The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Dale Hedges Comes In In

DALE HEDGES COMES IN IN the sickroom. Hedges comes in in a fly-ass sequined silky, Nuggets jersey, and petticoat breeches, and he came in, and treated King That-Rudy Butter-Huggins abed with enormous compassion, with everything going through his compassion. The king wears a chullo and a sixty-five-pound bone mala.

Hedges had the king’s arm and read his pulse: “I can say, my Lord, you will benefit from this fennel yoghurt I’ve made at home, of course, and brought.” The king listened to Hedges.

Hedges got around in his backpack and got out the shut containers of yoghurt. The yoghurt had been in shut containers; now it was opened, now it was being served with Hedges’s little specialized scoopers. Everything seemed to have a scooper. Everything was open.

A minister entered and leaned toward Hedges. She repeatedly tried to get Hedges’s attention by waving her hand through the air in the room, and by leaning and waving her hand. Leave it to Hedges to be digging around in his backpack that moment, and at every moment! Leave it to Hedges to never seem to stop. The minister closed in on Hedges a smidge and changed the angle. Dig, dig, digggg, never . . . .

King That was doing what he was supposed to be doing: eating mouthfuls of his fennel yoghurt with his eyes gently closed.

A domestic all the sudden bringing lunch enters and sets up lunch. The distances all get changed and so do the angles of everything.

“Oh, he’s sticking with that yoghurt only,” Dale Hedges sort of shouted, didn’t look up: not at minister, not at domestic, not at no one—fussing with all his containers. And lids. After a moment, he turned to King That-Rudy and said in a soft and friendly manner, “Garvble it.”

The domestic made some kind of face to the minister; they didn’t have an answer today. Hedges said leave the food.

“On the strenth,” King That-Rudy said softly with yoghurt on his lips, inside his mouth and throat, absorbing in his body now, absorbing in his bloodstream, as well.

Hedges studied the urine specimen. The specimen itself was located in a special lidded container. The minister tried to signal people in the hallway. The minister held on. Hedges stood by the window: “You have bluish pee with lines. It’s still your lungs, my Lord, alright?” The minister was edging out, was signaling the hallway. The minister barely.

That-Rudy was tucked back in his sickbed having a little more fennel yoghurt. “I feel even better,” he had said.

Hedges pulled and stretched the king’s limbs he was massaging with olive oil. He had been skillfully wiping the king’s mouth with a nice, soft, purified rag. The rag was puffed-out on the nightstand. It was out of the way, and it was placed to the side of the massaging. It was throughout fifty of the containers, and would be washed off. The lids would be washed. Ultimately, someone would wash it off.

In the end, while the king napped with his mouth spread out, godlike, Dale Hedges began to eat the available lunch. He was bearing down and eating the lunch hard. “I only eat what I take. I only do,” he whispered. Eating hard, food moving, no one else.

A Famous, Normal Municipal Calligrapher

A FAMOUS, NORMAL MUNICIPAL CALLIGRAPHER skidded down the side of a mountain for twenty years. And if that wasn’t enough guess what then he went into a immediate coma for twenty years after that.

He coma twenty years, at the doctor’s office.

So those two things, the skidding and coma time together, were, and became, actually, forty sheer years. He had done much calligraphy and pieces with inkstone & brush already and wasn’t able to return to it no matter how long he lived; it was fully all done the second he started skidding. One minute, for twenty nonstop years, he fell and his head was shooting through rocks, and the next minute twenty years later he coma twenty years.

According to records, he stubbed it he lost his footing and skidded down the mountain with his arms skidding through dirt and his head bouncing along and flying down, shooting through tree stumps, lakes, and clouds. Sleet nailing him he skidded and flew through shrubbery, and over the side of cliffs.

Drizzle! Hailstones! There was heat. Garudas flew up through the snowflakes. Gales hit, hit his legs and damaged penis. His hair and his face went in a forest fire, as his face slammed through the ground, pine roots, and he skidded a bit more through a wild animal.

One time for two weeks a chain of monkeys worked with him trying to help him with his machine-made lace underlay and body but eventually they had to go home. There was so much noise with jetliners flying in and the monkeys reacting, and doing it.

This was everything in the community for twenty years.

After the calligrapher reached the base of the mountain, he snapped into an immediate coma on the gravel road. He was apparently found there by a railroad hobo: “Your hands and knees are blasted and bleeding. But, it’s more than that. This is serious.”

The calligrapher was already into a deep, deep immediate coma, and was taken to the doctor’s office entrance. After everything, his head was pulverized, and changed. Medical staff were treating his injuries and definitely monitoring his head and the coma he got twenty. The lace was gone.

His hair was like fifty feet long, and had all clods in it, even though a lot of his head was pounded off and burned. Some little idiot was crawling back, hitting the clods with a medical hammer and chopping the hair and gathering it, and trying to watch football on his phone. This is according to some documents.

The idiot called his mom on bluetooth at lunch. He had his hands on the top of his ass talking to reporters, and he was squashing it out of nervousness. The hobo was waiting around near the doors, checking stuff.

They brought the calligrapher into an empty room in the facility with nothing about calligraphy and backed up and put him in there, and plugged everything in. So, everything was plugged in and ready to go because it was on and you could watch football. His hair stayed a disaster area. His really coma butt was in there twunny years.

His patroness would come in with a pewter goblet of coffee cake, do prayers, eat and do Zoom, and the calligrapher would be propped up in the room, and he was basically the only other thing except all the various shit they kept plugging in and changing.

Chris Erickson is from Decatur, Illinois. His debut novella Henrytown was published in August 2025 by Dzanc Books. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Reader, Gigantic, Action Spectacle, Capilano Review, Seneca Review, PANK, benmarcus.com, The Hobo-Tramp Voice, and Byline. He is the former host of “Boxcar Whitey’s Old-Time Music & Lore Progr’m,” which aired on KRCL FM Salt Lake City from 2003-05 and on KDRT FM Davis from 2006-08.

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