Some middlefingers have a story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.