Feverhead

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Quiet Foxes 
i  n  d  e  x

Adultery
Age
Animal
Anomie
Apology

is for Bestiary

Backta Vagen, yells my mother, yanking me backwards. It means, quite simply, Back off! Car. I shouted it across the street to a startled American classmate. The car whizzed past and the last fragments of my mother's language were exhumed as I stood, baffled by their antiquity, her rust in my mouth.

Balloons
Banana
Beirut
Black
Body
Brotherhood
Brown

C

Baring one's teeth and retreating is an animal response. C begins with the menacing hiss of sss and then the high-pitched wail of the eeeeee. It is us, backing off from all that is crazed, the entire curve of our backbones distorted by fear.

Wystan, my brother, lets out a small cry.

Cars
Cell
Cello
Childhood
Children
Compassion
Confession
Confinement
Contempt
Convert
Criticism

D

Death
Demeter
Depression
Dream
Dreams
Drowning

E

The sound of e is the sound of failure, high-pitched screaming. I and my mother read a book with cardboard pages. The sentences are stiff.
Tom Thumb is a small boy.
The hand is a finger toy.
My mother shuts the book. She puts her hands to her face; I'm wondering if she is going to cry. Instead, my mother's thumb and index fingers form a closed rectangle. Through this, she looks at me as through a telescope, unblinking: I spy with my eye.
I cup my hands together and look back at her. Our eyes meet.
Blackberries are soft.
Pears, plums, oranges are firm.
The pig is in the sty.
The apple has a worm.
You're the apple of my eye.

Earnings
Emotion

F is for Father

Violence, force, the white heat of anger and dizziness pulled out and displayed. That is why the 'F' begins words as 'fuck' and 'father'. Each bout of anger must begin again. My mother stands up. She's lost so much weight I think of the woman who's sawn in half. Entire sections have been misplaced. She pulls out all her clothes into heaps on the floor. She sits, lost in her clothes. She hasn't washed her hair or cooked in days. She looks at my fingernails and her own. They're rimmed with dirt.
Wash them, she says, go wash your hands. Our father has been gone for two weeks. He's scheduled to arrive tonight. My mother wants to be gone before he arrives but she must sort out all the bills, her belongings and letters, her failure. Before he arrives, she takes a shower, changes her clothes. This time, she's prepared.
Jonathan, do you think I'm bad? This is what my mother asks me as she starts packing. It is autumn. The sky is so blue I don't understand what she is saying.
Where are you going? I ask. I'm going too.
No, you've got to wait for Daddy. I'll be back.
When?
Next Friday.

Fable
Faith
Fear
Fever
Florida
Friendship
Furniture

G

The dual sound embodies the notion of duplicity, the inner pleasuring of a transvestite. Outwardly, it has the guttural effort of the brusque 'hard' g. This hard 'g' is a buffoon, a mock-up of a gangster, a pimp. The soft 'g' inside is an effeminate whisper--utterly harmless in its gauzy attempts to actualize the fantasy of woman. It rarely succeeds. It is used in moist words such as 'gentle' and 'genitals', ineffectual words such as 'geraniums' or 'genial' but, usually, the actual woman 'J' pushes it aside, questions its legitimacy or 'genuineness'.
Shapewise, 'G' echoes C, but it curls its tail inwards. I remember one afternoon watching my brother Wystan depilate his legs.

Glibness
God
Gold
Good
Gratefulness

H

H is a letter of self-denial, hiding behind a mock-sneeze. The weakness of this letter is apparent in its promiscuity. It couples with various letters such as 't', 's', 'p' and 'c', creating absurdly humpbacked sounds. By itself, it has no backbone. It takes the breath out of you entirely to say the sound. It is the motion of disgorging, having the wind knocked out of you.

Hands
Hatred
Heart
Hell
Her
Here
Hertzsprung-Russell, Demeter (1949---- )
Hertzsprung-Russell, Maria
Hospital
Humans
Hunting

I

Insanity

J

The tail of this letter lifts upwards in a small query, a faint hope. Refused legitimacy or equality--note that its top is firmly stoppered--it puts its root into the ground, seeking ascendancy through wiles, jokes, the tenderness of manipulation, the submissive wag of the tail.
Marilyn tells me the story of Jonah, a man who is at first fearful and proud. Jonah tries to sail away from Nineveh and the Lord himself. After a few days in the belly of the whale, Jonah wags his tail and bares his belly before the will of the Lord. But, in her version, Jonah never goes back to Nineveh. Instead, he sails off into the sunset.

Once they arrive at Beirut, my father puts Marilyn on a strict allowance, just enough for food and clothes. He's learned his lesson from my mother. He wants to see receipts and itemized bills. Marilyn begins to have a shifty look about her. I catch her lying several times; I know she's hiding something. I tell her I'm clearly on her side so she tells me her secret: she is slowly piling up her own stash. She calls it egg money. My father never confronts her but he knows and they wage their silent battle. For instance, a large T.V. might be delivered to the house.
Marilyn looks helpless. Are you sure he didn't pay for it ? It's not a mistake ?
The delivery man gives her a small note in my father's hand. It says, encouragingly, Go ahead, Marilyn, you can pay for it.

Why don't you call your parents? I say. Ask your parents for money.
They wouldn't give me a cent. They want me to send them money, she says bitterly. Besides, your father has my bank account and my passport.

But it isn't really that Marilyn can't run away. It's that she has nowhere to run to. She's got one bad knee and two young children and this imbalance causes her to walk in a circle right back to my father.

K

Kindness

L

L is the bane of the stutterer, the child outlining its cleft palate; it consists of the tongue briefly licking the ridge on roof of the mouth. Tentatively, we speak of loss. The delicacy of the sound is used to lace cruder concepts such as leer or lechery with a delightful swirl reminiscent of Benedictine liqueur. The pleasure of the tongue touching the palate is that of a sweet dissolving in the mouth. So we savor lewd, lick, linger, longing and lulled. This self-caress is also why love fascinates us, why we repeat it to others at heady, inappropriate moments, draining it as gamblers drain their luck. Lastly, L is most irresistible when paired with the sibilant S--this fully explains why we spend a third of our lives in sleep, the remainder on lust or even less.

Lunging, Loss, Light and Leaning.
My own mother used to take me on her lap, almost suffocating me as she held me to her, rocking back and forth in the dusk. I would ask what was wrong. She would say, Lessna .

Language
Leavetaking
Lie
Life
Love
Loss
Lost
Lucidity
Lust

M

M draws itself painfully up on two legs and manages to stand. Therefore M is the patron of words that imply a task or duty that is difficult to satisfy or fulfill. M is for Marilyn, my step-mother. M is for Marenna, a good friend. M is for Maria, my ex-wife. M is for Moving.
The second time my mother runs away, she doesn't take much at all: only two loosely packed suitcases, one in either hand. Travelling, I realize the wisdom in this: if there is too much luggage, you get caught. If one side is too heavy, you keep veering like Marilyn. If you keep veering, you never reach your destination.

Marenna (1931-- )
Masochism
Memory
My own affair
Medea
Millenial Chess
Mind
Monday
Mother (1920--1957) Russell, Marilyn
Mother
Motion
Murderers

N

Note that N is a fragment--a rib of M. It waives responsibility by disabling itself. Thus, words that begin with 'N' are almost weightless, elusive: Njinsky, nothingness, nearly. Consider my brother kicking both my father's legs until the man slumps. Wystan and I are the straight lines, carrying our slanted father towards the car.

Nightmares

O

O

P

P is the letter of disdain, an exhalation of contempt, spitting out: Pah. That is why we cannot speak of our 'pain' without a certain amount of irony, for, in expressing it, we are opening ourselves up to the ridicule inherent in the phonetics.
Packing
Pain
Pause
Pity
Phosphene
Porch
Pornography

Q

Queen

R

Reader
Reality
Religion
Rosenthal

S

My brother had a brilliant yellow umbrella with a handle that was a roughly textured orange, the color of a chicken's foot. The umbrella itself was a small sun and we gloated beneath that sun in our artificial heat, huddled together because it was so small it hardly covered one person. Sometimes Demeter would join us and we would stand in the thunderstorm together, the yellow light glowing down on us, the rain hissing, wetting our backs, the faint rumble raising the hairs on the back of our necks. I wish I could pull that umbrella out of my mind and open it for you. It is a perfect example of primitive happiness.

SSSsssssss
Sadism
Shirt
Shit
Soul
Sound
Spectacle
Stars
Stupidity
Suicide

T

Just as Q attempts to go beneath, T desperately struggles to stay on the surface. Thus touch and talk, titillate, titter and travesty. When the repressive comes in contact with the corruptive H, it realigns itself into a hypocrisy. Thus we have thanks, thoughtfulness, theoretically, theology, thorough, Thalidomide and threat.
We also have Theodore Russell, my father, nicknamed Tito.

Telepathy
Thirty-eight
Touch
Trust
Truth
Twenty-three

U

U insists that you shape your lips into a kiss. But the words themselves are somber, concerned with creating ghetto boundaries: Undo. Unusual. Ugly. Unhappy. Used. Unravel. Umbrage, Underneath, Urinate.

Then we have stranger words such as undulate, ululate, but these words, like a U-turn, come back to us and the sound itself brushes the soft, fleshy uvula suspended from our palate.

V

Ventura
Vulture

W

W is a strangely moving letter. We form it by drawing our lips together for an O but then suddenly slackening the muscles: weary. Even the 'h' cannot invigorate it: it sounds exactly as it did before, as in the negligent 'whatever', or entirely falls back to leave the 'h' alone, as in 'who'?

This wistful quality of the 'W' can be seen even in relatively simple words such as woe, whittle, willful, wirra, wisp, wanting, wince, wouldn't, wingless, wayward, whiffle, wellaway, widdershins, wellies and the reoccurring why? that confronts exposed lies.

Creatures that exist under the sway of W are similarly homely: worms, wildebeests, water buffalo, wombats, and walruses, or utterly slight: the cream-crowned widgeon, whippoorwill, woodcock, whooping crane, widow-bird, whorelet, whimper and warren.
It is also the home of my older brother, Wystan, otherwise known as Jonathan, better known as myself.
There is no W in the Swedish alphabet.

I ask my mother, Why?
She shrugs then says, What? Why? Who? When? What's the point?

Whar?
Why?

X

This glyph is synonymous with poison, the letter itself is a curse; the sound is strange and lifeless: one is pushing the 'k' onto 's'; this unlikely fusion falls apart. Thus we have xenophobia, and xerosis is when our skin flakes off due to abnormal dryness or aging. Xenon refuses to merge with other elements.

X-rays push aside the impenetrability of the flesh, and the xyster is a surgical instrument used for scraping bones.
When we are no longer in love, the former object of our desires is also referred to as our 'X' and we scratch out sap and numbers with this same swift slash.

With a bright blue marker, I have marked an X on Ventura.

Y

At first glance, there is something wildly exuberant and foolish about the 'Y'--we have Yes-men, yeti, yentas, yahoos and yakuza. One looks foolish, unhinging the jaw to release this yabbering, yammering, yackety-yak; one yawls, yawns, yawks, yodels, yowls and then, as the sun shifts from today to yesterday, Y takes on a quieter note by yielding, yearning, again: yes, yes and yet I have hardly touched on my subject; I have been swept farther and farther away. Perhaps it is time to simply give up the idea of returning home. I should place the heart down at this strange forked juncture. I should call Anna back but I'm too angry and tired at her joke, her stab at humour.

Yolk

Z

Look at how effortlessly we have arrived at the end. When I come to Z, she says, Stop. The English alphabet stops here. I am surprised: it's so short. Truncated, it does not even reach the floor. Instead, it hangs suspended by a breath, lazily twirling clockwise, then counterclockwise, perpetual, inexplicable.

Zugzwang

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