By Joe Plicka

“Unknown / Man / Died Eating / Library Paste / July 14 1908”

                        — epitaph on a headstone at Pioneer
                         Cemetery in Goldfield, Nevada

We were called to Braddock, arriving after midnight to find a woman, recently widowed, laboring with her fourth child. She stood in the kitchen near a burning stove, unclothed and sodden, gripping a thick cord dangling from the rafters. As her pains grew, she called for her oldest daughter to bring a syrup she’d somehow procured from a druggist in Cleveland, an anodyne she was willing and able to try in the absence of her late husband, whom she fairly cursed for his commonplace insistence—when he was alive, of course—that a daughter of Eve not “thrust aside the decrees of Providence.” The druggist, however, had mixed the compound with blackstrap molasses rather than rose honey and the poor woman found the flavor unpalatable. She cried for flour paste, which her daughter fetched from a printer’s devil down the road. This paste she mingled with her bitter cure in an empty sardine tin and continued to taste it with a wooden spoon, even as she birthed a healthful boy with the most immoderate hair one ever saw on an infant.

                           — Mabel Gaskin, midwife, 1850

Kid’s always hungry for something, whether it’s Sir Walter Scott or a bit of smoked eel from the Shawnee across the river. Some people say he’s teaching those Indians to read.

                          — Ms. Hinkle, schoolteacher, 1862

Boy put that bugle down! Come! Lord Jesus, child, you press here and press hard because if you let up this man dies. Keep the blood in. Keep it in until I get the surgeon. And if them Rebs come back over the hill, well, they’ll see you’re young . . .

                       — Lieutenant John Allen, Battle of East
                        Cemetery Hill, 1863

Brilliant in Latin, accomplished in rhetoric. He had no pedigree to speak of and was frequently seen gleaning scraps from diners on Fifth Avenue. Still, we recommended him for study in Berlin. Then, just last week, he withdrew and disappeared! His last words to me were an assigned precis on “What are the real and solid enjoyments of human life.” But, instead of a treatment, all he turned in was a yellowed piece of rag paper with the words Memento Vivere at the top. And at the bottom: Barba non facit philosophum.

                       — Theodore Moses Barber, Professor of
                        Latin Language and Literature, 1873

I heard he slugged a copper and left town. That was years ago, though. Holly thinks she saw him last month at the depot, drunk and harassing the station master—a tall, lanky fella he kept calling “Duke of Limbs.” Said he just needed to get to Charleston. But I doubt it was him. In the dark? Under a dirty beard and an old bowler? Could have been any number of drifters to come through here, some of them bound to be handsome and inimical to authority.

                      — Edward Grubman, Pittsburgh Academy
                       classmate, 1878

He used to send letters at Christmas and Easter, but half the time he didn’t even say where he was. Mostly just poems he wrote and Bible talk. A wildflower or a few seeds tucked in. One time I tossed a few out the window and lo and behold couple months later I see a purple sunflower peeking up over the sill. Now where do you find a purple sunflower? Nobody ever could tell me.

                                  — Mother, 1883

Wild hair? Big monkey fist around his neck? Always going on about how God rides with hoboes? Yeah, he was here. Spent a couple winters eating snowballs up in Chicago but got tired of flophouses and hurt his back humping bricks. Always complained about the younger guys. Just a bunch of tramps, he said. Buzzards, never bringing anything to the stew. Said he was heading west to work the fields.

                       — Stumpy, hobo jungle near Mansfield,
                        Miss., 1885

Decide your own life; don’t let another person run or rule you.

                           — The Hobo Ethical Code, 1889

That was a long time ago. I do remember a few things. I remember a boy. He was my best friend for a while. I gave my love a cherry, that haaaad nooo stoooone! Gave my love a chicken, that haaad noo boooone! Ha! Hells bells! We were always singing that, sitting outside the general with our licorice and buttermints, hollering until old bird Watson swept us away. He never seemed to have any money for candy but always had something magic in his pockets. Like a mouse skull or an arrowhead. Of course, blue-blooded girls like me weren’t supposed to loiter with little scamps like him. The church ladies worried I’d become “mannish,” and the schoolmaster told my father to “paddle some sense” into me. But we stayed friends until he wandered off to the war. And he was still just a boy! A bugle boy. I cried. But, I knew he was gonna make his own way. He had this gift of thinking ten steps ahead while never worrying ‘bout the future.

                     — Janet Creighton, first woman to be named
                      Chief Factory Inspector in Chicago, 1892

Old bugger done seen some things, that’s for sure. That’s how a lot of them get, you know. Real quiet. Like they went to hell and brought back a piece and they’re scared it’ll come out so they just kind of stop talking.

                    — Foreman, Gold Prince Mine, Colorado,
                     1902

Yes, Officer, I’ve seen him in here but I don’t know his name. First time was just a week or two ago. Independence Day, actually. He came in complaining about the cannons and the smoke, then asked for Leaves of Grass. Spoke like a gentleman, not like any vagrant I ever met. He sat right down on the floor and read there for the rest of the day. It was like that for about a week, but with him sleeping more and more and reading less and less, until one day he didn’t come in. That’s the day they found him in the sagebrush by the garage. Doc Turner said he was near starved, but it’s hard to make sense of that. I mean, he was gaunt, but living rough will make you gaunt. It was hard to see much under all those clothes. Like drapery on a skeleton, I guess? And there’s plenty of food to go around in a boomtown like this—vittles and odd jobs too. Hell, he could have bummed an old tent and set himself up nice down by the river. But they’re saying he was eating paste? Did he choke on it? I guess he nicked it from us. I didn’t see it. Maybe he found it in the trash. Cora gets exercised when it starts to harden, wants to throw it out, even though I told her a thousand times to just add water. Who knows? Maybe he just liked the taste.

                     — Bella Greenway, Goldfield librarian, 1908

Mom didn’t know her father. No one did, apparently, least of all Grandpa, who wasn’t my real grandpa. He was locked up in Omaha when Mom was born. Did about five years for embezzling railroad money. Grandma denied the math and never spoke of it, but my aunt Abigail, the oldest, remembers a few men at the house—charming transient types thinking on their feet and dancing for their supper. One of ‘em, she said, had pretty wild hair that mom seemed to love, and he talked like a gentleman. He even recited Latin for them! And the priest at Cyril and Methodius refused to baptize Mom when she was little on account of her being “misbegotten,” which I guess was the beginning of the end of us being good Catholics. Speaking of churches and excuse me while I talk to this customer—Hello, welcome to The Czech Mart! Kolache fillings? Yes, we have sweet cheese, but sorry no more blueberry or raspberry. Okay, thank you and take care now—anyway, speaking of churches, tomorrow night at the Divine Mercy in Schuyler. Bring your accordion and it doesn’t matter if you’re no good there’ll be a hundred people there . . . Yes, accordion jam! Just come!

                          — Frank Shmerka, grandson, 1970

Bro, this place is off the hook! The car forest, dank old-ass bars, and now this crazy headstone! This fucking guy. Are you serious? So random. Like, who the hell was this dude!? Died eating library paste? What even is that? Isn’t that, like, Elmer’s glue? I used to eat that shit all the time. Put it on my fingers, let it dry, then peeled it off and threw little glue balls at people across the room. Or I ate it, l-o-l. But this guy went and ate a gallon or something. Or maybe somebody shot him while he was eating it. Helllla crazy. Yo, we better get back for that auction thing. I wanna laugh at all them people buying dirt squares in the middle of the desert.

                      — Leo Shmerka, great-great-grandson at
                       Goldfield Days festival, 2019

So, I’m just finishing a Quora post. It’s for the Snapshots of History thread. I found a picture going around the internet of a random headstone in Nevada. Some nameless guy died from eating library paste . . . Exactly, right, like whaaat? I guess it’s just basically flour and water, but it seems someone dug up a legit newspaper clipping saying there was an autopsy and he was starving. Then some article on the University of Michigan website speculated there was alum in the paste, which is a preservative but also poisonous . . . I know. I know it’s frustrating to you, but after executing timecards all day this is how I unwind. And, like I said, Quora is starting to monetize their platform for top writers and even though you don’t believe it, hold your comments please, I think this could be a side hustle! Some Mexico money. For our trip? So please, close the door, give me five minutes, then I’ll come down and let you hold me while we watch Netflix.

                      — Marilyn Jessop, payroll specialist, 2022

One of the questions I get asked all the time, especially from students, is where do you get your ideas? As if a writer’s brain somehow works differently, right? Like we’re these special geniuses just oozing originality and cleverness, imparting our ooze to the poor, uninspired, idea-less populace. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t actually believe that, or at least want to believe it, just a little bit—thank you for the courtesy laugh, Michael—but, really, most of my ideas come from the internet. Or the news, or television, which is all on the internet. And who doesn’t have the internet these days? Like, don’t worry about ideas, dudes. Don’t talk to me about ideas. Ideas are the easy part. Just walk out your front door and they come flying at you like gnats. Or, just open your email! Here, I’ll show you. Just let me get into my phone here . . . annnnd here’s something from Quora, you know, that crowdsourced question and answer thing . . . okay this is good, here we go: the tombstone of a drifter who died after eating paste at Pioneer Cemetery in Goldfield, Nevada, USA. There’s a story. And, it’s my story now. Give me scissors and glue, maybe some paste, right? As long as I don’t eat it! I’m making a collage. I grab what I can, whatever doesn’t slip through my fingers, and mix it good. Knead it. Throw it in the oven and see if the crumb comes out just right. We talk about pastiche like it’s some post-modern phenomenon, but isn’t it time we admit that pastiche is just another word for art? Harold Bloom was saying it back in the 70s, but he was only quoting the Hebrews in Ecclesiastes. Nothing new under the sun. Ever hear that song that goes don’t throw the past away, you might need it some rainy day? From All That Jazz? Wayyy too obscure for you guys, I’m sure. Peter Allen wrote it and thirty years later Hugh Jackman sang it while playing Peter Allen in a musical. So, really, there’s only one story, and we’re all in it. We’re all telling it. Saying our lines back to one another—uh huh? uh huh. uh huh? uh huh—which is how we navigate down here in the dark . . .

                     — Joseph B. Plicka, (b. 1978), fictional writer                       of fiction teaching fiction to fictional                       fiction students, 2023

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Joe Plicka‘s work has appeared in Booth, Brevity, Hobart, Psaltery and Lyre, Ekstasis (now Inkwell), and other venues. He lives and teaches in Hawaii.