AMBER MCMILLAN
The Rusty Toque | Issue 4 | Poetry | February 15, 2013
VARIANT CThere once was a blind kid who comforted himself daily with a dial tone, cradled a plastic phone to his ear for hours, who later became the freak midday-calling the Russian foreign embassy pretending to be a radio talk-show host, invited the soviet on-air for a round of American trivia, tugging conversation and teasing out talks for as long as possible to give tracers the time to find him, arrest him, and provide him a bed. This was the 1950s, before the effects of sound on the human psyche were investigated with quite the panache they are now. Before a car-horn in F-sharp was standardly applied to all new vehicles, and the minor second interval was enthusiastically assigned to rear moving, heavy-load Mack trucks. At that time, a dial tone was just a telephony signal indicating that the exchange is working, confirming the off hook, ready to transmit a call. A WAGERIn 1949, the middle-aged and sufficiently
well-mannered educators and nurses at the Fernald School in Massachusetts, famously provided their developmentally challenged students with radioactive oatmeal, the city-funded leg of a state-funded project, determining the precise amount of juice the human body could tolerate before collapse. Three times daily, the children gathered in the bustling school cafeteria, oftentimes chasing one another, pushing, poking, tripping, until finally settling on the long wooden benches lining the lunch tables, outfitted with stacks of handmade ceramic bowls and Lucite green water glasses neatly embossed with tiny images of post-war airplanes. Whispering and pinching each other, they waited as each child was served a level ladle of slop, each glass filled three-quarters-full, ten children per row, and every one numbered, carefully monitored, even marveled at by the attending, on-site, medical professionals, the kitchen-help swaying to the muffled radio, Louis Armstrong’s A Kiss to Build a Dream On. |
AMBER MCMILLAN is a teacher and writer living in Toronto, Ontario. Her poems have appeared in fwriction: review, The Puritan, and Emerge Literary Journal.
