Here is a Short Story

I wrote about phrogging.

The Dropouts

The county is as rural as rural gets. Its population is exceedingly small, 328 people according to the census-derived info on the internet. But there’s actually just under sixty more, hidden away where even the drones don’t fly.

Og was screaming. Several of his tribe were trying to remove a spear from his leg. This was tricky work. The only halfway appropriate tool the half-naked medics who were treating Og’s leg had was a rusty old saw. Just then, the busy saw teeth made it through the shaft of the weapon penetrating the old man’s leg.

“Got it, Og!” Daryl crowed.

Others rushed in to clean the wound and apply healing herbs.

“Any whisky left?” Og begged.

“No, they got our still last week, old man. Remember?”

Indeed, the two tribes were often stealing from each other. Raiding each other for women. And, of course, killing each other. Cops were never called. Nobody ever went to a hospital. Everything was off the grid and off the record.

It had started as a dare between two rival factions of survivalists who knew each other on the internet. It was a couple of extended families of survivalists from the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. It was going to be a long weekend survivalist challenge, a contest between two tribes. Many of them were fans of the grittier reality shows, like Survivor and Naked and Afraid. But those shows never went far enough, everyone agreed.

Things soon got out of hand. Someone died in an honest accident a few days before the thing was to end, but the other tribe didn’t see it that way. They thought one of their own had been murdered. This triggered a blood feud. Harsh insults were lobbed. Group pride was injured. Another gauntlet was thrown down. All the members of both tribes swore a pact to stay on. They sent their last text messages to family, giving their bogus excuses for their staying on, and then the phones were switched off and locked up again. They went back to their respective caves and huddled around their fires. Somebody was pregnant. It would be the first baby born in the new Stone Age.

It had been two months and change out of civilization by this time.

The spearing of Og was a really dirty thing. Og was the oldest member of the Red Ford Explorer Tribe. He wasn’t harming anyone. True, he had sticky fingers and was making night raids over there around their stores and animal pens. But they could have just thrown a rock. There were revenge grumbles going around the cave.

Nobody in the Red Ford Explorer Tribe knew that Og had killed a twenty-four-year-old man the previous night when he had tried to stop the old codger from stealing some coyote steaks. Og wasn’t offering that part up.

So over at the Pabst Blue Ribbon Tribe they were planning a massacre. One of the woman suggested they return to their (forbidden) vehicles and retrieve their (forbidden) modern world weaponry. This was roundly shouted down. There was to be honor among caveman. There might be a massacre, but it would be done with the correct tools.

While Og was being treated, Jeremiah was being buried in a very private grave alongside a creek where he loved to catch crayfish the tribe all enjoyed together in an improvised broth. His young widow (stolen from the other tribe) cursed her own parents in the enemy tribe as the young man’s body was placed in the hole which had been dug with a shovel secretly retrieved from the Vehicle Field (totally cheating).

Two men from the Pabst tribe were nearly a hundred miles away in a small town, watching a suburban street. It was early morning. They were watching students walking to high school. The man on the passenger side beckoned a boy with a blue backpack to come over to their S.U.V. He was holding a road map out the window, waving his bait. All the other kids were gone now. The blue backpack was the last walker on the street.

“Yeah, he’s got nice muscles. A nice solid build. Probably a wrestler. He’ll do,” the driver mumbled, while smiling at the boy the whole time through the windshield.

Once the tall young man reached the S.U.V., it was over in a minute. Bound on the floor in the back, tears soaked his face.

The guy on the passenger side rifled the kid’s phone, caught up briefly on the news in the outside world, then took the battery out and chucked the phone.

The kid was pleading by now through the duct tape across his mouth, but those weren’t words coming out. The shot he had been given was starting to take effect. It would soon be lights out.

“Don’t worry, kid. We ain’t a couple of perverts. We’re taking you to a great place. You have a destiny to fulfill. You’re gonna be a warrior. Old school warr-i-or! Much better than whatever shit you were going to do when you went to school today. Trust me.”

It was true that the tribe had a 100% success rate so far with abductees. They adjusted after a short period of rebellion. Usually only a few days, really.

Of course, if you wanted to leave, you had to go for a walk in the woods with Psychopath. He was the least nice member of the Pabst tribe. Psychopath would always come back from that walk alone, and the other members of the tribe would be told that the member who went with him was “restored to civilization.” Everyone knew what that meant. So people didn’t ask to leave. The Ford tribe also had an enforcer. Her name was Margaret.

So MISSING posters continued to go up on telephone poles and in storefronts in the small towns around the state. But never any too close to the caves. Always they drove far out to find the young men and women they needed.

The tribes had initially numbered only 51 people combined. A net increase of eight bodies had been realized by the time of the second casualty. There had been three whiners taken out between the two enforcers from the separate tribes. There had been some wife swapping and some agreed contractual hunting for additional warriors on both sides, both male and female. It kept the contest interesting.

“You want to stop at Mickey D’s?” the driver asked the rider. “Before heading back and drawing up them battle plans? That boy’s totally out cold.”

“Shit, that’s cheatin’ and you know it, Sam. But alright. Don’t tell a soul and get rid of all the trash, for sure. Fast food is capital punishment now, remember?”

“Don’t fucking burp or fart around any of the tribe, either. Get us both killed. But I’d like to hunt them son’a’bitches on something more solid than plant roots. And that coyote gone bad tasted like shit. I think I got Lyme Disease or some shit like that.”

“Tell me about it. We’re going to have to go on more of these people runs, ya know. After we take out as many as Sondra is planning. I don’t want to wipe ’em out completely though. Would ruin the fun, know what I mean?”

“No, I totally agree. We can seed the other tribe with newbies after it all goes down. Man, I really don’t miss my job back home. Not one fuckin’ bit!”

He laughed.

The other man laughed too.

“Me neither, man. Me fuckin’ neither.”

“We have a special on the new egg sandwich today,” the nerdy female voice coming out of the menu board offered.

“Give me ten,” said the driver. “And two milkshakes as cold as you can make ’em, sweetheart.”

Housewife

Every morning, he wakes, turns to her, and asks her the same question: “How did you sleep, beauty?” And always she shows him the same contented smile. The comfort of all those years spent together is apparent in the curve of those lips. No words necessary. And then he is able to face the world. That’s all he needs. “Get your rest,” he says. “I should be home around six. But I’ll be thinking about you all day.” Oh, make no mistake. Once, there were bad times, very bad times, and they used to try each other greatly. Marriage counseling didn’t work. An open relationship didn’t work. Nothing did. And then he stumbled on the solution. Now they’re just perfect together. She feels it too. Just look at that face. He can’t resist doing so, one last loving glance, as he stands dressing before the closet. Mummification makes the heart grow fonder.

A Muted Parade

I went walking in the fog of morning before morning. A voice told me to look for living things or — finding no living things — look for pieces of living things, parts of their bodies and body loves. Of course, the trees were all alive. The children below the trees, ferns and weeds, they are alive. Green spurning things. I saw a dragonfly wing. Glinting on the asphalt. A desperate iridescence signaling. Everything was wet with dew as the inside of  a very old man’s wrist watch. One tall cold one. A black umbrella going  to a black car funeral somehow like an umbrella. The first birds called, then, to the space before time. It was black and weirdly swaying, dappled, blotched with holes like an old Super-8 film-leader. We were all on it.


A breeze through trees whispered it was only passing through and inhuman. The BLOCK PARENTS had died, but the yellow blocky sign was still in the window of their empty house. The photograph of this is of everything, that spirit of guardianship in photos taken for unknown reason. It floats like  a summer dirigible’s shadow on the nape. Time says things behind a photo’s back. That feel of father, wet beer kiss of yesteryear on a naked knee. Oh, it’s just the breeze again. You carry your father’s camera and inside the body the fog. The sense that hands are superfluous only leaves the body slowly, slowly as the morning, many hours and loops later.

I Am Brian

Sometimes the proliferating cells of my absence, the online articles about me, use the present tense, sometimes the past tense. The flicker between the present tense and the past is where I, where you, where everyone with an aching memory exists. I have a hold over certain people, almost all strangers, who come looking for me. Beloveds.

The thought of me is cast like a lure on a silken spider thread out on the water. The Olentangy River flashes in the sun, then darkens under pregnant clouds. The riverfront has changed so much since the spring I vanished. Stand on the waterfront and look out where the water was shallow that spring, only two or three feet deep, when my father and his brother waded everywhere in the flow, forded the river, hyper-vigilant for my body. My father slipped and almost drowned. He was rescued by the arms of his own brother. These moments roil in time as water roils everywhere tonight and forever.

Did you guess that when my apartment was finally broken up there would be a word carved in the wall behind my bed? How long do you pay the rent on an empty apartment when someone is gone without explanation? How long do you stand and stare and fear to touch anything? To lift a sweater and breathe in the essence of love. It was just a lonely word. A word without its sentence. I was a young man. I hid a word. Behind my bed where I slept alone, I hid a word.

You study my face. You study my face with the intensity that you study a lover’s face. You memorize the curve of my dark eyebrows. You study how my eyebrows arch, how they bend down to the inner canthus of each eye. How my smile is half-given in most photographs. You might meet me on the street, might see my face, aged ten or twenty or thirty years, on the internet. Some of you study the faces of dead young men in online repositories of images. Networks of Does. Late into the night. Looking at faces harvested years ago from woods, from water, from snow. Looking to return me where I belong. Thank you for your care.

You study how I stand. In some photos, I wear the white coat of the medical student. I assume the stance. The way you can pick out a policeman in plain clothes by the way he stands, you can see this care growing in me. Some of you notice the sign language in my hands in these photos. The hidden message: “I love you.” Some see it as a secret message to some particular someone. Others say it is to anyone in the world. You believe I planted these messages in photographs as Hansel dropped breadcrumbs in the woods. Are we not beautiful in our fairy tales and our wandering?

How we search for one another. Even when we are only images in a story.

It was April 1st, the night I disappeared. Two hours into April Fool’s Day. You watch the grainy security video tape of me in the night. Standing outside the restaurant that no longer exists. From video to video, my disappearance is grafted. The cells of my absence grafted in your body. April 1st. You make of that what you will, depending on who you are.

Some point out how much my appearance changes from photo to photo. It’s hard to connect some of the faces, the different young men, together. Some who knew me in the flesh say that I changed like the wind from season to season. Potential pro-athlete. Party boy with a D.U.I.. Straight arrow medical student who doesn’t touch drink or drugs. Budding songwriter who wants to live with his bare feet in the sand.

You listen to my last recorded words, the voice mail I left for my fiancee. All her life she will have those words. “You are amazing…” You listen for any shadings in the small handful of words that follow, searching for any hint that it is a goodbye. But the words are bright and clean. Two more nights’ sleep and we would have been sitting side by side on the plane to Miami. Through the years, as her hair silvers, as she sleeps next to another, the image will return. The two young bodies side by side on the plane. On their way to the city of bodies, of constant flux, color and danger, dance and bright reflections.

My mother’s death by debilitation was just weeks before I vanished. My father was killed by a windstorm two and a half years after I vanished. Only my brother remains to remember the most of me. The things he will tell his children. The good memories. Two boys, two bodies in the ocean together. Fighting the waves.

My father is where I am or he is not. A large branch crashed improbably down and felled him, as he stood in the backyard, like a scene out of an opera written several centuries ago. An opera you would call “overwritten” and then smile for the sake of it. Because operas have no real bloodshed. And because our weird smiles are catharsis.

First, I am in a mist. I am a mist. Amiss. Missing. Then, slowly, you start to see in me a myth. Mything.

My fiancee calls my phone every night. For many months. Each night it goes to voicemail. One night, it rings. It rings several times. She feels a sort of terror that is awe of hope coursing through her body. She shares the words of this feeling online. The cell phone pinged off a tower only fourteen miles north of where I disappeared. The service provider says it might have been a glitch. It might mean nothing. Or it might mean everything.

Someone goes back and rereads Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield.” The small, perfect story of a man who casually moves a short distance away from his home and changes his appearance, who watches the space where his life was to have been. Unable to re-enter it.

Until, many years later, a lifetime unspent, he does.

Return. He does return.

A month gone, someone breaks into my apartment. You see me going through my things in your mind’s eye. One last time. Maybe I take something that nobody notices missing. Something insignificant in the eyes of others. But everything to me.

A month gone, someone breaks into my apartment. You see my murderer going through my things in your mind’s eye. One last time, a visit where we sat together and smiled eye to eye.

The detective points out that I had the key to my apartment. If I was still alive. Why break into what was mine? But if my life was no longer my own, the only way in would be that way. To break in. I could never walk through the front door again.

Either way, the rooms were cold by then.

The place where I slept. Where I washed my face, looking at it.

Whoever came in, felt the cold.

An Ear for Crime

Hickory, dickory dock,

I selected the Hickory family. I had to choose the right one. There were several families with the surname Hickory in this city, in its suburbs. I drove and drove. So many days, so many nights. I scouted. Studied houses and yards patiently. Until I saw the ones with the clock. Right there in their backyard. I knew then. They were the ones.

The mouse ran up the clock.

It was the sundial in the backyard. The clock. I placed it against the wall which I knew had the best window for a stealth entrance. By then, I knew the Hickory family’s schedule. I knew when the kids went to bed. When the parents did. The rooms were all dark that night when I stood on the sundial and leaned against the wall, next to the pretty trellis. I used the glass cutter. I unlocked the window. I was in to do my business. I must say it all went beautifully. Not a whimper, not a pleading out of place.

The clock struck one,

They actually had a grandfather clock in there. Imagine that. I heard it strike one a.m. And people say there’s no such thing as fate. There was one Hickory left alive by then. Her eyes pleaded with me. Her mouth couldn’t. Not with that gag. I had recited the rhyme enough by then, that she must have known what was coming, what that sound from the downstairs clock meant. She must have known that it was time for me to leave. Finishing time. And so I did.

The mouse ran down!

I went out the way I came in. Down to the clock and off through the backyard, racing into the shadows of the bushes and the trees. Then through dark neighboring yards. My car was parked several streets away, where it would not arouse suspicion. I must say I was pleased with the way it all went down. It was the night of the new moon. The cool dark of that night on my skin felt so nice. Thank You, Moon. It took everything I had not to steal peeks at the videos I had recorded of the Hickorys. Such fun we all had. But I waited until I got home.

Hickory, dickory, dock.

The obituaries for the Hickory family were sanitized. The news stories splashed across the front pages, and all over the airwaves and internet, were more sensationalized. Television’s talking heads were fascinated by the murders. They loved that I had left the nursery rhyme behind. They loved that I had left a sprung mouse-trap on each of their bodies. That sort of thing plays well in the tabloids.

But not all the details were released. The police like to hold some gruesome facts back. I get it. They have to play the hand they’re dealt. They have to hold those cards close. To see who knows what. So the darling public didn’t get to learn that the dearly departed indeed showed signs that a mouse had visited. None of the news stories mentioned the gnawing.

For those following my work in the press, they’ll have other rhyme crimes to read about in the near future. Unfortunately, some will be discovered out of sequence. There’s Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, that old battle-axe who writes those letters to the editor constantly. I finished that one months ago. But Mary has yet to return to her gardening . Come spring, when she finally gets back to tending her silver bells and cockle shells, she should find them. I mean those pretty maids all in a row.

I hope she writes a letter to the editor about that one.

Sleeping Cat

The cat sprawls on a window’s blue sill. His eyes are closed. He absorbs a distant star’s fury as something intended only for him. The sun’s fury has been refined to something soothing. Merely by distance. The window’s glass holds a reflected world, but no one is watching. Brahms plays softly somewhere in the house. Another room. Distant, subdued talking. An Intermezzo.

A child rummages quietly through a small sheaf of papers. Schoolwork’s all over her bed. The girl no longer even hears Brahms, though the recording is audible anywhere in the house. It’s been played so often these past few months, that it’s like (not) hearing one’s own breathing. One intermezzo whispers into another. The girl studies a simple division problem and her answer. She feels a strange twinge when she realizes that her answer to the math problem is the same as the answer given by every child or adult on the planet. If those people give the correct answer.

For a brief moment, she feels jealous of the children who will get the math problem wrong. For a handful of heartbeats, she feels this. At least their answer will be theirs. She doesn’t follow this thought to all the places, she senses, that it wants to travel. Maybe this is because she is eight and being wrong is still fearful. She stares at the cat in her bedroom window in his full glory of sun. She enticingly whispers his name, Mooshi, just to make him lose a bit of his heaven for a moment and look back at her. His eyes open. Seeing that she wants nothing, the cat’s eyes close again.

Distant, subdued talking. Her parents go back and forth. It’s a fraught conversation. Is it too soon? Is it right? They talk about their daughter, Elise. Their only child. Brahms goes from intermezzo to intermezzo. Alicia mentions the cat. Maybe start with the cat. Explain it to her that way. Matthew is not sure. He shakes his head as he looks out the bay window into full sun. He closes his eyes against all that brightness.

The neighbor across the street, Sue, widens a slat in her window blinds and peeks out. She sees Matthew standing in the window’s full sun, blinded. She remembers the horror all those years ago. She figures she must be the only neighbor left on that street that remembers the story. Matthew and Alicia were young then. They had everything back then.

She remembers one particular day. Sue had been walking the dog she called her little “street duster,” her Shih Tzu, and they had gone past a joyous leaf fight which had erupted as Matthew was raking leaves in the front yard with his wife and daughter. His first daughter. The one who is gone. How long has it been? Seventeen years? Eighteen? Now the couple is middle aged. There is a palimpsestic sadness showing through their new layer of happiness. Even the little girl is more sober than the first one, who was so lighthearted. Strange little girls of today, she thinks.

She remembers how she would sometimes watch the other little girl walking to school under leaves turning red and yellow in autumn. Or see her skipping home on a spring day, maybe stopping on the sidewalk to find a robin’s egg that had fallen from its nest. The miracle of the unbroken. Adorable child, she thinks. There are monsters everywhere. What those parents must have gone through, she thinks and shakes her head. She refuses to imagine, she just can’t, what the girl herself faced. It’s impossible.

Now they drive her to school. She’s never seen the child walking anywhere alone.

She remembers how she would see the child’s cat still sitting in her bedroom window. That went on years after she disappeared. That cat must have lived another seven years. At least. And then one day she saw Alicia and Matthew burying something in their backyard. Something wrapped in a blue blanket. And that was the last of the child’s great love. It had been raining that dark afternoon. It had made it even more awful to see. They had never been able to bury their child.

Matthew and Alicia decide to wait. There would be days and days of growing ahead. Let’s wait until it won’t be everything, Matthew begged. Alicia thanked him for sparing them both. But should we explain about the cat? We could show her a photograph of just the cat. A photograph of the cat, all by itself? No, said Matthew. Let the cat stay the cat. So they made dinner and joked with their daughter in that goofy way she loved and smiled upon her as they dined together. Brahms went to sleep. Later, they watched some shows with her and the child made popcorn for all three of them. They shared the warm popcorn and feelings. And then they went to bed.

*

In the night, the girl is awakened by a skittering sound.

She bolts to a sitting position in her bed. In fear, she reaches out to touch her cat for comfort. The cat is already alert, staring at the window. A finger is tapping there. A woman’s manicured finger. There is a strange woman smiling into the room from the moonlight. She is tap-tap-tapping at the child’s window like that Raven in the poem by the strange looking man with the huge forehead that she only recently learned in school.

The child wonders briefly if she should scream, but the moment for that has passed. If she has not screamed by now, a scream would be an artificial thing. A scream must just happen to be a scream. Not that the child doesn’t feel terror.

She slides out of the bed in her pajamas and walks, carefully, towards the window.

The woman is smiling at her. Why does her face look so familiar?

Through the window glass she hears smudged words: “I want to come in.”

The child couldn’t open the window even if she wanted to. It’s locked. It’s too difficult to lift. And she know there is an alarm system to protect her.

The woman smiles and smiles in the moonlight. She’s not truly all that old. Certainly not as old as her parents. Her smile is full and her lips are bright red, but her smile looks painful.

“This used to be my room,” the woman laughs. “I slept in that same bed.”

The little girl’s eyes grow large. This woman is crazy.

Elise runs to her parents now, barefoot. The shrill tocsin, the screamed alarm of their names, wakes them and they come running. Her mother catches her running body. Her father checks her bedroom.

The child tells them a story that turns them to stone.

*
Elise is at school.

“It had to be a sick prank,” Matthew nearly whispers.

Alicia doesn’t respond. She is staring at a photo of her firstborn, a young girl holding a cat.

That cat walks into the kitchen from the living room just then. Not exactly that cat. But almost that cat.

“They never found her, Matthew. They found the blood. They found all the other girls. But they never found her.”

“You’re trying to tell me you actually believe it’s her. Do you realize how crazy that sounds?”

Alicia continues to stare at the image in her palm in silence for a while longer.

“Elise’s description of the woman matched, Matthew.”

“Look, we waited years. I refuse to believe…there’s just no realistic possibility…okay, even if, one in a million, it actually was her, then why the hell would she be tapping on a window instead of ringing the front door bell and walking right in? Try to explain that part to me, okay?”

Alicia didn’t reply right away. She didn’t look up from the photograph. She felt sick in her stomach, and you could hear that stomach sickness in her voice when she finally found the strength to speak.

“Maybe because she saw herself sleeping in her own bed, Matthew. Maybe because she saw herself sleeping with her cat. Maybe because she saw she had been copied, like a traced drawing or a xeroxed document, and knew that we were sleeping in the next room. Peacefully. Maybe because we gave up. We started over. Maybe because we saw her as….replaceable…”

Her words became sobs. She struggled to speak; her legs felt weak; she felt dizzy.

“Matthew, she wanted to take our little girl. She wanted to…I can’t even bear to think of what she wanted to…what she intended to…”

She choked on her own sobbing. Her husband held her. They were no longer young.

The photograph of the girl with the cat was on a counter now. All by itself.

Nothing staring at nothing. The way photographs really are.

“It’s time to pick Elise up at school. Let’s go together.”

Alicia nodded. They went out from the kitchen into the garage and got into the sedan.

As the garage door opened automatically, they stared at the rain together in silence.

*

Not that many miles away, a young woman stood in the same cold rain. She was in a city park, staring down at the dark river below a steep bank. She thought of it heading down to the bay and wondered how many lifetimes people had stared at it and known absolutely nothing.

A homeless man approached and asked her if she wanted his coat. He was older, a relic of some native tribe or other, and seemed kind.

She shook her head no.

“No man, I’m just waiting for my sister.”

“Your sister? Is she as pretty as you?”

“Oh, she’s just as pretty as me. Actually, she’s even prettier.”

“What are you two lovely ladies going to do?”

“We’re going to go on a long trip together. A spirit journey. Get to know each other and know the world. The way things are. You know what that means, right?”

She smiled down at the dark river. As if she knew it.

He looked at the dark river and tried to see what she saw.

She disturbed him. Something about the glitter of her eyes. He remembered walking down a dark road once with a shaman who was not really a shaman, but something else.

“Yeah, ” he said, and walked away.

The Peasants

The peasants drank.

The peasants drank and talked. They pantomimed. Mostly, they pantomimed the war which had consumed them. The war had been over for years. The small tavern of shadows where they congregated, a collective shambles, was like the intermediate stomach of a ruminant where things that should not have been consumed are somehow digested.

They drank beer. They drank mostly in the evening in their village which had been destroyed by the war. They drank the alcohol made from plums. They drank alcohol made from the beautiful rye grass. They drank herbed alcohol made from the fermented juice of fruits with the bodily forms of young girls and women. They drank mead. They drank to the cemetery. They drank to the brave. They drank to the worms. They drank to the fire and the fire’s children.

They got insanely drunk and talked about the village war dead. Someone would talk about A. An old man would get drunk and would act out A.’s death for the rest of the bar. A. had not answered a certain officer of the occupying army correctly. He had stood before an officer of the army which had owned their village for the duration of the war and answered incorrectly. He had answered as if it was a performance. He figured the officer was giving a performance in that funny costume of his. A. had wanted to perform too. He had been very young, the village comedian. He had all the playfulness and natural comic instincts of a puppy. He had been promptly taken to a nearby barn and shot. The entire village had watched.

A’s pantomimer would tell the story of A. over and over, night after night, year after year. Was the story a joke? It was told in the tone one tells a joke, with broad smiles all around. The smiles of the drunks remembered the fate of A. and his comical words spoken into the face of the officer. Certainly, the shooting of A. was told as a sort of punchline. The voice telling the story got louder during this part and then everyone guffawed. “Shot dead in that barn.” “What was he, seventeen? Eighteen?” “Sixteen, I think,” an old woman chimes in. Laughter follows.

But what sort of laughter is it? Could it be compared to the laughter of schoolchildren on the playground? Or is it a rarer sort of laughter? The story would not change. Only the storyteller would change, his face becoming wizened like a dried apple, his teeth less, his teeth uglier each year. And the faces of those who listened to this story would deteriorate along with the storyteller’s face, as if in a secret sympathy.

So the bar collected drunks that would pantomime the various war dead of the village. Each dead person had a stand-in. The stories of very young children who had been murdered by the war were not told. Their stories must have gone somewhere else to be told, somewhere even darker.

The old lush who told B.’s story down the years droned on and on. She would sit in a dark corner of the bar where she could see everyone. She knew who everyone was, what everyone was. People no longer talked about who had been good in the war, who had been bad. It was the stories that needed to be pantomimed, not morality. People are story magnets. And drunks are the most magnetic old story collectors. When you’re drunk, you need a rope. And stories are like ropes you can pull yourself along. Any old story with a barb in it will do for thinking, will do the thinking for an old drunk.

The old lush would tell how B., a simple mender of shoes, had made bombs. He was attempting heroism. But he blew himself up before he had a chance to place those bombs under the occupiers’ vehicles. He blew himself up in his own barn. He blew himself up, but also a pregnant horse. That was the sockdologer for B.’s story. The drunks had even named a cocktail after B. It was called “The Pregnant Horse.”

It was drunk on the darkest nights, on the heels of the tragedies with the most teeth. Maybe it was an amulet. The younger citizens who frequented the bar, who were born after the war, had no idea what the nightmarish denizens were talking about when they toasted each other with the memory of this horse exploded in time immemorial.

And so on and so on. C.’s pantomimer recalled that young woman who had slept with the enemy for favors and was later found hanging from a large branch over the river with an ill-gotten couture bag around her neck.

D.’s story was that of an old woman who had been forced to kneel on her family’s soil with a pistol pressed to her head. She had been given the choice to spare her beloved pig or herself. She had chosen to save the pig, so the trigger was pulled. The pig was shot immediately afterwards, of course.

E. had been an educated man, the villager with the most books, who had tried to lecture the occupiers in front of his fellow villagers. He had been tied to a chair in his study and burned with his books. The drunk assigned to tell E.’s story would make the flames with his hands and his arms. He would become the flames as he laughed uproariously, a strange glitter in his eyes. The alcohol would feed the story, down at the roots, would feed all the stories.

The young people were trying to reclaim the tavern for their generation. It became easier with the years, as the bodies of those who remembered the war, its pantomimers, drifted off to the village cemetery. The stories went quiet, the stories went dark. Rain and snow fell on the cemetery. The names on the tombstones became fainter.

These young ones, who were interested in making love and making money, had no interest in these old stories. They would be polite. But they could not laugh at these stories. They would stare stony-eyed at the punchlines. You had to have been there to get it. They understood that these wizened creatures had become these stories and that this tavern was their home. They mostly tolerated them.

On the rare occasion that one of the younger drunks would go after one of the older drunks, the older drunks would form a posse and grab bottles. The young man would usually back down once he saw all the missing teeth of his adversaries and how even the old women were ready to draw blood.

The one all the old-timers wondered about was M. He had lived just outside the village. Nobody knew what happened to him or how he had behaved during the war. He just disappeared. His little house was still there but empty after the war. Nobody had even thought to check on him. Was he young? Some said yes, some no. Was he old? Some said yes, some no. Was he crazy? A monk? Did he have a family? Certainly, he did not or they would have been remembered. He must have been solitary.

But what was he? The only people who might have known were dead. If anyone had ever known. The best people could do was a story of a story of a story about M. that was usually soon discounted as hearsay.

M.’s story was the one story that changed constantly. All the other stories remained the same. M. was a community project, the one story in which the storytellers (and they all took turns telling M.’s story) could use their imaginations. They could embroider, they could reinvent. Some nights everyone was sure M. was a villain. He must have been in the enemy pay, in the enemy headquarters, “giving them information on all of us.”

Other times, he was off doing something heroic to save the village. Certainly he existed. He wasn’t fictional. Though he existed now as a series of permutating fictions. He had been real.

You could still see his house at the edge of the village, decaying. Its little roof had turned to moss long ago and had begun to cave in. All of the furniture had been taken by scavengers. Birds liked this little house now. It had become a bird hostel, a come-and-go-as-you-please aviary. The drunks were mystified. The tongues returned and returned to the missing story the way a tongue returns and returns to a missing tooth.

Maybe M. had been a saint and preached to the birds like Asisi. Maybe the birds were the souls of the dead villagers and M. had left this rainy house to them, that they might perch in its windows and watch the wild grasses and wildflowers of the summer fields nod in the wind outside their beloved village.

So the old-timers prattled on, such nonsense that rankled the ears of the young lovers and businessmen sharing the tavern with them. So long after the war, everyone still had magical hopes. And magical hopes are only chatter, the young men and women thought.

When the last old drunk found himself the only person in the bar who remembered the war, to whom could he tell his story?

He was like the last exemplar of a lumbering species now going extinct, trapped in a zoo. The others were outside his cage, looking in. Look at those strange eyes in the creature‘’s head.’“Do you think it guesses it’s the very last one?” a young woman would whisper to a young man. “And the smell!” a student would intone, elbowing his buddy and shaking his head.
In the corner, the old man faced outwards, drinking himself deeper and deeper into the only story left to him, since he could no longer speak, the conundrum that burned inside him almost as ardently as youth itself: “But what really happened to M.?”

Gift

Jason.

It would be so easy to say it’s all Jason’s fault. After all, he was the one who retrieved the package from our mail box. While Sarah and I were still at work, he opened it and read the instructions and blindly did what they told him to do. But it’s what any kid would do. We remind ourselves of that. When we get to really arguing. When we get ugly with each other. Hundreds of times we’ve reminded ourselves.

And I’ve looked at that set of instructions hundreds of times. It’s a single sheet of paper that arrived folded in the package. It looks like any other goofy set of instructions telling kids what to do with a toy. Large, hand-drawn comic book style instructions with black and white drawings show you how to put the contained “seeds” in a filled bathtub. Kids can’t wait to see the seeds “COME ALIVE.” They can’t wait to see the “MAGIC SWIMMERS!!!” promised. The words under the drawings are in several languages, so kids around the world can understand no matter where they live. No matter which country.

I’ve never seen the seeds. I have to imagine them. I have to go by what Jason tells Sarah and me, when we ask him to repeat the story. He hates telling it now. He’s almost a year older.

He’s started talking about leaving. At his ridiculous age. Where would he go? How would he live? He carries a heavy load of guilt, we know. We keep telling him that it’s not his fault when he talks about leaving. Or when he hints at doing something worse. I take him by the shoulders and tell him. “It’s not your fault.” But, really, a tiny voice deep down inside me screams that it is his fault. It totally is, kid. You did this to us.

Jason says when he placed the seeds in the warm bath water we were at work. It was late afternoon. He had just gotten home from school. They were in the mailbox inside the envelope addressed to him. It was a label sticker, not handwriting. Later, we noticed his name was actually spelled wrong. His birthday had been less than a month before, so he figured it was just one of his uncles who had sent them. Perhaps the young uncle who travels a lot with his army job and is always late with birthday presents, when he remembers them at all.

Or it was just some sort of free promotional gift for something he had filled out somewhere. Some contest or other. He didn’t give it a lot of thought, he admitted. He just wanted to see what would happen.

It was slow at first, Jason said. Nothing seemed to be happening with the seeds. They just sank to the bottom of the warm tub and rested there on the bathmat doing nothing whatsoever. “What a rip!” Jason thought. He went downstairs to watch t.v., made a t.v. dinner, texted a bit with his friends. Then he ran back upstairs to the bathroom and looked.

And they were swimming around in there. Little black aquatic creatures. One for each seed. Five of them. Not like fish. Too many tiny little limbs attached, he said. And the shapes of their heads were different. It wasn’t all that exciting. He ran down to the basement to see if we still had the aquarium. He wasn’t sure if we had donated it to Goodwill after the last of the goldfish deaths.

When he got back upstairs, and he assured us it couldn’t have been more than five or ten minutes later, there were no longer five of the things in the water. Now there were at least a hundred of the small black creatures swimming in the tub. And he saw the drain cover had been removed. Partially. The tub was slowly draining. He watched as the black creatures swam with everything they had in them for the drain. And down they went. It wasn’t a random sort of swimming. It was directed. It was intelligent. And they were gone in seconds. He watched them go.

He watched them go.

He said he had no idea how that happened. The drain cover being partially open. Sarah slapped him once. Hard. She slapped him hard across the face when he said that part, when he repeated the story. When he said that he didn’t know how the drain cover was open. I don’t think she knew why she slapped him. We all knew by then that he hadn’t done it. They had. I think she slapped him because he had mentioned the moment when things truly became irrevocable.

We saved the envelope they came in, but the return address was fake. When I searched online, I saw how many other people had received the package too. Many of them had different fake return addresses, but no small number had our same fake address on their package too. The address in Idaho. It said it was a “toy company.” The government had begun collecting the packages. By then, we realized the government was also rounding up those people who had received one of the packages and that those people were not returning to their lives. Not even their children were returning to their lives.

So we chose to be one of the families who remained silent. We chose to proceed with our lives.

I remember when we first noticed it in our drinking glasses. It would form a black gelatinous mass on one side of a clear glass. Perfectly circular. Smaller than your pinkie fingerprint. You could turn the glass away from you and the mass would swim across and paste itself against the side of the drinking glass nearest your face. Even with a magnifying glass, you couldn’t see any distinguishing features, any sense of a tiny animal or animals in the mass. You would see see nothing in the filtered water container in the fridge. It looked like crystal-clear water. And when you filled the drinking glass and sat down to watch your favorite television show, it would be there within minutes. On the side of the glass.

Well, of course you didn’t drink it, you’ll say to yourself.

But if you didn’t drink it, the pain would start up inside. Inside your guts. Sometimes in your head. In your brain. It felt like knives twisting or sometimes like hot coals placed inside one of your organs. Other forms of pain were something new on earth. Like nothing anyone on earth had described in any medical textbook. I know because I would type words in the search bar. The only matches were people describing similar pain that started only with this year. It was dangerous to confess such things on blogs or websites. The government was tracking us all down by then. I stopped typing things in search bars.

So we did as our bodies told us.

Soon, we learned the pain would stop if we walked outside the house.

If we walked a certain direction, the pain increased. If we walked the other direction, it relented or completely disappeared. You’re getting warm. Warmer. Warmer. Very hot. No, you’re cold. Go back the other way! You’re feezing! You know this game. Cold hurt like hell.

So now we leave the house when we’re told. All three of us, Sarah and Jason and I.

Remarkably, we are still able to keep our jobs and Jason goes to school every day. Except for the days when the pain tells him to stay home “sick” and then go out. While we are at work, he goes on what we now know are missions. We go out in the evenings. Sometimes in the middle of the night, Sarah just leaves. I say nothing when she slips out of our bed and begins dressing. She says nothing on the nights that I get into my clothes at two or three in the morning and leave as fast as I can, to stop the gnawing pain.

We don’t talk with each other about the places we go on these “guided journeys,” or the things we must do. The things the pain makes us do. Because on the few occasions we have tried to pool our information, the volume on the pain was turned up to its highest level. We are still allowed to have normal conversations, to pretend that life continues as normal. But it’s a hollow thing, an exercise in calming our own nerves at the dinner table. It helps to pass the time.

I think we’ve all thought of suicide by now. Probably we’ve all thought of familicide too.

You probably would too. In our shoes.

There’s always the government. We could go to them. But the pain would be excruciating. And nobody has seen any of those people return. The word on the street and online is that those people were probably all seen as collateral damage. They’re just gone. It makes sense.

I don’t want to tell you all the things I’ve done. I don’t want you to hate me any more than you already do right now, as one of the uninfected reading my words.

I don’t want to tell you how I’ve had to open my mouth and disgorge a dark, gelatinous fluid into the food of my coworkers kept in the little mini-fridge we share in our university office bay.

Only the oldest colleagues in my office still leave their food out of their sight. That generation doesn’t seem to get what’s happening. The younger coworkers are well aware. I’ve seen some of them eyeing me. They talk to me differently now. A few of them do, anyway.

I’ve started to get the pain around them. They know, you see. They know which ones know. Just as they know if I try to talk to anyone.

I know what I’ll have to do in a matter of a very short time. The pain increases and the thought forms in my head. When they approach and speak with me. The ones who have guessed I’m on the new “down low.” They might have already spoken with the government. It might be too late.

I know what I have to do.

Unless my young colleagues are better organized than I am. Part of me, and it’s a large part, hopes they are. Hopes they win. I’m tired.

But for now I must go and have another ordinary afternoon, stand before my host of angels, my paying students, and explain William Burroughs (how ironic, right?) to the innocents in a way that the words will walk carefully on society’s eggshells, and yet still perhaps give them a hint of a warning that the safety they are feeling is a safety within a placid dream that someone other than themselves is dreaming.

People Talking in Their Sleep

"The diamonds and emeralds, the rubies! That little dog is not your dog, that dog was always mine, he loved me more and you hated me for it!" an eighty-five-year-old man in pineapple-pattern pajama bottoms growls and punches his pillow, which this moment is a brother who has been dead since 1969.

"I'm the Queen of Snow Peas!" a four-year-old girl exults, so proud to be handed the crystal scepter and see those countless green minions, who stretch to the horizon now, jumping up and down and cheering her, just before she rolls out of the top bunk and crashes to the floor, waking up crying and screaming for her parents, from the pain, but mostly from the sudden revocation of royalty.

"I always will, Essie, I always did love you…your brother is a liar and I killed him cuz he poisoned you against me….put 'em in a garbage pile….like a carrot!"mutters  someone in New Jersey who thrashes under a blanket, as a dark nurse stands in the dark doorway, half watching a CSI rerun on a television in a room across the hall.

A woman who has become her long-dead Yorkshire terrier in a series of dreams chases the sled on which she (as a six-year-old girl) flies so joyfully down a snowy hill in a cemetery near her former home, long-razed, where a strip mall now stands, barking merrily all the way down.

"Yes, I used the toothpaste to masturbate," an astronaut-in-training reverted to his eleven-year-old self abjectly confesses to his father, who is a mouse twice his size, standing before him, next to his mother, who is now younger than he ever remembered her, platinum blonde and dangerously alluring in a way that he knows only from photographs in a family album that was rarely brought out.

An eleven-year-old girl who has recently studied the history of American slavery is shouting out numbers, bidding at a slave auction on all her classmates, white children who have become African-Americans, but still look exactly like themselves, had they been born black, in another century, and not ten or eleven years ago in a Connecticut city with the highest per capita income in the state.

"Be quiet, I am punishing you," a thirteen-year-old boy tells his little sister's favorite stuffed animal, a pink rabbit, in a dream, but the lagomorph fights back, and soon he is on his back and the pleasure is everywhere until he is woken by something like a bee sting and the thrashing of his necklace, its crucifix, so tired he had been last night that he had forgotten to remove it, and now his fingers discover (his eyes with the girlish lashes are still closed) it is wet with something he is sure must be blood and probably the blood of weeping Jesus his grandmother in the mental hospital warned him about.

A homeless man wrapped in several blankets on a park bench that overlooks a river whose hard surface deer now cross, going from blue forested island to blue forested island, freezes to death in the night, but not before reciting The Gettysburg Address to perfection in the presence of his parents, who keep nodding approvingly and smiling, though he murdered them seventeen years before for drug money.

Every Rational Person

Every rational person has approximately twelve irrational people living inside his or her skin, sharing organs with him or her.

For example, today I met "Robert" downtown for lunch in the food court at Strawberry Square.

I say the "food court," but we sat at one of those small tables set in the elevated walkway which connects this downtown mall to a decent hotel. We sat about twenty feet above a city street and enjoyed the traffic whizzing under our sneakers, watching it through the bowed glass of this tunnel so like a Habitrail tube for hamsters.

It wasn't long until the twelve inside Robert began to emerge.

We were having a normal conversation, but I sensed the twelve pushing at Robert's face and innards, like Freddy Krueger with his nightmarish plasticity.

Who were these people inside Robert? I named them arbitrarily as I sensed them.

Mariah wanted to dance with me. I believe a tango she had learned in her college days and had never again gotten a chance to show off.

Jude, I am fairly certain, wanted to slay me very slowly with a rusty can opener.

Robert drank his diet soda and prattled on about perfectly ordinary and depressing things in the news and in the art world.

He smiled nicely, a smile like a well-made sandwich.

Sam, I am fairly certain, wanted to sleep with me.

Or did he merely want to seduce me? Yes. It was horrible Julietta who wanted to sleep with me. She was in her nightgown. In a food court. She was always that way. He hair had her children's lollipops stuck throughout.

Rani was feeding the imaginary sparrows which flocked the food court. A true nature spirit. Barefoot at all times, even when she married.

Poor Gus was mentally challenged but a delight to behold should we decide to play the game "What Does That Cloud Resemble?"

Odile and Odette only had eyes for each other. They wanted to weight Robert down with stones and just throw him in the river. I sensed him watching them at their caustic flirtation even as he talked. They don't think of themselves as lesbians. They think of themselves as swans.

Rod was doing things with a protractor and French curve and his mustache that he hoped would win the attention of the attractive young woman passing us just then. It didn't.

Salvia was contemplating what song should be playing during her suicide, which is all she ever does.

Alice, despite the name, is a boy and a spiteful one in a dress.

Albert, despite the name, is a girl and a spiteful one in no dress.

I enjoyed my visit with Robert but I couldn't help scribbling down notes to some of his various resident personages and I even penned poems to two of them.

Of course, I was too afraid to show these to Robert or his "inner friends," so I just surreptitiously slipped these notes into a trash can as we exited the food court, hoping Robert's bodily cellmates would not notice.

The Plant

     My mother's closest relationship when she died was with a plant.

     What can I say? She was a weird woman. And she was old. Old enough to have crotchets, eccentric ideas. I urged her to explore the possibility of a pet, the warmth and personality such a spirit might bring to her apartment and her life. But she insisted the plant was better than any cat or dog. And it was much less work. I say "plant," because when I first saw the green tropical thing in her digs, it wasn't even as tall as I am. It barely came up to my waist.

       Over the years, it grew much larger. Maybe I shouldn't say "plant." Perhaps I should call it what it is: a tree. Some sort of exotic palm tree. It did cut a somewhat different silhouette. If I speak candidly, there was always something about it that I found a little unsavory. I almost used the word "uncanny." What was I thinking? How can a tree be uncanny?  But if you had seen some of the things I had seen! The way she would throw her arms around that tree and whisper in the place where you might expect there to be ears. The way I would see her tip her drinks (Mother loved alcohol) into the plant's pot, as if she were sharing sips with a lover.

        "Won't that kill your beloved?" I would ask.

           "Hardly! She drinks more than I do, the lush," she giggled.

            Crazy old women. You just don't argue with them.

        My mother and I had our difficulties. She thought I didn't see her enough. She called fairly constantly, sometimes several times a day and even at night. I always reminded myself that a widow's lot can be hard. This wasn't easy on Natasha. Natasha is much younger than I am. Perhaps that is what is responsible for the imbalance of power in our relationship. Or maybe it is just N.'s somewhat overpowering spirit.

      Initially, N. played polite during these barrages of calls and exchanged a few perfunctory sentences with Mother before handing me the phone. But it wasn't long until she was answering the phone without saying a word, marching it directly to me, letting Mother guess correctly on the other end at what was happening: a freeze-out. But this was fine with Mother, since there was no love lost on her end for N., whom she considered a gold-digging (silver-digging? aluminum-digging?) wastrel.

         When Mother died suddenly, I was saddened, of course, but I would be lying if I said I didn't anticipate a warming between N. and me, a renaissance of increased goodwill and more charitable feelings, if you will.

            But there was a hitch.

            Mother's estate was rather hefty and she had been quite generous with me, her favorite son (if I am allowed to speak candidly). There was a proviso in her will, a ridiculous proviso, that I must "adopt" her beloved plant. Not legally adopt it. Nothing that crazy. But I must take it. Her tree, which had occupied the very center of her living room, like a performer in a nightclub, was now to be, perforce, relocated to our apartment.

           I looked at the attorney and said, "You're joking, of course."

       He explained that it was no joke. He was required to visit my dwelling to make sure the plant had indeed been relocated before the arrangements could be finalized for the disbursement of assets.

             N. sighed heavily at the news but we did what was required of us. We hired a moving company and soon Mother's beloved palm tree was ensconced in our living room. Its top fronds found themselves crowding up into our much lower ceiling. N. suggested we pick up some shears and "hack the shit out of it."

              So this is what we planned to do.

              Unfortunately, this is where the story takes a strange turn.

               While we were cruising with our shopping cart down the ridiculously wide aisles of the hardware warehouse where we hoped to find shears, a ridiculously handsome, ridiculously young man accosted us. He looked like the sort of chap you'd see on an afternoon soap, dark featured and oh-so-poised.

                He asserted that he was N.'s lover (he had actually followed us to the store in his hybrid, imagine!) and that they were to begin a life together anew. She had promised him. I laughed in his face. Then I saw N's sheepish face.

                She left HOMEWORLD with the twenty-five year old that night, climbed into his hybrid like a tall, displaced princess in a very poorly-written fairy tale, and I rarely saw her again after that.

                 I might have thought briefly about killing myself, but I no longer was in the mood to kill mother's beloved friend.

                                                    *

              I was alone for a few weeks, drinking again. But only for a few weeks, I promised myself. I remembered to share my screwdrivers and other cocktails with Mother's alcoholic tree. It did seem to perk up her leaves even more.

              Why did I say her leaves just now?

                Well, it's hard to tell you this part. It's hard to tell you that I began to see shadows around the tree when the room was dark, when I sat there all alone, sinking into the ugly black couch whose upholstery was always too much like melting butter for my taste. No support at all for a man. That was N.'s choice.

                 True, I was drunk. But I began to see feminine forms, voluptuous shapes, shadow breasts and legs turning. Dark legs, dark arms. Never did I see a face. Just this....woman shape.

                   Whenever I would jump up and switch on the light suddenly, trying to catch her, I would just laugh.

                It was nothing more than a palm tree. And I was a pitiful drunk.

                    I drank on. Once I went over and hugged her in the darkness. I pressed my body against her. I was hard. I heard a moaning. A satisfaction coming from her. My lips slobbered on her trunk. My hand found a wetness. A sort of wet bole. You've surely seen a bole on a tree before that looked like a woman's secret source. You've had to have wondered. When you were a young man. I didn't understand it. Not one bit.

                      And then Natasha came back.

                                                         *


            Natasha came home one night and just flipped on the light switch in my bedroom, found me passed-out drunk. She threw the bottle off our balcony. I heard the crash. She was shameless. She wanted to be taken back with absolute impunity. She took on the role of my savior. With a straight-face. I agreed immediately.

                 She looked at the tree with even more disdain now. She gave me to understand right away that the tree had to go. The lawyer was not going to come back and "check up" on us. He had as much as winked at us and said, "What you do later with that tree is your own business." Natasha had flashed him a grateful smile then. She really hated Mother.

                     So I came home from work one day soon after that and the palm had been lugged out onto the balcony. It was snowing out there. I came in carrying the groceries and set them down where I stood, just inside the front door. Somehow it bothered me so much. And how had she gotten that heavy pot out there? No way on earth she had done it by herself. Could it have been a strapping twenty-five-year-old who had given her the necessary assistance?

                    And there was the matter of my new inheritance. Was it really the fact that her young lover was "impossible" (her word) or was it that he was "practical" (my word)?

                     As the snow continued to become denser and denser throughout that evening, as Natasha and I sat there watching television together like two pilots on a long distance flight, I couldn't help stealing glances at her. By her, I mean the palm. She was barely visible in the white-out now as a squall whipped through our city.

                      Natasha grew furious at me for stealing glances at the plant, for making comments about the brutal weather.

                     "Don't you realize that tree is your Mother? She's in there, somehow. It's the last stranglehold she has on you. And you're...tree-whipped! It's me or her!"

                       People who look like models can generally get away with murder. But I had had a bad feeling, a hunch about Natasha for months now, and our breakup-makeup thing had not done the work of breaking a bad union and then resoldering it. I tersely explained that we were through.

                            N. packed what little of her things she had brought back to our apartment and left within the hour. She showed her usual degree of emotion. Think negative numbers.

                              My first act was to go out on the balcony and drag the palm back into the center of the living room. My living room now. Or should I say our living room still. The tree had been good company in N's absence.

                                                               *

                        I did go on one more brief bender. I did take a few days of vacation from work. But I told myself I was grieving the real loss of Natasha this time. The final goodbye.


                                                             *

                         One morning, after a night of heavy indulgence, I did wake up with that tree in bed with me. I was naked. Was the tree naked too? Aren't trees always naked? I didn't even open my eyes. I was listening to the whisper coming from her leaves. I remained pleasantly blind as a newborn kitten. I told her I wish I could take her to a tropical island, that we could have a getaway vacation together. But I just couldn't see her getting on a plane. We had a special kind of love, one that would work best on a desert isle, perhaps. I stuck my naked feet in her pot of soil and dug my toes in. It made me giggle like a schoolboy who has finally bedded his first crush in her parents' house. The humus was wet and gave nicely. I had nowhere to be for days and it was so comfortable, so real. So real. The earth is one sexy mother, isn't it? 

Plus

      For honesty's sake, it is better to tell your life story when you are tired.

      For the ultimate in honesty, it is best to tell your life story when you are dead.

                                                 *

      Leon was finishing up in hospice. He was not afraid to die, for he was tired beyond fear. He was obscenely old. He was alone in the world. He had, in fact, detached himself from the existence of his large, globous body entirely, except for when this corpus-soon-to-be-corpse managed to sneak a pointlessly punitive message of pain, a sort of ridiculous holler, an idiotic yahoo, through his pharmacological defense shields, which were tended not quite assiduously enough  by the not quite beneficent but nevertheless smiling and amiable nurses. The chief weapon in that arsenal, the one which deployed the shield, which protected  floating being from actually being here, was morphine. Morphine, that king of drugs, the king of no fucks given today, Ma'am.

      Leon stared at a little bouquet of flowers that had appeared while he was sleeping, which had suddenly materialized on what he liked to think of as the "floating table," that little service station on casters. The table floated like a ballerina. It was Ginger Rogers to any nurse's Fred Astaire. This bouquet came from nobody he knew. It wasn't for Leon. Rather it had been purloined, Leon intuited, from a nearby room in the hospice where someone had just checked out in that final way. Someone had checked out to go check into that dark hotel below our feet. The hotel of infinite capacity.  Some nurse, probably Jim, had rehomed these flowers. Probably the nurse thought he had repurposed kindness. But the flowers had merely moved from a room of the dead to a room of the dying. To say what, really? What is it that we imagine a gift of flowers says to the moribund or the dead? Leon remembered archeologists giving accounts of finding flowers (ancient pollen) in Paleolithic graves. So when we brought flowers into hospice rooms, when we decorated our funerals with them, we were being Neanderthals? We had come so far? Not at all in these moments. We had put no distance at all between us and that aporia the Neanderthals felt in the face of death. You might as well shoot Silly String as place a bouquet on a grave. It made Leon smile, despite his muzzy hopelessness.

      The man tried to hump himself up a little on his pillows and told himself he knew who it was that went this time. That silver-haired little smiling gamine across the hall. It must have been. He seemed to remember hearing a quiet commotion across the way in her room that morning. Asleep, he had known what it was and had known it was not worth rousing himself up into full consciousness. But now the memory returned. The sounds which had tweaked his consciousness. It had been nothing as loud as a resuscitation. What was her name? Oh yes, Barbara. How he hated when she hummed her way down the hall with her walker. And hummed her way back. But she was a nice little woman. No use denying that. He was sure he could remember the exact moment when she received the flowers, that cooing and excitement. A grandson had brought those, Leon knew, because the oversize adolescent had turned into his room by mistake at first, with the little bouquet in its vase palmed in one if his huge hands. He had redirected the peach-fuzz giant across the hall.

      Leon knew he was missing a clue here about the fragile woman. But it was irretrievable. It was meant to be irretrievable. Something about empathy, something about grieving even strangers. The morphine put the kibosh to that. Good.  It was good it was that way. Sleep in being awake and the sort of jigsaw sort of holds together.

      Leon stared at the flowers. Merciless beings. They were merciless because they were a puzzle. They were merciless because they were ferociously alive and determined to give meaning to color and form. In this late hour. Their own color and form. Or so they thought. Bother, bother, bother.. But they had already been snipped. They were in a plastic vase drinking water. They were in a hospice themselves. There were orange cups and cusps, pink labials and little dry white antennae. What a load of shit, to feel the vibrance and the engagement these things wanted with the man lying in the bed, waiting his turn. The vibrations they gave off.  But they wanted that engagement with anyone. They needed attention. They wanted a painter to see them. Obnoxious things. As bad as people, Leon thought. Or as good as them. Same difference. Bloom, attention.

       They were careful about  mirrors in the hospice. The staff discreetly hid them. There had to be full length ones, but they hung and hid on the dark sides of doors turned to walls. Leon knew the patients, clients, inmates--whatever the polite term was these days, he had forgotten--usually wanted to control the reckoning of their own reflection and all that it implied. One hobbled, one fell, one was often stooped if one was ambulatory at all. But then there were the funny cases. The ones who could have danced a jitterbug right up to the moment they went dark. Some were even young. Better not touch that with the mind. Isn't it funny how a thing like than can happen, Leon wondered. That sudden precipice. How you can think you're fine but be moments away? Then Leon giggled and suddenly died.

     A cerebral event. The nurse actually did nothing. She watched quietly from the doorway, calling no one. Though the machines were sounding a surprisingly polite alarm. There was no family to summon. No real alarm. She bit her thumb. At the nail.

      Leon didn't know she was there. She saw the man rolling over into it. She did the human thing then, approached and took his hand. His big hand covered in seborrheic keratoses, glued-down disgusting chocolate chips. Did he know she took his hand?

       No.

     

                                                                    *

     Suddenly, all the time in the world was there. It emerged from a beatific doorway that was somehow insanely wet.

      Leon lay on a large bed in a high-ceiling bedroom. A shadowy room protecting itself from a sunny afternoon. Dark blankets over long curtains over the tall windows. A vague insinuation of a city out there. So vague.

     Leon lay back and admired his voluptuous breasts.

     I am this way forever, Leon knew. He was right.

      His lover entered the room then. It was the male corollary of the tigress Leon had become. Everything was to be given. There was fruit in the bed.

       He entered the lovemaking from the other side. He realized instantly he had missed out his entire life. That he could not be entered in this way. It was criminal but he had not known.  But now it was here. Searing pleasure.

         The man making love to him did not look like him. But he knew it was him inside there. They must be the same.

          Here, here, here, his body said. Her body said. There, there, yes there, his body said.

          They were enfolded in a swath of light, for that is what this sort of living is.

            The tongue of flame is what he would remember and remembering, Leon knew, was now forever.

                                    *

         He was a dog in the night. Leon was on all fours, a black dog, trotting through the darkness, drinking from puddles. He drank the moon from puddles. It tasted so good.

        What is there in a dog's mind that is wrong?

        Well, there were shadows that teased, and the smells were infinite! There were threats and promises and worries. He noticed he still had his breasts. His voluptuous human breasts somehow seemed natural on the underside of his dog body.

           He would deliver them somewhere.

          His lover was far behind him now, Leon knew, down at the end of the longest street ever. It was the man in the apartment who had just taught him everything there is within his body, the power of surrender.

           Leon ran forward. The man would remain forever at the end of the long street, running towards the black dog. The distance between them would elongate infinitely. It was a beautiful thing. It was like a violin string that could go around the circumference of the world while being played. No worries.

           Leon arrived at an opening in the earth. It was like a cave but it went down.

            He wagged his thick black tail.

             He went down.

     
                                   *

        Going down the slope of the cave, Leon realized how much smaller he had become. He had six legs, not four. He was small but he was immense within himself. He was still the exact size of the universe, whether he was a voluptuous woman, a black dog or the thing he was now.  He was inside the mind of an ant. It was all armor, that head. He had mandibles and a skull of some strange shell. But it was comfortable. Designed for comfort. Ergonomic. Home.  It was like waking up as the moon and knowing you were the moon.

             Leon was slowing down. His body had antifreeze in it. Some ants behind him were closing the entrance to the cave (or anthill) now. Closing the cold out. They were doing such a great job. He felt the tender ministrations as if they were hands touching his body, setting it aright. As if it were a mother tucking him in.

              He approached a group of brethren ants. They were all touching their antennae to each other, slowly. They were closing in a circle. The antifreeze was doing its work. The bodies were sealing up from the inside. Winter was moving over the anthill. He knew he was safe though he heard the wind. He felt so lucky.

             What if some of us were left outside, Leon worried. He asked the other ants in ant language (he was quite fluent) whether they should form a rescue party, unseal the cave, the anthill, and search for any stragglers.

           Stragglers will be fine, the other ants said in ant unison.

           This could be translated, Leon knew, as ant death is not real; only ant language is real. Do not betray this moment.

             Leon had to agree with this sentiment. He realized his empathy for the earth outside and the stragglers left for the winter blades of ice to shear away was a primitive holdover from the time before ant-consciousness had made everything all right again. Evolution had been running backwards all this time. It was the higher-ups, the ones who stepped on us, who had it all wrong. To pity them, Leon thought, is useless.

      So he slept instead in the bosom of his siblings, who had been waiting for him.

Maybe

Maybe you are strong and already know your way. But I have put these magic gloves on the street for you to find. Just in case. They are not mine. Actually, they are not "gloves." They are mittens. They are a child's mittens. I figure you will find them since you are a creature of wandering. Although this is an empty street with no houses and only trees are watching here. The symmetrical spiderweb patterns with the eyes on them is for you to appreciate the starkness of such childish beauty. Childish beauty, like what quantum mechanics is doing down under the day. All day today.  Didn't you fall in love in childish beauty, with it all your life?  I have placed them, the foundlings, as they would appear in the "natural world," i.e. left on the left, right at right. Although the universe has other symmetries. They are not to keep you warm, but they might. It is bald winter, after all. You may have to stretch them to fit your hands. As you are not a child, except in matters of total darkness. You are totally dark. So you stumble towards a woman's body. Another one then. In a closet you take her. The women's bodies are as illuminated, lit up, x-rayed. They have dark grammar. You should pick up the mittens. The gloves. Call them gloves if you must. You are on your way there. To the place where there are no children. Where the closets are no longer filled with women facing into darkness, but actual brooms and true darkness.


--after a photograph by Atsushi Ito

She was embarrassed to have to go into the street with the three boys who had all known her. Well, they hadn't known her, but they had known her. The crazy way her mother talked.

She thought of the movie Carrie.

So she stood around in the street while her mother watched from the picture window. The girl was picking some peeling rubber off her mint Converse she had drawn on with a pen, running her fingers through her...stop watching me, she grimaced at the window. The curtains banged shut like an impossible old maid, muted.

Rach smelled two of his fingers and then crossed himself nervously, not even realizing he did it.

"What food do you smell?" Nial asked. He didn't wait for her to answer. "Bananas? Do you smell bananas?"

"No," she said.

He had been practicing to be a hypnotist using YouTube. Which she figured meant he was practicing to be a rapist.

(He had to be buying those ugly clothes for something.)

"Barbush barbush barbush barbush barbush" practically hummed someone in stoner monotone.

What she had been doing before her mother chased her from the house:

She had been dissolving various colored dyes in glasses of water in the kitchen. Peering at them like a Russian scientist. She was conscious of the soft fact that she liked the high ceiling in that room and how it was always deserted in there since her mother was useless. Psychic. Useless. The sound of colors dissolving in water was no sound at all. The air was cleared of some sort of static by this process.

It was as though she were holding the hand of water like a mermaid.

She had been watching the colors plume out into phantasmagoria, vivid arabesques and serpentines. Sea serpents and orgasms. She was a girl, after all. She was these essences, she knew. Was she any good? If she just listened, she knew it would be the way she wanted in life somehow. If she just listened. So she stood on the street with the three boys who had all known her and wanted to know her again and she wondered. Was she really any good? And what good were these boys with her mother behind the curtains she was holding in both  hands now, unsubtle. Her so-called psychic mother who fought and pleaded and fought again with banks like lovers. Her bankrupt psychic mother. Who could not cook or suck a man's cock to save her life. And that was the woe of both of them, wasn't it?

She chased off a perfectly good trucker, a perfectly good idiot, this summer. And he worked ridiculous overtime. Solvent and invisible. What an idiot her mother was.

If she could just haul off and hit her in the face. She knew the feeling but couldn't quite own it, tame it. Punch her. But through that iron curtain. While she cowered in her pusher manners behind the walls of the house they would eventually lose. Let it just happen. Let them ride the wind. Maybe she could pare off from her then. On the wind of shared failure, the way people do. The way people divorce reasons. Or promises. There is beauty in such errors. Such fuck-ups.

"What do you smell now?"

It was Andy, mocking the august mannerisms of the junior rapist-hypnotist.

She was inside the color blue. It could not touch her if she remained inside the walls of the color blue This was an actual place like a prison, the color blue, but with this difference: the rest of the world was looked out and that externality was the prison. Blue means within. This shade of blue was a vivid sapphire. It was a roaming spirit condensed in a still person. It was what gave water its sexual prowess. The sexual powers that water has at night, all night. Wild water. Even the water in a night bathtub has a shade of this.

Neon has nothing on water, except when neon reflects in it. Then it might win. Like a serpent against a mongoose. The mongoose has nasty powers. You know Riki Tiki Tavi. She let the smoke out slowly from her nostrils. She did it right under her mother's glass nose. Let her press behind the curtains into the glass of street looking. Fairy pimp-mother. Let her fuck off, let her hear this thought, psychic bitch.

So her mind wondered and the boys touched each other. Their hands covered each other's hands like lovers. They pushed. They walked backwards. Their language skipped beats like hearts will do when the closeness is all anticipation. The boys. Nervous coiled springs in them like you see in hunting dogs. She noticed how they were doing this over and over. Unconscious, since they were boys. Boys are unconsciousness, she thought. She figured there must be exceptions. But they were lovers in this way. These three in the street. Dancing into each other. Giddy not awkward. They were like Three Graces. Maybe a little homely but still.

Three Graces. With a basketball under the arm of one.

"That must smell like your body odor," she said. But she said it soft, so friendly. So that it was a tease. A sexual poke. A sexual poke given out of boredom, acedia. The sexiest kind of flirtation. The insincere kind with nuance.

She wondered if she would be sentenced to be the insincere flirt (the word is cocktease, she knew) all her life?

Why was it a question? Why was she sentenced to asking questions instead of making declarative statements like the idiots do?

"Do you want to play basketball?"

"No. Kerry." She had to make it clear she understood the real beg there.

"Behind the 7-11..."

"I know behind the 7-11, Kerry." She was forced to be stern with this horny boy nostalgic already for what had happened over and over in his mind.

Did he really not wash his hand for days? You hear the thing.

The dog on the carpet with his belly upturned. (Look at my yummy, well-behaved balls.)

Just imagine the power, she thought. Why am I not abusing the power? She thought she must be crazy like her mother. Was she merely "psychic" too? To call oneself a psychic was to confess one saw oneself as passive before and within the universe. It was not a magical power. It was a form of usual victimhood. There was a sisterhood. A weakness. It was to believe in feeling over knowledge over feeling. Folding over knowledge over feeling. Like laundry.  How did she know this when she was just fifteen? She just did. A puppet. If you sit on playground swings alone, you will eventually become a philosopher. Everything's eventual. She was a girl philosopher. She had spilled her essence but not her thoughts all over the crooks of these boys who believed that brown longnecks behind the 7-11 were magic talismans on a road somewhere.

She was told that she was prettier than the prettiest girl in the best magazine inside the 7-11..With her legs pinned back like a Japanese butterfly.

She should know.