Just thought I should put this somewhere more accessible.

Came across something interesting my my research…

It appears that famous murderer Lizzie Borden actually killed many more people than popular wisdom suggests. In fact, after “giving her father forty-one whacks,” she went on to murder her sister, Emma Borden—the deed evidently requiring forty-two blows from the very same axe. Then, in the same evening (really the early hours of the next morning), Lizzie accosted the family maid, Bridget Sullivan, hacking her forty-three times before jumping into her four-poster bed and falling asleep, her clothes still covered in blood.

Lizzie, now the sole inheritor of the Borden estate, was arrested and jailed on August 11, 1892. Before she could be tried for the quadruple homicide, however, her case was taken up by Thomas Embling, a psychiatrist who had gained fame for his involvement in a Parliamentary inquiry at the Yarra Bend Asylum. Embling managed to have Lizzie released under his supervision.

Just as Embling had predicted, Lizzie’s first act after her “escape” was to murder another maid, striking her with an axe forty-four times. Embling continued to observe this depraved behavior for several months before he was “whacked” himself, fifty-six times, by the object of his unseemly research. Embling’s experiment thus concluded, Lizzie was finally apprehended and returned to the custody of the Crown.

Embling was, thankfully, the last to fall to Lizzie’s axe, but it is interesting to note that if the waif were allowed to continue her string of murders, by today (July 8, 2011), she would have slain her 552,898,543rd victim, striking him or her 552,898,582 times.

You can read more about Thomas Embling in the Wikipedia article about him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Embling

Adam Belstrom puts his socks on one at a time. “I don’t know of any other way to do it,” he says.

Adam is shorter than you’d expect, neater and better dressed than you want him to be. An experimental jazz musician should have facial hair; he doesn’t. He should be living in a messy studio apartment, not a duplex near a church.

I show Adam a neat way of putting on both socks at once. He agrees that it’s neat. Then I make him do it a couple of times, so I know he’s internalized it. He thanks me, tentatively. I tell him he should do it that way from now on. He says “sure,” and I can tell he has no such plans.

“It’s a structure built out of chaos.“

Bismarck, North Dakota: No epicenter of artistic innovation—or so you’d think. Adam Belstrom is turning that assumption upside down, with a little help from his family. Every Saturday night, at Bismarck’s experimental jazz club The Sponge, Adam Belstrom debuts a new composition. Each piece is 500 notes long, and each note is chosen by Adam’s infant cousin Marquisha.

“My brain is formless,” Marquisha says, in sign language interpreted by her mother Hester, Adam’s aunt. “Jazz is formless. That’s not completely true. Jazz has structure. But it’s a structure built out of chaos. A baby like me is a perfect composer of jazz music.”

Marquisha’s composing process involves throwing ball bearings into a sand pit in Hester’s back yard. (During North Dakota’s frigid winters, the sand pit is brought into the living room.) On Sunday morning, Marquisha is given a bag of 500 ball bearings; over the course of the week, she eventually throws all of them into the sand pit. When the bag is empty, Hester and Adam photograph the pit and use Photoshop to overlay the array of circles onto a blank page of staff paper.

“We don’t have a Photoshop license,” Adam tells me, “so you should probably just say we use an image editing program. Or, just say ‘a computer.'”

“I’m listening to the ball. It’s like a Zen thing.“

Once Marquisha’s composition is transcribed, her mother uses a special rake to remove the balls from the sand pit and pours them back into the bag. Adam spends the rest of the week—however long that ends up being—rehearsing the music in preparation for Saturday night’s performance.

The ball bearings don’t always cooperate.

“Sometimes, a ball doesn’t want to be music,” Marquisha, now eighteen months old, explains. “Sometimes I throw the ball at Mommy, and she gets upset. But it’s because I’m listening to the ball. It’s like a Zen thing. I’m throwing it where it needs to be thrown.”

When this happens, Hester puts the steel sphere back in its bag, so that Marquisha can throw it again, hopefully into the sand pit. Her reasoning is simple: “Every song needs to be five hundred notes.”

What if Saturday night rolls around and Marquisha hasn’t thrown all the ball bearings into the sand yet? Hester brushes the question aside; such a thing “would never happen.”

Though he refuses to take even partial credit as composer, Adam does think of himself and Marquisha as creative partners. “Her fingers are too small to play the guitar. We got her a toy guitar for her birthday, but she can only strum an open chord right now.”

“When she’s older, she’ll play her own compositions,” says Hester. But Marquisha flails her arms emphatically, and Hester translates: “Mother, don’t you dare tell me what I’m going to do.”

---

It’s Saturday night. I and four other music critics are crowded around The Sponge’s tiny stage. Adam Belstrom arrives, ten minutes late. (Later I will deduce that he has just finished an argument with his girlfriend Sam, who will decline to be interviewed.) He arranges the pages of Marquisha’s music, six sheets of paper spread across two music stands. He clears his throat and begins to play.

I’ve heard from Hester that Marquisha only finished this composition this morning. Adam has had, at most, twelve hours to rehearse—and that’s not accounting for his argument with Sam.

The music has no melody, no tonality. Adam’s fingers struggle to accommodate Marquisha’s incredibly dense note clusters; I recall craters in the sand pit where ten or twelve ball bearings had gathered in little heaps.

I turn my attention from the stage for a moment, and I notice that Geof Yards, of Crawdaddy Magazine, is copying my notes. I cover my Moleskine with my hand. He pretends not to notice.

Geof Yards is a plagiarizing piece of garbage.

When the performance is over, I grab Geof’s notebook and throw it across the room. While he’s occupied, I move in for a final interview with Adam. He seems distracted. The only quote I can get out of him is “Thanks a lot for coming all the way out here.”

Outside, it’s dark already, and snowflakes dance under the orange streetlights. What a surprise: It’s snowing in North Dakota.

Lydia stroked her chin thoughtfully. “I hope that I have used the correct knots,” she said, out loud, to herself.

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a Twitter novel
by Ryan Veeder
copyright Ryan Veeder MMXVII

The wind blew across the elementary school playground. It blew the orange leaves up against the wire fence. The leaves rustled.

Betsy Morrison wrote in her diary.

“I am a twelve-year-old girl,” she wrote, “the wisest creature upon Earth. I understand the languages of birds, the ebb and flow of the seasons, the past and the future and the space beyond time. Today is my birthday, and I am twelve years old.

“We went to Garbaggio’s Pizzeria for my birthday over the weekend because it was Uncle Boscoe’s birthday last week and we celebrated them at the same time but my REAL birthday is today,” Betsy continued to write, leaves swirling around her ankles, “and I am perfect among humans.”

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A Cozy Mystery by P.J. Quickbooks

The rec room was a mess. Hanna made a show of stepping gingerly over some free weights; then, balancing her tray of blondies on one arm, she produced her key ring and unlocked the heavy door to the back room.

“It’s such a shock,” she repeated, ushering me and Melanie ahead of her into the tiny chamber. Then she made a point of looking straight at me: “You gotta understand, things like this just don’t happen in Carol Lake. It’s not that kinda town.”

The room did not have the appearance of a crime scene. It was quite tidy, especially in comparison to the rec room. The safe was small and unimpressive; its door was only slightly ajar.

“Of course not,” I said. “I’m finding out that it’s a really lovely town. Really beautiful.”

“That’s right. Aren’t you sweet?” Hanna smiled her huge, disarming smile. “You oughta have another blondie, you sweetie, you.”

I started to shake my head, but Melanie put her hand on my shoulder.

“My friend is about to reject your offer. He wishes to treat you kindly, and believes it would be impolite to eat more than one of your blondies. He is unused to the social mores of Carol Lake, and is not aware that the opposite is true.”

She turned toward me, pushing my shoulder so that we were face to face. “You would be treating Hanna with more kindness if you ate another of her blondies, which I have reason to believe you find delicious. You should continue to accept her blondies until she ceases to offer them.”

I nodded emphatically, and, at a loss for words, picked up a second blondie from Hanna’s tray.

“You’re just like Mr. the Mayor,” she said, still grinning. “‘Only one blondie for me, Hanna! Watch out for those empty calories!’ All that nonsense. Don’t let him find out I said such a thing, of course. Such a lovely man.”

“Of course.”

Melanie was now poking her nose around the room, leaning and craning her neck with her hands in her pockets. Hanna and I just watched and waited—then Melanie turned around, pushing past us to investigate the rec room. With a short glance at each other we followed the detective.

Melanie’s talent for moving around without touching anything was put to the test in a room littered with fitness equipment. I won’t embarrass myself trying to put a name to each of the appliances, but I will say that the level of organization definitely made the area more of a “rec room” than a “gym.”

Now Melanie was stalking along the south wall, inspecting a series of tall basement windows which afforded the space only a modicum of natural light. The sill of the last window was occupied by a brown tabby, attempting to luxuriate in what passed for a sunbeam. Without warning, Melanie abandoned her policy of non-interference and shoved the cat out of the window.

The poor animal yelped as it fell to the floor, but, having landed on its feet, it immediately put on a show of nothing having happened. With unconvincing loftiness it strolled over to Hanna and deigned to be picked up.

“You’re sure that the door to the back room was locked?” Melanie asked from across the room.

“It locks on its own,” Hanna explained.

“Where was Cleopatra last night?”

Hanna smiled. “I never know. Out on the town, I expect.”

This sounded like an evasion to me, but Melanie seemed satisfied, and she continued: “Only you and the mayor have keys to that door?”

“That’s right. Well, there’s only the one key, but—”

Melanie cut her off. “And the combination to the safe?”

“That’s between me and Mr. the Mayor.”

Melanie nodded. “I have it figured out,” she said. She took a seat on one of several weight benches, took a deep breath, and began:

“The latch on that rightmost window is undone; the others are secured. Before the building closed, your cat left that window open—on purpose—and at some point during the night she entered this rec room in that way.

“Once inside, the cat grew a pair of human hands, which she used to pick the lock on the door to the back room. In similar fashion she broke into the safe and withdrew the bake sale proceeds. Cats being inscrutable creatures, I can only guess at her motive. Perhaps she suffers from a bad catnip habit, or compulsive purchasing behavior regarding fitness equipment. Perhaps a series of veterinarian bills piled up after a relative was put to sleep.

“At any rate, the cat left the back room with the money, allowing the door to lock as it closed. She left in the same way she entered, through the basement window—but, although she could pull the window shut behind herself, even with a pair of human hands she was unable to close the latch once she was outside.

“Then she hid the money, I do not yet know where, and turned her human hands back into paws. By pretending to fall asleep on the sill of the relevant window she hoped to disguise the key clue in the case, but I’m afraid I was too smart for her.”

Melanie finished her story with a little nod. I clicked my teeth nervously; Hanna was silent for a moment.

When she finally spoke, it was clear she was trying to hold back laughter. “Miss Cozy, that is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. If you can’t solve the case, I understand, but that’s no reason to make fun of it.” At length she regained her composure: “This is a very serious situation,” she concluded.

“I totally agree,” Melanie said, “but I’m afraid I’m not joking. The only humans who could have committed this crime are the mayor and yourself. It’s beyond consideration that either of you would have done such a thing, and so the only remaining explanation—”

Now Hanna cut Melanie off. “Oh! Oh, Cleopatra, you bad, bad girl!” She pushed her face into the cat’s, pursing her lips and squinting furiously. “How could you have done such a bad, bad thing?” But despite her anger she clutched the poor animal all the tighter against her chest, and I imagine a less lazy cat would have summarily jumped out of her arms.

“Well,” Hanna said, grinning again, “looks like you solved the case! Should I—Write a check, or?” She glanced from Melanie to me and back again.

“We’ll mail an invoice,” I said automatically.

“That is incorrect,” said Melanie, standing and dusting off her jacket. “My associate and I will accept payment immediately, in the form of blondies.”