EXCERPTS

VIDEOS: GARY READS TWO EXCERPTS FROM THE COMPLICATED CALCULUS (AND COWS) CARL PAULSEN (CLICK BELOW)

FROM THE COMPLICATED CALCULUS (AND COWS) OF CARL PAULSEN, A NOVEL FROM FITZROY BOOKS, July 5, 2022

MILK

First published in Callisto

It’s the official start of tenth grade, and everyone is talking and texting at the same time, even though the person they’re texting is probably less than 10 feet away. But if you can do both, and do them well, your coolness quotient is obviously very high. Mine, I’m afraid, is in the negative digits, but then again it probably always has been.

Everyone is also showing off their summer pictures: for some, trips to the Black Hills or the Wisconsin Dells, or for the rich kids, California or Florida, and for the ultra rich, maybe even further. Sue Tilford, whose dad is president of Fullerton Savings and Loan, went to some fancy summer camp in France to learn to speak the language so she’d be ready for some fancy college in a few years, and a group of girls is crowded around her like she’s a rock star, oohing and aahing over her pictures of the Eiffel Tower and Mediterranean beaches. But for most of the class, it’s photos of late afternoons and weekends at Woodland Lake, tanning on the raft anchored to the muddy bottom in between shifts at the Dairy Queen or canning factory, or after hot July days walking soybean fields to weed the corn out that isn’t supposed to be there but somehow always manages to get mixed in with the soybean seeds.

I don’t have a cell phone, and most likely will never get one unless I can talk my father into joining the 21st century or I find some way to pay for it myself. Too expensive, my father would say whenever I asked for one, and besides which this whole texting insanity is destroying what little is left of the English language, not to mention face to face social discourse, whatever that was. As a former high school English teacher he was concerned about such things, even if everyone else in the free world didn’t care one way or the other.

It didn’t matter. There was no one I wanted to text anyway. If there was someone I wanted to talk to, I would do it in person. That would please my father to no end. More than anything, though, I just want to get my piece of paper telling me where to be the Tuesday after Labor Day, the first day of school, what my locker combination is, so I can go home to my true friends, my cows.

GOODNESS AND MERCY

“Milking’s done. I’ll get back to painting the tool shed in a little bit, if that’s okay.”

I put my cereal bowl in the soapy water in the sink, give it a push, and wait for it to hit bottom. It’s Friday morning, the beginning of the long Labor Day weekend, and with morning chores out of the way, I’m looking forward to some alone time in my room, maybe even a pre-lunchtime nap. It’s summer vacation for only three more days, and I’m not ready to let go yet.

My father, sitting at the kitchen table, looks up from the newspaper he’s spread out in front of him. “The cemetery. Remember?” He shakes his head. “How could you forget that?”

And yet somehow I have. Did that make me a terrible person?

We’d gone last year, on the first anniversary, and I knew without either of us saying anything, that we’d started a tradition. Of course we had. But had it really been a whole year? I remembered how slowly time seemed to move from when she died to that visit a year later, but how fast it had gone from a year ago to now.

We were getting used to her being gone. Or maybe it was just me who felt that way. Whether or not my father did, I couldn’t say. We didn’t talk about such things; why we didn’t I couldn’t say anything about that either. Sometimes it seems like there’s an opening; we’re watching TV and reminded of something she liked or said, but neither of us are able to do anything about it, or there’s some distraction, like time for milking and chores, or Anna needing something or other, or just being too tired from everything to do much remembering.

But maybe that was the whole point of going, to somehow make up for what we couldn’t say or what we lost track of in those other moments. Society is governed by rituals. We learned that in geography class way back in the eighth grade, and here was one of our very own. But somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better about forgetting.

Anna isn’t going; she’ll stay home with Ellen. She’s too little to remember anyway, my father says. She’ll come with us in a few years, when it’ll mean something.

But before we can go we have to get dressed up, even though we’ll just have to change back into chore clothes afterward. “The least we can do is look nice,” my father says, sensing that I’m about to complain. And of course he’s right, and once again I’m a terrible person for caring only about what a pain it is to have to put on a suit in the middle of a hot early September day instead of what it is we’re trying to do: remember. Though never mind that my mother wouldn’t care what we wore, she’d understand the comfort of stained T-shirts, jeans, the scuffed summer tennis shoes I wore from April to November. My father, however, will not be moved, so why try?

The Complicated Calculus (and Cows) of Carl Paulsen is available through Regal House Publishing, Amazon (paperback, audiobook, and Kindle), Indiebound, bookshop.org, and Barnes & Noble, or from your local independent bookseller.

FROM ORANGES, A Short Story Collection PUBLISHED BY NEW RIVERS PRESS

DONNY

On the Saturday before Christmas, not quite a year since Kevin died, I went to the Electronics Department at Dayton’s to try and find out something about Donny. I did need to shop for some CDs and other last-minute gifts, but there was any number of other stores I could have gone to that day and found those things. I went to Dayton’s to see if Donny was still alive.

I had decided, when I went up to the cash register, I’d tell the sales person that I was a friend of Donny’s and that I was just wondering if he was still around, ask how he was doing. I hadn’t figured out exactly how I would react when they gave me the news. I’d have to act surprised, of course. I thought, I’m sorry to hear that. He was a good friend of mine, sounded good. But if I was a friend, wouldn’t I have known what had happened to him?

As it turned out, I didn’t need to worry about that. Donny was there behind the counter.

Now that I knew, I wanted to get out of the store before he saw me. I didn’t know what I was going to say. It’s good to see that you haven’t died? But just as I was about to leave, he called out my name.

ORANGES

First published in Water~Stone Review

My mother says the oranges I bring from Minneapolis are much better than any she’s ever found in Mason City, Iowa. She’s been eating three or four a day, according to my father, and after every chemotherapy session she asks for a big glass of orange juice and drinks it down in two or three gulps. It usually comes right back up, and my father has to be ready with a washcloth to wipe her mouth, her nose, and the front of her pajama top. But it doesn’t bother her. “It cleans things out,” she says. “Better than that poison they’ve been pumping through my veins.”

This weekend, I’ve brought a dozen for her and half of them will be gone by the time I leave Sunday afternoon. “You never bring enough, Michael,” she’ll say when I call on Wednesday to check up on her. “Your father’s rationing out what’s left until you come down again.” But for now, she has plenty, and she likes the way they look in the wicker basket next to her chair in the living room. I’ve mixed them in with apples—red and green—and bananas that I buy along with the oranges at the co-op down the street from my apartment. “We need the colors,” she said as she watched me arrange them last night on the fake green grass she used to put in our Easter baskets.

I’m here for the weekend to watch her while my father’s away in Des Moines on a business trip, one of his last before his retirement begins. He didn’t want to go, but I told him he needed to get away and it would be good for him to have a break. My sister Anne, who lives nearby and comes by twice a day, offered to stay, but I told her she could take a break, too. Let me do this, I said. It’s my turn.

Oranges is available through Amazon (paperback and Kindle), ebay.com, or from your local independent bookseller.