For Lack Of An Audience.

Note: Italicized quotes/prompts to be distributed randomly to audience members before a reading.  During a reading, audience will recite quotes; recite and answer prompts.

0. (Four reasons birds have more anxiety than people.)

  My father and I watch a flock of finches flying around the fallout shelter.  Their orbits are slow and worn in, they make it seem like the hours outside are smaller than ours.  My father tells me if we wait long enough one of them will be Mercury, one will be Venus, one will be Earth, one will be Mars.

  Even then, I could tell his astronomy was clumsy and domestic, a way of keeping track of dinner manners and developed etiquette.  A way to make sure an elastic band is all he'd ever be.

  Waist high though, I believed him when he said, "there are bread winners and there are bird feeders.  Jonathan, you are a bird feeder."

1. "The Earth, in relation to the distance of the fixed stars, has no appreciable size and must be treated as a mathematical point." 

-Ptolemy, The Almagest, 147 A.D.

  And if the Earth is flatter than we ever gave it credit for, and if the Earth is already a dead bird in the air.

2. (If you could build a house in the shape of any bodily organ, which would pick?)

  When we first met I was living in a blue house (as it grew out a red house). “Look at our house! Someone ripped it all up and burned it! The walls! The stairs! The floors!” When I was tired I slept in spare shelves or scatter points. When I was awake I tried to keep track of the birds.

  It all changed when the candle came down.

3. "Il lupo perde il pelo ma non il vizio.  The wolf may lose its hair but not its vice." -Italian Proverb.

  The curtains were as thin as shedded snake skin.  I tore them off to get a better look at him.  He was walking with his mother.  Her legs were made of grey and brick, her head was twice as tall as his.  It looked like there was a tunnel dug underground between the two of them, every time she moved a foot one way, he would follow a foot behind.

  They had been walking that way for a while and then she stopped.  She shouted something at him that I couldn't hear.  He shouted something back at her.

  It felt like there was a family of field mice sneaking through me.  I was nervous, but not as nervous as I should have been.

  She reached into the sack she carried and pulled out a piece of wood with a nail at its head.  I hadn't met her yet so I couldn't have known what was coming.

  She swung the wood with both her arms and he crumpled.  Like a mannequin who had been up all night.

4. (If the first person you dated was a body of water, which body of water would they be?)

  Our first date: 
  A bird storm blocks out the black of the sun.  South of the skylights we clothe our torsos in sizes too small.  Everything feels closed too tight.  Like corsets on candlesticks.

  He builds me blind spots to breath through.  We undress.

  Into the lake, from the front seat.  Tinfoil salmon sweating around our thighs.  Yawns in their gills, their fins, their reflexes.

5a. "Don't worry, we will always be together."  -Dolores.

5b. "That's what Diana Ross said." -Mary Lazarus.

-Whoopi Goldberg and Mary Wickes, Sister Act, 1992.

  He takes me to his home, the bulk of it is the same as mine.  We watch two soldiers swinging across trapeze bars. They throw rocks and ulcers at each other through the gaps. Neither side seems to understands the delicacy of when to stop short.

  Below them, there's a kitchen full of children marching.  There are three sisters and three brothers.  The littlest one pukes up a balloon. Skull-sized and blue. Others cough out plastic bags.

  In the stands, I can see his neighbors staring back at us. Behind them on the walls, their still-lifes look healthy.

Ya-Te-Veo, Or Carnivorous Plant.

The Ya-te-veo ("I see you") is a carnivorous plant said to grow in parts of Central and South America with cousins in Africa and on the shores of the Indian Ocean. there are many different descriptions of the plant, but most reports say it has a short, thick trunk and long tendrils of some sort which are used to catch prey. in J.W. Buel's 'Land and Sea' (1887), the plant is said to catch and consume large insects, but also attempts to consume humans.

The Hanging Of Mary.

Mary, a.k.a. "Mighty Mary" and "Murderous Mary", was a circus elephant executed on September 13, 1916 in Erwin, Tennessee. She was hanged by a railroad derrick car at the Clinchfield Railroad yard. This is the only known elephant hanging in history. 

Mary, who toured with the Sparks World Famous Shows circus, killed her inexperienced keeper, Walter "Red" Eldridge, on September 12, 1916 during a circus parade in Kingsport, Tennessee. Eldridge had supposedly hit Mary's tusk or ear when she wandered from the parade line to eat a piece of discarded watermelon.

The details of the aftermath are confused in a maze of sensationalist newspaper stories and folklore. Most accounts indicate that she calmed down afterward and didn't charge the onlookers, who began chanting, "Kill the elephant!" Apparently within minutes, a local blacksmith tried to kill Mary, firing more than two dozen rounds with little effect. 

Newspaper published claims that Murderous Mary had killed several workers in the past and noted that she was larger than the world famous Jumbo the elephant. Meanwhile, the leaders of several nearby towns threatened not to allow the circus to visit if Mary was included. The circus owner, Charlie Sparks, reluctantly decided that the only way to quickly resolve the potentially ruinous situation was to kill the elephant in public. On the following day, a foggy and rainy September 13, 1916, she was transported by rail to Erwin, Tennessee, where a crowd of over 2,500 people (including most of the town's children) assembled in the Clinchfield Railroad yard.

The elephant was hanged by the neck from a railcar-mounted industrial crane. The first attempt resulted in a snapped chain, causing Mary to fall and break her hip as dozens of children fled in terror. The severely wounded elephant died during a second attempt and was buried beside the tracks. Although the authenticity of a widely distributed (and heavily retouched) photo of her death was disputed years later by Argosy magazine, other photographs taken during the incident confirm its provenance.

The Dancing Plague Of 1518.

The Dancing Plague of 1518 was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, France (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) in July 1518. Numerous people took to dancing for days without rest, and over the period of about one month, most of the people died from heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.

The outbreak began in July 1518, when a woman, Frau Troffea, began to dance fervently in a street in Strasbourg. This lasted somewhere between four to six days. Within a week, 34 others had joined, and within a month, there were around 400 dancers. Most of these people eventually died from heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.

Historical documents, including "physician notes, cathedral sermons, local and regional chronicles, and even notes issued by the Strasbourg city council" are clear that the victims danced. It is not known why these people danced to their deaths, nor is it clear that they were dancing willfully.

As the dancing plague worsened, concerned nobles sought the advice of local physicians, who ruled out astrological and supernatural causes, instead announcing that the plague was a "natural disease" caused by "hot blood".

However, instead of prescribing bleeding, authorities encouraged more dancing, in part by opening two guildhalls and a grain market, and even constructing a wooden stage. The authorities did this because they believed that the dancers would only recover if they danced continually night and day. To increase the effectiveness of the cure, authorities even paid for musicians to keep the afflicted moving.

The Curtsies.

  They weren't birds and they weren't people, so we didn't know what to call them at first.  They had feathers on the front of their arms and who the hell knew where else.  My husband was one of the ones who was afraid of them, but I didn't marry him for his bravery, I married him because he knew more about the weather than I ever could.
   I remember it all too well, we were half-young and all-married and living in a town known for its toothlessness, it made me feel like I was in a cartoon sometimes, the way everyone walked past us, smiling with their big blank gums, and all those pets they pulled along with them too.  Big pets and little pets. So many fucking pets. 
   I wasn't a detective by any means, but I could tell as soon as we moved there was something going on there. The sky was loud in all the wrong places, the days were short and long and everybody said the sun could do all sorts of other things if it wanted to, I didn't get what they meant by that. Again, I was no Sherlock Holmes.
   When they showed up we thought they might be some sort of new pet too, but as soon as we got a good look at their faces we knew they couldn't possibly be, there was too much action behind their eyes, it was obvious they knew better than to be leashed around.  While I'm telling you about their faces, I'll tell you this too, they were round and slightly pink, and sharp in the middle.  They didn't quite have beaks, they looked a lot like people.  Maybe seventy-five percent like people.  I think I liked the way they looked, avian and mammalian and big eyed.  Like children.
   My husband would take a big breath whenever we saw one on the street.  He's always been a fragile man.

   There had been a break in the summer and we weren't expecting anything special.  The garbage was piling up in the kitchen, the mannequins were on display on the street, I was trying on new ways to be mad at buildings.  I used to wear my frustration on my sleeves, but then I was doing my best to cover my contempt under my clothes.  As deep as it could go I guess.  My husband would tell me to take the elevator to meet him for lunch and sometimes I did.  He ate a lot of salads and chewed quietly, one day he found a butterfly in his lunch bag, its wings were blue as a baby boy's room, we laughed as it waved away.  Summer was when we got along best, I bet it's like that for a lot of couples, I don't know.  
  Anyways, we were closer to black and white living than I'm letting on, it was pretty boring for the most part.  I was working in a field I understood too well, sharpening equations and balancing ledgers for people who had grown up taller than me.  I didn't have a fling with my boss despite what my husband says.  My hands were just too tired to get into it, even though I could've.
   Maybe I was waiting for something larger to crawl its way all over me.  One way or another, I was just waiting.

   My husband started to call them bird people after a few days of calling them, "them" and "they."  I kind of felt that name was disrespectful to birds and people both, these creatures were something new, and needed a new name of course, not some hackneyed mashup of their most accessible characteristics.  I tried on a few names, "flickities", "koo koo karoos", "laylas", before I settled on one I liked, "curtsies" (after the ways their legs bowed when they walked).  I never thought to ask them what they wanted to be called.  Sooner or later they'd tell me I guess I imagined.  
   The big question we had to begin with was whether or not they could fly.  They could, but not very high and not very far.  They were better at gliding, but even still, they didn't take to the air too often, not that I saw anyways.  Every once in a while when I was driving around in my car (it was yellow) I would see one up perched in a tree, but I always assumed they just crawled up there to get a better view, it barely occurred to me they could be flying around all the time when I wasn't looking.  I barely ever saw it happen, I don't have a terribly good sense of my surroundings sometimes, that's all I'm saying.
   Another question is where they came from.  My husband insisted they came from bad families, but I eventually convinced him otherwise.  My theory was they came from some place colder and migrated here for the warm summer weather.  It wasn't much of a theory, a hog-tied kindergartner could've come up with it on the spot.  I liked it.  It was simple.
   I guess it didn't really matter where they came from, but we were curious of course.  Either way, there they were, a couple of them at first, and then more and then probably somewhere between ten and twenty.  It was easy to tell them apart, some had long, fat, feathers, some had tiny, prickly ones, some had skinny necks and some were stubby shaped.  Also, believe it or not, they had numbers on their backs.  Big numbers, like the ones on sports jerseys.  That made a lot of people think they were escapees of some sort of experiment, but I just figured they liked numbers.  I liked numbers, I guess probably I was projecting.
   My husband had these horrible glasses then.  We still danced in the living room sometimes, but he was clumsier than ever.  At work someone kept telling him the Earth's poles were reversing fast (too fast!), that's the sort of stuff he brought home at least.  Our lives were less than fireworks on the rise, that's for sure, far, far less, but there was a lot lower we could go too.  My hands were still soft, they didn't hurt like they do now.  I still believed one day there would be a stage in the sky where I would watch something spectacular happen.  I'm pretty sure I don't feel that anymore.

Mary Toft.

Mary Toft (née Denyer; c. 1701–1763), also spelled Tofts, was an English woman from Godalming, Surrey, who in 1726 became the subject of considerable controversy when she tricked doctors into believing that she had given birth to rabbits.

Toft became pregnant in 1726, but later miscarried. Apparently fascinated by a rabbit she had seen while working, she claimed to have given birth to parts of animals. Local surgeon John Howard was called to investigate, and upon delivering several animal parts he notified other prominent physicians. The matter came to the attention of Nathaniel St. André, surgeon to the Royal Household of King George I of Great Britain. St. André investigated and concluded that Toft was telling the truth. The king also sent surgeon Cyriacus Ahlers to see Toft, but Ahlers remained skeptical. By now quite famous, Toft was brought to London and was studied at length. Under intense scrutiny, and producing no more rabbits, she eventually confessed to the hoax and was subsequently imprisoned as a fraud.

The public mockery which followed created panic within the medical profession. Several prominent surgeons' careers were ruined, and many satirical works were produced, each scathingly critical of the affair. The pictorial satirist and social critic William Hogarth was notably critical of the gullibility of the medical profession. Toft was eventually released without charge and returned to her home.

City Life Inside Creature.

We were swallowed whole and there we were, warm and inside, with that creature's electricity echoing over everything.  It was a pulse that reached far past the tops of our city's tallest columns, a power line of a size too colossal to possibly pronounce.

We woke up to stomachfuls of wrecking balls, wet food, worn debris.  Each day was a chunk of something slowed down and coming at us, one storm of morsels after another, washing against our windows and collecting on the ground.  

In the beginning some attempted to dig their way out of the city, only to find a fence of thorned circuits that cut up their skin and blackened their hands.  The rest of us waited, and waited inside the heated sheets where the creature let us live, working down samples and imprints, hoping it would find us useful.

Still, grandfathers and lost men talked about the before times, when the creature was but bone and rock, when the city existed according to another anatomy entirely.  They told stories of a hair trapped animal that only ate days of moving light.  They called our city a silhouette inside dead static, the spasm of a monster.  We couldn't know what to believe, the creature was everything we could name, we were here to be part of its body, to winnow ourselves out until it had had enough.

On the other hand, time was running out more or less.  Even if we could never admit it, this creature was too outstretched and erratic to depend on forever, sometimes it didn't eat even when we begged it to eat, sometimes it made a type of electricity that sounded like a scream.  Every day was like a little blink to the creature, regardless of whether it had been dead before, it was patient in a way we could barely understand.

The hours were low when we focused a way forward.  We began soothing a simple glue into the city streets and watched them slowly stick in place.  We replastered what scaffolding had begun to break apart and strengthened our towers with chopped blocks and stored fat.  There was no way out of the creature, so we would make the best with what he had left, we would work to become a shadow the creature could not live without.  It was work enough so we slanted ourselves into smaller and smaller shapes so our supplies would last longer.  Every day and every night, we took whatever remains the creature accidented to us and sharpened them back into an energy it could use. 

We weren't naive enough to believe in sudden compromises, we knew we would have to prove ourselves neccesary, but still, we were anxious.  With every burp and gulp we searched for a sign that our city would be protected, an indication we were safe.

When night came and the creature started to cave in, the electricity would flicker, quiver, and dim.  As our lamps began to blackout, we would straightened our sheets and rehearse our whispers just like any city.  When at last the creature was snoring and and asleep for good, we finally put our distances away, held each other close, and recited our prayer.  

"You are our creature and will always be our creature.  Whatever opens out of your mouth we will worship first.  We have been swallowed by you and wish only to have you hold us here.  Our city is sheltered in your electricity and softened by your pulse.  Forgive us if we trespass in this body you have lent us.  If we can help you as you walk along this earth, we will.  If we can keep the pain of your prey from you, we will.  Carry us with you and let your hunger be our hunger, let your thirst be our thirst   We are your city and we will always be your city.  Now and forever, stay alive and with a small past."

All Flesh Is Grass.

Have I told you this before, I've been doing my best to keep one foot facing what's forgotten me.
(A family of even numbers, a life sized limp, a patch of grass where the accident had been.)

If I seem utterly gullible its only because there are a hundred other stutters I've tucked my trust in. Now, now Jillison, if there's such a thing as patience in the first person, if every sigh needs legs to stand and so on...

The Soft Lottery.

          
          So many others had won the soft lottery before me, but I was smaller with my longings.  I didn't want to be overwelcomed anywhere and I didn't have a kingdom of debts I had to kick down.  Nevertheless there I was, with a very simple situation staring right at me, a sky of good fortune and no clouds I had to corner or corral.
          Like most people, I'd been pulled over from my plan in life, I did all my writing with simple pens and always remembered to hide myself an escape hatch just in case.   
          My brother visited on occasion.  His eyes were sleepy and blue and see-through, like he'd stole them from some ghost he once knew.  He was older than me, his skin was splotched and wrinkled, his hair barely heaving over half his head.  He wore a watch that was tight around his wrist, and he liked to talk about how badly it fit.
          "There's nothing worse than poor circulation," he would say.
          He wasn't a complainer, but he could seldom tell the difference between dead air and conversation.  Either way, he would often lose the whole of his anatomy inside a rant or argument, mistaking the loss for an open dialogue.  One time I watched him spend the better part of forty minutes marveling over the misuse of utility drivers in modern times.  I still don't know what a utility driver is, but sure as night and day, I can tell you he was damn angry about them, or what had happened to them, or what was happening to them.  Like I said, I'm still a bit unsure about the issue even now.
          Still, there was a lot to like about him and a lot to listen to too.  He would rub his thumb in ovals over his temples when he spoke, or sometimes nervously adjust his glasses on top of his nose over and over, like he wasn't certain where his skin ended and the bridge of his glasses began.
          His name is Garrett and my name is Larry.
          We are from a medium state called East Carolignia.  Our father was an electrician and as far as I know he never won a single thing in his life.  If he was still above ground and breathing, I probably would've shared some of the soft lottery winnings with him.


          I should tell you now they call it the soft lottery because you have to spend it all almost all at once, in a day in a half to be accurate.  I didn't have a clue what I wanted to spend it on.
          Now, now what would you spend it on, if you only had thirty-six hours to go and harvest the rest of your life?  Let's just say there was enough that I could've probably chosen any combination of comfortable existences to call my own.
          
          In East Carolignia, most of the grass is a greyish blue, the soil is a darker navy, and the sun is the same as it is everywhere, a big old orange burning away, day by day by day.
          The house I live in isn't one I've completely memorized, even though I've been living there for about a double decade now.  There are still rotting floorboards I forget about and fall over, ceiling tiles I scarcely recognize.  
          I guess it doesn't help that I simply spend most of my time in one room, a roundish, octagonal study, with a red desk near the entrance, and a small forest of assorted plants arranged in every corner.  There's a fan that's about four feet above the top of my head when I'm standing, and it only works when I remember to say my household prayers, more than sparingly, maybe occasionally would be the accurate assessment.  It's often hot in East Carolignia, but I don't mind the heat, the sweat on my brow keeps me from worrying my head's gone and broke open for good.
          I should tell you I worry a lot about my head breaking.  That's how my father found a grave to grow into is all.  How much of anything is genetic and how much is luck?  I bet there are more than a couple of palmfuls of people who are getting paid to piece together the proper ratio.  I wouldn't mind being one of those people, but I know almost any of the results would terrify me.  Maybe there are some questions that are best left in the quicksand.
          My father once told Garrett and I that death is a nest where you climb into an egg again. This was after he lost his senses of course.  Like I said, he was an electrician and concerned with how things work, not the streets of meaning that intersect beneath them.

Suspicions About The Hidden Realities Of The Air.

Suspicions about the Hidden Realities of the Air is a book by the 17th Century philosopher and alchemist Robert Boyle. It was written in 1674 concerning ideas about the agency of the air in chemical reactions. Air at this time was considered homogenous, empty and inactive.  Boyle however, argued to the contrary.

I have often suspected, that there may be in the Air some yet more latent Qualities or Powers differing enough from all these, and principally due to the Substantial Parts or Ingredients, whereof it consists. For this is not as many imagine a simple and elementary body, but a confused aggregate of 'effluviums' from such differing bodies, that, though they all agree in constituting by their minuteness and various motions one great mass of fluid matter, yet perhaps there is scarce a more heterogeneous body in the world.  

Although his research and personal philosophy clearly has its roots in the alchemical tradition, Boyle is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of modern chemistry. It was by examining the part played by the air in processes of calcination and burning that men at last became able to give approximately complete descriptions of these processes, which led to the gradual scientific rejection of the Phlogiston Theory.

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.

The seventeenth-century writer Sir Thomas Browne declared that Sir John Mandeville was “the greatest liar of all time.” The travel book attributed to Mandeville, which first appeared around 1371, was certainly one of the most popular books of the late Middle Ages (hundreds of medieval manuscript copies of it have survived to the present day), and it was definitely filled with bizarre fabrications. But Browne’s assessment of Mandeville’s character is undermined by the fact that Mandeville probably never existed.

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville described the travels of an English knight who left England around 1322 and journeyed throughout Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Persia, and Turkey. The stories that Mandeville returned with were fantastic, by any measure. He told of islands whose inhabitants had the bodies of humans but the heads of dogs, of a tribe whose only source of nourishment was the smell of apples, of a people the size of pygmies whose mouths were so small that they had to suck all their food through reeds, and of a race of one-eyed giants who ate only raw fish and raw meat. All of this fantasy was interwoven with other geographical descriptions that were perfectly accurate.

The authorship of Mandeville’s Travels remains unknown. Historians cannot decide whether the author was French or English, though they agree that the book was originally composed in French. The character of Mandeville, as already indicated, was almost certainly fictitious. The name might have been adapted from an earlier French romance titled Mandevie that also involved a hero who embarked on an imaginary journey.

It is not clear how seriously medieval readers took Mandeville’s stories. It is tempting to think that they must have recognized them as works of fiction, but then we shouldn’t project too much modern skepticism onto the medieval world. Again we return to the puzzle of the medieval concept of truth. Medieval culture made sense of the world by viewing it through the lens of religious imagery and fantastic legends. So in this respect the book did offer a truth, of a kind, though not one that modern readers are likely to grasp.

The Black Rock.

Rupes Nigra, a phantom island, was believed to be a 33-mile-wide magnetic island of black rock located at the Magnetic North Pole or at the North Pole itself. It purportedly explained why all compasses point to this location. The idea came from a lost work titled Inventio Fortunata, and the island features on maps from the 16th and 17th centuries, including those of Gerardus Mercator and his successors.

Mercator describes the island in a 1577 letter to John Dee:

"In the midst of the four countries is a Whirl-pool, into which there empty these four indrawing Seas which divide the North. And the water rushes round and descends into the Earth just as if one were pouring it through a filter funnel. It is four degrees wide on every side of the Pole, that is to say eight degrees altogether. Except that right under the Pole there lies a bare Rock in the midst of the Sea. Its circumference is almost 33 French miles, and it is all of magnetic Stone."

The Recital.

I guess every atlas has to take accidents into account, and I was no different. I've said it a lot, I didn't talk much. It took too much to get the motives off me. Sometimes I thought about making a full-scale model of my mouth, a mock up to use when my face was over-swollen with emotions. I didn't know what sort of material I would use, recycled cans, rest stop receipts, refrigerator remnants? Maybe the butcher paper they put between slices of deli meat, maybe that could make up the fair bulk of it. I never got around to putting the face together, though I still could by the time the recital comes.

I call it the recital, and D and Derek call it the recital, but really it makes more sense to call it the day the red blood cells run out. I don't know when or why we started calling it the recital. I think Derek started it, he must have thought anything would've sounded better than the actual scenario. All I know is if there is an afterlife I don't want to have to audition for it. I don't want a proscenium arch, I don't want a theatre in the round, I don't want a thrust stage. I want to cut off the crash landing before the lights come back on.

But yes, there were accidents along the way, cosmetic changes to the clockwise course that had been chose for me. Alterations I couldn't have anticipated. There were days I'd wake up and my vital statistics had slept so far away from me that we lost each other for a while. These were the days I did what I would've done if the war had never come, if they had never started calling it "The Natural War". 

I put on my egg-white work clothes, the kind I wore back when there was whitewater inside me. The fabric was as rich as when I first felt it, almost flawless, that's how little I'd lengthened myself into it over the years. I put on the worker's clothes and walked as fast I could. It didn't matter where I was going, the point was to keep the speed. To get within gripping distance of D's day to day decathlon. I didn't feel disfigured or slow, I felt like I'd found a reason to be a better self-adhesive, like my own left-over shelf life was worth sticking to with all I had.

There were places I liked to walk to most. I liked to walk around the house, in concentric circles, over and over, widening the circumference of my orbit each time around. I felt like the house was some sort of black hole I was burying. Sometimes a few of the neighbors would come out and watch me, because they didn't get to see me too often I guess.

There I would be, untightening my circles around the property until I was past its pull, past the gravity it had planted in me. I tried to walk as fast and as formulaic as I could, I didn't run, no amount of accidents could ever enable me to run, but I sharpened my spinal cord and made sure each rotation was as regimented as possible. First, I spread my circle out a foot, then three feet, then five feet, then ten feet, then twenty feet, and then I was in the town, far from the house, and all alone again.

They would find me after a while, and my accidents would be too tired to keep me up anymore. It didn't take long to learn that if there was an atlas to my anatomy, it was inconsistent, unreliable, the kind of map where the mass of the poles is misunderstood. It was a projection that kept up with the slope of my pulse but not the undertow that punctuated it. For the most part, it was point-blank wrong.

Eighteen Hundred And Froze To Death.

The Year Without a Summer (also known as the Poverty Year, Year There Was No Summer, and Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death) was 1816, in which severe summer climate abnormalities caused average global temperatures to decrease by about 0.7–1.3 °F, resulting in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.   

It is believed that the anomaly was caused by a combination of a historic low in solar activity with a volcanic winter event, the latter caused by a succession of major volcanic eruptions capped by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), the largest known eruption in over 1,300 years.

Historian John D. Post has called this "the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world".

The unusual climatic aberrations of 1816 had the greatest effect on the northeastern United States, Atlantic Canada, and parts of western Europe. Typically, the late spring and summer of the northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada are relatively stable: temperatures (average of both day and night) average about 68 °F (20 °C) and 77 °F (25 °C) and rarely fall below 41 °F (5 °C). Summer snow is an extreme rarity.

In the spring and summer of 1816, a persistent "dry fog" was observed in the northeastern US. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. Neither wind nor rainfall dispersed the "fog". It has been characterized as a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil.

In May 1816, frost killed off most of the crops that had been planted, and on 4 June 1816, frosts were reported in Connecticut, and by the following day, most of New England was gripped by the cold front. On 6 June 1816, snow fell in Albany, New York, and Dennysville, Maine.  Nearly 12 inches (30 cm) of snow was observed in Quebec City in early June, with consequent additional loss of crops—most summer-growing plants have cell walls which rupture even in a mild frost. The result was regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemic, and increased mortality.

In July and August, lake and river ice were observed as far south as Pennsylvania. Rapid, dramatic temperature swings were common, with temperatures sometimes reverting from normal or above-normal summer temperatures as high as 95 °F (35 °C) to near-freezing within hours. Even though farmers south of New England did succeed in bringing some crops to maturity, maize and other grain prices rose dramatically. The price of that staple food, oats,[8] for example, rose from 12¢ a bushel ($3.40/m³) in 1815, equal to $1.52 in today's purchasing power to 92¢ a bushel ($26/m³) in 1816, equal to $12.6 today. Those areas suffering local crop failures had to deal with the lack of roads in the early 19th century, preventing any easy importation of bulky food stuffs.

Cool temperatures and heavy rains resulted in failed harvests in the British Isles as well. Families in Wales traveled long distances as refugees, begging for food. Famine was prevalent in north and southwest Ireland, following the failure of wheat, oats, and potato harvests. The crisis was severe in Germany, where food prices rose sharply. Due to the unknown cause of the problems, demonstrations in front of grain markets and bakeries, followed by riots, arson, and looting, took place in many European cities. It was the worst famine of the 19th century.

The Father of the American Cavalry.

I haven't even got into Walton yet, the only one I still see with the life I have now. He was the smartest of us then, the only one who wore a shoulder harness when the sun went down. He had a beard then, but he has the government look now. Clean-shaven, skin the color of the census taker. His beard was black and blue back then, a bruise he built to keep the bleeding in. If it wasn't made of hair, I don't know how he shaved it. I guess maybe it wasn't made of hair the whole time. It looked just like hair to me.

Was I willfully dumb or just dumb? Is there any point in putting this question in the past tense?  Probably just dumb.

Walton lives close, at the corner of Rockwell and Black, though I don't think that will mean anything to you. Even if it doesn't, there's no need to give you a misled tour of a town that turned into a mousetrap as soon as the moon came down, anything you can imagine would already be too surprising .  What I should tell you is that Walton lives at a standstill, and he's been sitting down the whole time.

Maybe he likes it here? Walton was always the one who worried least. Before he started building bottlescapes, he wrote too much. The story I remember most was called "The Father of the American Cavalry." It was about a dad who had diseases where his children used to be, or something like that. It wasn't a good story, what I remember most of it took place back when fathers were everywhere, almost anyone could've been The Father of the American Cavalry, that's how common fathers were. I guess it was interesting for that alone.

Et Cetera, Et Cetera, Et Cetera.

King Charles II of England (1630-1685) is said to have had a fondness for collecting the dust that fell from the skin of Egyptian mummies, and rubbing it on his own skin - under the belief that the greatness of the ancients would rub off on him.

Charles Dickens always slept facing north, in an effort to battle insomnia - when he travelled, he would carry a compass with him and move his bed around so it was correctly aligned. He also liked to face north while writing, believing it aided his creativity.

The first picture anybody ever clicked on the web was a promotional photograph of Les Horribles Cernettes, a girl group formed at particle physics research centre CERN, who sing about high energy physics. They had an office next door to web creator Tim Berners-Lee.

The path that led scientist Joseph Priestly to discover oxygen was started when he moved next door to a brewery, became fascinated by the bubbles rising in the beer vats, and asked the brewers if he could do some experiments with it.

When an iceberg melts, it makes a loud fizzing noise, caused by all the trapped high-pressure air bubbles in the ice being released. This noise has the rather wonderful name of 'Bergy Seltzer.'

The equals sign was invented by a Welshman - physician and mathematician Robert Recorde, who created the = sign in 1557, on the grounds that writing 'is equal to' repeatedly was 'tedious'. He chose two parallel lines because 'noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle'.

It is reputed that when John Hetherington, the inventor of the top hat, first wore his creation in London, it caused a riot in which a child's arm was broken. He was prosecuted for his hat crime, on the grounds that the design was 'calculated to frighten timid people'.

The largest jellyfish ever discovered (a lion's mane jellyfish washed up in Massachusetts Bay in 1965) had a body 7 1/2 ft in diameter, and tentacles a staggering 120ft in length. That's longer than the largest blue whale ever found.

The phrase 'steal my thunder' comes from dramatist John Dennis, who in 1704 was very proud to have invented a new method for producing thunder sound effects in plays. He was less happy when his play was shut down, and a new production of Macbeth nicked his sound effect technique.

The rings of Saturn fascinated and puzzled skygazers for many centuries. In the late 17th century, theologian Leo Attalius published 'De Praeputio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Diatriba' - his theory that the rings were actually the circumcised foreskin of Jesus Christ, ascended to heaven.

The first lighter was invented before the first friction-based match. The lighter, known as 'Döbereiner's lamp', was created by German chemist Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner in 1823 - three years before English chemist John Walker invented the friction match.

In 'The Descent Of Man', Charles Darwin described monkeys with hangovers after drinking beer left out by trappers: 'On the following morning they were very cross and dismal; they held their aching heads with both hands, and wore a most pitiable expression.'

King Charles VI of France (1368-1422) - also, known as Charles the Mad - suffered from the delusion that he was made of glass. He had protective iron bars sewn into his clothing to prevent him from shattering if he fell.