscript about the world be organized? I'll just buy some more suitcases today to deal with this minor problem."

Just Write A Story

2005-02-11T03:37:00.000-08:00

Write a story. Don’t’ ask me what kind of story. Just write a story. Any story. A story about nothing if you want. I know a guy who makes up stories all day. If I ask him ‘how are you?’ He tells me he’d just made a trip around the world, walking, on his bare feet, with a dog named Buddy Hopper, who protected him against some aliens with odd sexual desires.
If I ask him ‘and how’s your mom doing?’ He tells me she kind of died some weeks ago but just before she was buried she knocked on the cap of the coffin, which he had made for her, and therefore it was a gold plated coffin because he’s doing so good with his business in granite tiles lately, he doesn’t know what to do with all the money he makes, and this is how they found out his mother was still alive. If I ask him: ‘Are you happy?’ He says,‘I don’t like to tell you the truth thus I'd better not lie about it.’
He’s awesome. I think you should write a story about him.

All Those Dull Dutch Travelers

2005-02-09T04:45:00.000-08:00

The Inside Of Lover's Rail, Where I Waited For my Readers to never appear.

When my first novel was published I traveled a lot by train. I traveled a lot by train because I had read that Dutch people read mostly in trains. I looked forward to seeing all these dull Dutch travelers reading my first novel, sitting side by side in compartments, laughing their heads off and crying their eyes out about the things I had written.
Interesting enough I never noticed a traveler reading my first novel. They weren’t even reading at all and they never laughed or cried. All they did was gaze outside the windows of the train, whining about the rainy weather.

Do You Want My Pets?

2005-02-09T04:33:00.000-08:00

I have a cat named A Dog and a dog named A Cat. Now, the dog is barking thus I have to beat up A Cat. If I beat up A Cat the dog will bite me. If the dog bites me I hate A Cat and if I hate A Cat the dog is unhappy. I'm so tired of pets like that. Do you want them?

I'm Just Really Straight

2005-02-09T04:30:00.000-08:00

Once I had a obese friend who was a real funny hoodwink. I thought of his life as one big adventure. He told me he wasn’t straight and that his boyfriend was a movie star in Hollywood. One day I had an appointment with my boss in a restaurant. My friend, the hoodwink, dressed up as an oil magnate from Arabia, with a white sheet wrapped around his head, and he went to the restaurant too. He kept sending my boss messages and expensive drinks by the waiter. Messages that said: "I’m an oil magnate from Arabia, can I buy that blonde woman from you for a 1000.000 dollars?"

My Boss said it was bloodcurdling.

One day my friend the hoodwink told me he was in love with me. I was surprised since he had convinced me he wasn’t straight. He kept sending me messages and flowers, messages that said: "I’m no oil magnate from Arabia, and I have no boyfriend who is a movie star in Hollywood. I’m just really straight."

No One Detects It

2005-02-09T04:26:00.000-08:00

This morning, when I woke up, I tried to look at my life. There were no dreams to hold on to. There was nothing but this big silence inside me. I tried to look my life in the eye. The silence inside me was much like a huge storm. I sat on my bed and I thought: ‘My life is a tempest. This tempest lives inside me and it destroys me but no one detects it.’

I went downstairs and made a black coffee. I looked through the window of the garden and I saw a frantic bird with paralyzed wings.

A Man Named Jupiter

2005-02-09T04:21:00.000-08:00

A man named Jupiter told me my name is Io. He wants to touch my radically different surface and feel my volcanoes erupt for him. I like his rings. His sparkling material simply gets denser with depth. I could see the top of his clouds towering in his atmosphere.
We floated into the universe and found a dream where we could be real together.

I just woke up beside my snoring husband. I feel like molten rock.

Thinking About Nothing Special

2005-02-09T01:04:00.000-08:00

I sat in my garden and watched the skies. I saw nothing but clouds, and some blue fragments of the never-ending universe. Some birds, on the edge of their life were hovering below all this. I watched the skies and I thought about nothing special. I thought, I just sit here ignoring the fact that my body is dying since the day I exist. I’m like the birds in the skies. I just live my life until it’s over.

Vaguely I noticed the sound of rustling trees and I thought, the trees do the same without thinking about it. Then I started to wonder how I could be so sure trees cannot think. Right. How can I be so sure? I’m not God. I’m an atheist who seeks for answers and if I seek for them I start to pray.

Listen, I sat in my garden and watched the skies, thinking about nothing special.

The Invention Of The Hexagram

2005-02-08T05:23:00.000-08:00

Today is a very special day, because my husband invented the hexagram. I have to admit that other great thinkers invented the hexagram before him, but my husband has the habit to invent things that are already invented by other geniuses, so, again he wrote history today.

A Picture Of The Amazing Hexagram My Husband Invented

Drowning Is Living In France

2005-02-08T05:10:00.000-08:00

I was 3 years old when my mother and my sister and I, and a friend of my mother with her children, lived in France. It was the first time my mother had left my father. We lived in France for maybe 4 months. Every day the sun was sizzling our skin. We never saw a cloud.

I hated France.

I hated the apartment with walls of stone, white as chalk. I hated the bedstead I had to sleep in, while the Atlantic Ocean was howling day and night.
Our faces looked moderated but beautifully tinted. The sand of the beach was hot as a heater and our feet had blisters; our lips had cracks and our shoulders were loosing skin, like snakes lose their skin.

We were snakes in the blaze of France.

My mother was crying every day. She walked up and down the shore of the beach, looking for shells, sobbing. That unbearable summer she collected thousands of shells and dead crabs and pieces of twisted wood. When she walked up and down the shore I followed her like a little crippled shadow. She never looked around. It was like she didn't notice I followed her for 4 months. I can still see her black back; I can still hear her screaming her sorrow over the water.

The Ocean was aggressive and dangerous, and large salty tongues of water were thrown into the sky and dragged back into the mouth of the Ocean and the voice of the sea was thundering non-stop.

I wasn’t allowed to go into the sea alone. I decided to go into the sea alone. Bulging waves opened their jaws and swallowed me in a second. I was transported to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and I looked around me. France was gone and fear could not get to the bottom of the sea. The water was cool as a breeze and I saw the clean sand and some animals that crawled there, and I didn’t feel any consternation before I lost consciousness.

I woke up at the beach, surrounded by legs of shouting adults. The sun burned my salty face and blinded my eyes. I had to throw up water and shells and crabs and light and hatred.

I knew I had nearly died but I longed to go back to the silence under the surface of that French hell. I started to cry, saying I wanted to go back to the bottom of the sea. I hated the adults that stopped me. I hated my mother for crying I almost died.

I just hated France.

Sometimes I still long for the bottom of the sea. Drowning is living in France to me.

Old People Seem To Like Me

2005-02-08T05:01:00.000-08:00

Old people seem to like me. Today an old man came to my house and handed me some flowers. I asked him why he brought these to me and he said he wasn’t sure because he had forgotten who I was. I said it didn't matter because I didn't know him either. He was shaking like old people sometimes do. I took his hand and asked him to come into my house.
We talked about his life. I liked to observe the contours of his skull under the skin of his tormented face, when he talked about a love that was denied now more than 40 years ago. He said his tears were still behind his eyes. When he said this I could see him holding back these tears. I think we both cried that way about what life does to people who cannot be together for whatever reason. If I cry I cry like an old man.

This Read Can Be A Bird

2005-02-06T06:20:00.000-08:00

This read can be a bird...

Because, sometimes I am running in a dream of feathers
I don't know where I'm going....
I enter space after space after space, trying to get out of the place... Colors are haunting me...
Something is behind me, whispering... It is the imagined rainbow of my imagination...
Kaboenk, kaboenk, kaboenk...
goes the echo of the shadow of my heart...my heart has no color in the gap of my chest and no ground has my road... I hover there...among voices of voices and chants of chants
captured by endless mantra's
of a returning reverie...
am I a prisoner

of hope ...

I Live In A Frozen Metropolis

2005-02-06T05:55:00.000-08:00

I look outside my windows again. I see the sky that looks like a black lake. No wind. No waves. I see the rigid skeletons of trees. I see birds, stationary, in an unmovable painting. Across from my house is a home for elderly people. Behind the windows I see some pale faces. Ashen and frightened masks that glow in the dark. If I try to smile at them, my lips won’t move. The eyes of the masks just keep gazing at me like none of us exist . Nothing moves here. I live in a frozen metropolis. We have no time.

The Heaven Of Amsterdam

2005-02-06T01:27:00.000-08:00

When I was a child I thought of our garden in Amsterdam as heaven. I experienced everything around me as magnificence. I saw magnificence in the birds and magnificence in insects that buzzed through our garden full of smells and flowers and mighty trees. I was still so immature, I thought God lived in our dusty barn. In the beginning I didn’t have the guts to go in there. We had a cat with one eye who didn't fear God, it walked in and out the barn all day. When I was eight I was ready to meet God myself. I went into the barn and gazed at sinister shadows to look for Him. Suddenly I could feel Him watching me and I saw one of His eyes gleam up like a little yellow glistening sun. Now only I knew just one of God’s eyes lived in our barn. I’d run outside the shelter of His eye to save my soul. I looked into the azure sky and looked God in the other eye and blinked at Him.

My Grandmother's Wooden Dog

2005-02-05T07:32:00.000-08:00

My grandmother's dog hung in the corridor of her house in Amsterdam. It was a nasty little wooden fellow and she called him Axel. My grandmother used to say that Axel came alive at night. He ran through her dusty rooms and he barked and bit in my imagination. His eyes, red and glistening, gazed at everyone at any time. My grandmother survived her husband and all her friends, and she was very proud of that. She died at the age of 94. Shortly after she had died, I was alone in her house. My dead grandmother lay on a bed in the living room, with a content smile on her face. I touched her hands and they were rigid, like they were made of wood. Axel gazed at me and gave me the creeps. His eyes seemed to glow red. A few days later my father gave me the pet. He said my wooden grandmother wanted me to have it.

A Great Dutch Writer

2005-02-05T06:17:00.000-08:00

I know this great Dutch writer. Great, in a logic, he is huge. I’ve never seen such a big man, that’s what I mean. He’s a giant. It could be a coincidence, but his first name happens to be Goliath. You should see his sections to understand how big he is. His legs, for instance, his legs are like trees. And his shoulders – I’ve thought about his shoulders maybe too often. I couldn’t compare them with anything, except with the shoulders of God. And he has this big voice, if he talks, it sounds like heavy thunder. The funny thing is, he has two eyes, but only one of them is big.

That Old Man And Me

2005-02-03T04:58:00.000-08:00

I’ve just been out in the rain here. It is hideously cold and the rain was just as cold. I wanted to feel it. I just let the rain wash my face. Then I saw an old man, and he smiled at me because I probably looked a little funny standing in the rain and enjoying it. That man was about seventy years old and I said ‘hello there, how are you today?’ He said he was fine but cold. I said I was fine but cold too. I started walking and he walked with me. I said, 'can I take your hand?' And he said, 'that would be very nice.' I took his old hand and that is how we walked, that old man and me, hand in hand in the rain, until we both had to go in another direction.

Any End Would Do.

2005-01-24T04:43:00.000-08:00

A supernatural being floated through the universe, like a goldfish in a bowl. It kept rotating, and it always had, and that was life. Eager to find a way out of too much space, the supernatural being searched for the end. An end. Any end would do. But there was no end, just that endless loop of freedom that imprissoned all and always from no beginning, no ending.

My Name In The Snow

2004-12-22T14:21:00.000-08:00

When I was about 9 years old I had a crush on a beautiful tinted boy. I thought he was an Indian, and I thought of his bike as an iron horse. We were two children in the snow.
One day he asked me or I could guess who he loved forever and ever, and I answered 'no.'
Then he wrote my name in the snow and biked away.

Sometimes I like to paint

2004-12-21T14:22:00.000-08:00

Painting by me. Oil On Canvas.

Painting

Time Out

2004-12-21T10:40:00.000-08:00

A Moving Poem.

If time is passing, time has passed… Time is something we can’t get…
Time is flying, soaring, crawling…..
Time is a beetle with golden wings on a branch; a song in the sky; a sound on an attic, a shadow casting on a wall; a window with closed curtains… Someone said time doesn’t exist…That time is always now, never past or future…
I have no time, cause time is running. I am running out of time…
I’m losing it. Losing time… I’m leaving me…
I had some red and yellow time. I had some purple time. A sun – it was a star of time. Time is an agreement, a cloud in a sky, a sky around a cloud, a bird captured in a moment, a life… an explosion. Time is exterminating time…
Time is annihilating us and we are killing time…
If nothing would be in motion… If nothing moved…
Time’s up…..

Time out.

A Monstrous Category 4

2004-12-21T08:23:00.000-08:00

I was in the living room when my life collapsed around me. No one but me noticed it happening. It started with a whirlwind inside me. Soon the children were playing hide and seek in a merry-go-round that couldn’t stop rotating. My husband walked in circles. He talked about himself and his mouth steamed nothing but clouds. I couldn’t take it any longer. I launched myself into the sky and kept falling until I was the rigid eye of a violent hurricane. The very next moment I increased into a monstrous category 4.

I didn't make my first stop, yet.

My Father Was A Man In A Box

2004-12-21T07:21:00.000-08:00

My mother had a box made of papier-mâché with love letters written by my father. No one was allowed to read these letters after he had left. I kept asking for it but my mother kept the letters for herself. She opened the box several times a week and next she examined the letters and sobbed. I never knew my father. My father was a man in a box.

A Smoldering Shooting Star

2004-12-21T07:16:00.000-08:00

When I looked outside my window a huge blizzard was infuriating the coast of Holland. I had to go outside to feel the misery of my life. When I opened the front door the wind speed choked me. Unexpectedly I fell into the sky through rain and gloomy clouds. I didn’t see a seagull. All birds where hiding under the surface of the North Sea for some reason. I kept falling into heavens. I fell beyond the atmosphere of planet Earth and couldn’t breathe. I fell into the frost of the universe and couldn’t move. I left a bright streak of light behind me when I kept falling, falling, falling... like a smoldering shooting star. I tried so bad to fall out of love…

I let the characters in my stories suffer

2004-12-21T01:59:00.000-08:00

People say I write cruel stories and I do agree. I write about the people who say things like this to me. I just write about people in common. People like you. I write frequently on my new novel but someone I know believes writing is a way to run from reality. I have to run from reality. Reality is vicious. But the book I am writing scares the hell out of me because I see who I really am. I am vicious too. I let the characters in my stories suffer. I feel sorry for them sometimes. I cry for them and next I let them suffer even more. Then I stop writing for awhile to find out any story is better than my daily life. My daily life is more vicious than anything else. I really don’t know where I am today. I am a problem to myself lately. I like to hang out at the internet. I have a secret lover in one of my stories. Some time ago I'd found out my whole life is a story because my secret lover said something like it in this story. This bugs me. Therefore I try to live in a virtual world. Everyone is a virtual beings to me and if you invite me to your Blog I am aware of the fact you think you believe you have a Blog but you don’t have a Blog at all. All you have are words and an internet connection. This morning I woke up and I thought ‘I think I don’t exist.’ I hope I think differently tomorrow.