Mike Bendzela lives on a small orchard and farm in Maine. His short stories and essays have appeared in several North American periodicals and anthologies, and he won a Pushcart Prize in 1992. His collection, Metazoan Variations: Evolutionary Fables and Other Emblematic Tales, was published by UnCollected Press in 2020. Email: michael.bendzela [at] maine.edu
by Mike Bendzela [This will be a two-part essay.] Ischemia When the burly, bearded young man climbs into the bed with my husband, I scooch up in my plastic chair to get a better view. On a computer screen nearby, I swear I am seeing, in grainy black-and-white, a deep-sea creature, pulsing. There is a…
by Mike Bendzela Narrative is the elucidation of backstory. Thus, narrative partakes of other stories, is composed of them. There is no infinite regress of narratives, though. At the end lies a cosmology, which I use here to mean a master story, or, “a doctrine describing the natural order of the universe.” This the ground…
by Mike Bendzela While changing keys during a recent old time jam session, a friend asked for my thoughts about this new ChatGPT thing, seeing as I teach writing to college students and the fear is that this text-generating gadget will disrupt how such courses are taught. I had to answer that I did not…
by Mike Bendzela And on the pedestal, these words appear: . . . “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. —From “Ozymandias,” Percy Bysshe Shelley Prologue from Part One An investigation into the livelihoods of two great-great grandfathers, both oilfield workers in Ohio, has of necessity become a study in the…
by Mike Bendzela Sleepless one Christmas Eve . . . monkey brain, coffee at 3 a.m. . . . then back to bed to stare at purple and green fireworks on the insides of my eyelids. Meanwhile, my husband, the retired carpenter, saws wood loudly beside me. He is recovering from both cancer and stroke.…
by Mike Bendzela Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. —From “Ozymandias,” Percy Bysshe Shelley Prologue An investigation into the livelihoods of two great-great grandfathers, both oilfield workers in Ohio, has of necessity become a study in the nature of forgetting. I have sought one thing–my ancestral grandfathers’ involvement in the…
by Mike Bendzela Hannah was a wide-horned, burgundy-red American Milking Devon heifer, with bug eyes and such a timid disposition you got the impression of a creature permanently bewildered. You could not approach her; she would just pace off to a corner of the barnyard pasture and stare at you from a distance. And she…
by Mike Bendzela How would you account for the following weird experience? Do you have a handy explanation, or do you dismiss it outright? When I was twelve, Dad used to drop me off in the twilight in front of the parish across town to serve Mass, usually a Wednesday before dawn, because that was…
by Mike Bendzela “I am not an animal! I am a human being!”–“John” Merrick, The Elephant Man (1980 film) “Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch. [That is not only not right; it is not even wrong.]”–Attributed to Wolfgang Pauli We get no traction on a problem until we develop a…
by Mike Bendzela Over thirty years ago, my then-partner-now-spouse, Don, began planting heritage apple trees on the small farm where we are tenants, in an attempt to partially restore the historical orchard of Herbert W. Dow, traditional Maine farmer and cider-imbiber. Herbert’s original, handwritten map of the apple trees he grew out back was still…
by Mike Bendzela One tedious outcome of the ascendance of the anti-abortion movement in the United States is having to listen to the tiresome arguments about “the beginning of [human] life.” It’s like being stuck in a dentist’s office waiting for an appointment while nauseating top-forty hits from the 1970s play on a hidden radio. Not…
by Mike Bendzela Tribes In the great class of mammalian vertebrates, antagonism arose between the egg-laying monotremes and the marsupials. Neither side could see the other on its own terms, each insisting it was the True Mammal. An opossum (Didelphis) complained, “The platypus is a shameful pretender! It won’t admit that it is a failed…
by Mike Bendzela The Smiling Toads of Darwin's Bluff An obscure species of Bufo inhabits a remote point of land called Darwin's Bluff. Long ago, one of these toads learned to "smile," but this was a fluke: It was born with a congenital defect of the jaw. Like most toads, it spent its days in…
by Mike Bendzela Ants versus Termites Some ants (Formicidae) living under a certain wood stump were incapable of realizing that they didn't know anything. Their antennae were exquisitely tuned to find the airs of their own colony agreeable. The edicts that wafted down from their Queen filled them with an illusion of knowledge and reason.…