Elan Viss
Bio
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Stories (9)
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Pugilist At Work
It’s 03:58 on a Tuesday morning. I stand darkening the doorway of a building whose stucco is falling off in trapezoidal sheets. Water has infiltrated the cracks in the plaster, and large portions want to peel off high up on the front of the building. There is a gutter but no downspout, and it is obnoxious when it rains. Water falls 25 feet to the ground and lands close to the front sidewalk. A man limps to the sound of my knocking on a tin rollup door with a knee brace on, his keys jangling. I pull on the steel grid frame, but it is dead bolted from the inside with a key. That is not going to pass the fire marshal inspection, I think.
By Elan Viss4 years ago in Motivation
A Gateway Of Lemons
There was a whole bag of lemons to squeeze in the kitchen. Big yellow ones with pointy ends and thick skin. I think they were Lisbons, because they were certainly not Meyers. Their rind was hearty and fragrant and I didn’t know what to do with them. It’s a funny fruit in that you don’t ever really need them in kilogram quantities. One or two here and there for a drink or a recipe will suffice, but on this day I had kilos. The ones at the bottom of the bag started to grow a furry layer of blue-green fuzz during their time in ambient temperature. Penicillium mold of some kind. These were hard-earned lemons from a tree in my cousin’s back yard. He shared them with me as any good cousin would do when they’ve stumbled into a trove of fruit. It might have been currency a few hundred years ago in some barren, forlorn land. I couldn’t let these go to waste, so I woke up nice and early before the sun came up and brewed a strong batch of coffee. I started slicing them in half on a cutting board in the kitchen while my wife slept in the bedroom. I tried to be quiet, and figured that if I could just pull a few out at a time and get them in half, I could squeeze them with my hands and squish their insides with a lobed wooden mandrel that I found in the top drawer. That’s where we keep wierd kitchen utensils. Once I got the juice into a bowl, I would divvy the bowl into freezer bags and have lemon juice for the rest of my life and possibly part of my future kid’s lives.
By Elan Viss4 years ago in Motivation
Write Sharply
When I was 12, I made friends with my cousin. He’s my cousin’s husband actually, but it’s all the same to me. They were recently married at the time. He and I became friends because it was summer and I liked to fish as much as he did. I couldn’t drive, so I’d ride shotgun in his 70’s Ford Maverick. The window crank on the passenger side was replaced with a pair of vice-grips. The floor was littered with empty chip bags and cigar butts. There were dented surplus military canteens and rolls of duct tape and little patches of sawdust and oilstains on the blue carpet. The tires were bald and underinflated. You could hear them squeal around mild turns in the highway as we drove up near the power station in the town of Snelling, CA. He took on the name “Maverick”, despite that he had sold the old blue monster long ago. The car had been converted from 3 on the tree, to 4 on the floor and it ran like a sewing machine.
By Elan Viss4 years ago in Motivation
