Wouldn't You Know?
Eckhard Gerdes

Wouldn't you know—we were stuck in Transylvania; we couldn't stop staring at each other with our minds. She was just too young and frightened to stand up for herself. And it wasn't my place to tell her what to do. She had to want me to rescue her before I could do so. I was not going to rape her like Paris.

Godzilla smashed a thousand ships.

A thousand camels crossed one desert.

Through another, a thousand miles away, marched the forty elephants of Hannibal, in a state of misery. Never the twain could meet. Mark my words.

A fence of a thousand feet was erected in the Silvatic Savanna to keep the deserts apart and the dingoes out, though which side they belonged in was up for debate.

Fiery hunters were confronted by tigers, dragons, scorpions, diggers, assassins, and a monastery full of praying, darning, big-headed, dancing, roving potters. The main river's tributaries and capillaries were filled with concrete and disappeared into abstraction. Errancy was discharged. My purpose and reason were dispatched. A collection of disjunctive thoughts moved into the Silvatic Savanna. Soon, piled high, to the sky, the Silvatic Savanna became filled with magazines, beer bottles, spousal threats, bad familial advice, motel room keys, charms, CDs, joints, envy, jealousy, lust, pool tables, video golf, hands that had been held, birthday cards, poems, stories, one-armed bandits, DUI convictions, and around-the-world sex.

None of this should ever have been piled up leaning against the fence, I guess, though perhaps if she climbed up on top of it, she could come over.

Hold on with both hands.

Climb with both feet.

Yell out both syllables of my name. I hope I'll be able to hear you over the fence and over the din.

Eckhard Gerdes is a widely published novelist, with four novels in print and four more due this Spring. The forthcoming four are Przewalski's Horse (Red Hen Press), The Million-Year Centipede; or, Liquid Structures (Raw Dog Screaming Press), Nin and Nan (Six Gallery Press), and The Unwelcome Guest (Six Gallery Press). His fiction has appeared or is scheduled to appear in Golden Handcuffs Review, Fiction International, Notre Dame Review, Coe Review, Oyez Review, Rampike, Blatt, Hayden's Ferry Review and Temenos. His reviews and essays have appeared in American Book Review, Context, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Hyde Park Review of Books, Electronic Book Review and Pemmican. The editor of The Journal of Experimental Fiction, Gerdes has an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches at Triton College in River Grove, Illinois. He lives with his  two youngest sons in Geneva, Illinois, and his oldest son attends Georgia Tech. Gerdes was nominated for the Georgia Author of the Year Award in the fiction category for his mostt recent novel, Cistern Tawdry (Fugue State Press 2003).