little instances.

THE SUBTLE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LONELY AND ALONE

There may be an opportunity for you here, Mr. Hodgkiss, but you have to be willing to talk honestly with me. How did his left ring finger end up in the store’s meat grinder? The police have forensics confirming Leonard Thomas’ skin, muscle and bone were ground through that machine. Why did you put it in there? Why wouldn’t you just throw it away? You’ve stated previously that you received the finger in the mail, in a padded envelope, from Mr. Thomas himself. Mr. Thomas has continued to deny your claims—so how did you get the finger? Where did it come from? Did you assault Mr. Thomas? Was it self defense? You have to be honest with me, sir. You’re staring down some serious allegations. Did you cut it off in his sleep? Did you drug him? Was there a brawl? It’s impossible to think that the man removed it himself and mailed it to you. Stop hiding. I’m here to help. We’re aware you were lovers. Did he try to leave you? Did he cheat? Did he hurt you? Help me build the story or I won’t have a chance in hell of saving your skin.

WHAT MAKES YOU REALLY, REALLY GODDAM ANGRY?

Jaime Boulden’s car salesman dad got me kicked out of school in 9th grade for almost but not really blinding Jaime’s right eye when he called me a fat retard and I threw a pencil at him. I guess that was the first time. Every day since. Every step of the way from mom to the home to CCAC to the hiring bitches to mom to county. Everyone I ever met has been disappointed at me. 

DRUNK AND SEVERED HEADS

The boys have been on New Guinea for fourteen years and seventy days. de Torres sailed off. Teacher and nurses dead by 1622. Their copas y espadas long rotten away, they sit around the table under the tree outside the shanty church, shuffling dried leaves with charcoal drawn drunk and severed heads, a code to winning or losing, playing threes and fives, betting homemade weapons or what was once Ynigo’s red shirt on a fair run of the cards, and the ocean, there the whole time; just, eventually not worth waiting for. not when the next card is coming around.

I MISS YOU, PLEASE TALK TO ME.

divide it in two and move one half to the side.  now with the half you’ve got left, start prodding, left to right.  the hope could be small.  the size of a pencil eraser.  explore the material in such a way as to cover the necessary area.  it will be there, somewhere.  extract it in whatever shape is handy.  i personally find it best to reach into an infinite drawer (if you’ve got one) full of cutouts and feel around a bit.

throw the other half into the garbage.  compost it if you like.  feed it to your dog.  nevermind the time you’ve put into it.  it’s useless to you.  

I’M DONE NOW.

feels as if i’ve been shot out of a cannon but not recently ——— that i’ve been hurtling for some time now, my arms imbalanced propellers wildly ripping at the wall of air rushing by, most of my mind squawking through my nerves but their waves find no purchase ——— falling stupidly over myself at at a speed that is impossible and never ending. the ground is buried somewhere so far off that only the littlest parts of me have enough sense to be afraid of the fall.

I LOVE YOUR TUMBLR AND WAS CURIOUS IF YOU WOULD BE INTERESTED IN ANSWERING A FEW QUESTIONS FOR ME FOR A PAPER? I PROMISE NOT TO PUT ANY INFORMATION YOU DO NOT WANT, AND MAKE IT SHORT AND SWEET. PROMISE THIS IS NOT SPAM, YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON I HAVE CONTACTED.

I take Kyle to see his grandfather once a month. Dad’s just down the road at Rose Gardens so it’s really not a bother. I think Kyle likes it. He asks Dad questions about the great depression and Harry Truman and submarines. The kid likes his history. Has a drive to know things that I never bothered about. That Dad didn’t really bother about either, I don’t think. But he plays along. That part of Dad is still sharp. Still together. He remembers headlines and attitudes. Kyle’s ten years old. Dad could tell him that Hitler was a stone-cold bastard (cussing helps) and he wouldn’t know the difference. He tells Kyle he remembers watching tanks roll down the street in Gary on their way to transport ships. That he remembers listening to Orson Welles’ historic broadcast on Halloween in ’20s. He likes talking to Kyle in this way, I think. Inventing a history for himself. Accounting for all the time he spent working, sleeping, standing in lines, bouncing me on his knee, mowing the lawn, eating meatloaf.

Dad knows well enough that Kyle doesn’t care about the twenty two years he lived with my mother and me. Anything else existed in a newspaper in a trash can in the office breakroom.

“The days were meaningless,” he’s said before, thinking of Mom, I guess.

I hope Kyle drives that out of him in some small way. He’s too old to be worried by the truth.

IT FELT LIKE I WAS IN A DEMENTED WALLACE STEVENS POEM WITH FOOD POISONING.

Okay after we eat these if we both get the fear our safe word will be “ice cream.”

Ice cream?

Ice cream. 

Ice cream.

You are beautiful.

THE CAMERA EROTICIZES THE SPACE THAT IT AIMS AT

One frame. Night. Chain-link on the right, pale orange concrete on the left. A path along an empty two-lane bridge. Empty streets at either end. Empty sidewalks. Empty air. City lost and so loses its fervor. They’ve all gone home. Empty everything.

Everything except the field of view. The brown cracked winter grass. The wind. My keys keeping time. The man, standing at the end of the corridor, facing me, barely there. 

I stop. He stops. Turns. Waits. Empty everything. At the end of nowhere to go and he’s there and we’ve lost and I told myself I would never again be caught out here alone. 

With each footstep down the line, a resolution. If he’s there when I get there, I will murder him. 

TOMORROW WE WILL RUN FASTER, STRETCH OUT OUR ARMS FARTHER… AND ONE FINE MORNING—

Cindy sits on the rough carpet draped over the porch stoop, legs crossed, arms tucked in, leaning forward into herself. The sun breaks over the valley shortly before lunchtime, and she squints with one eye as she watches Christopher throw the ball at the backboard standing in the driveway over and over. A giant ball and cup. The hope of a meaningful afternoon with time to herself while he stirs on the living room couch and before her husband returns to suck the air out of their home. She likes the warmth of the sunlight against her. Her pores open, she deepens her breath.

When she was young, when she married Christopher Sr., she thought her mind would change. That she’d, at some point, make the turn into adulthood and be as comfortable home with a child as her mother was before her. She’d never asked her mother if that change had ever occurred for her. In the years since she passed, Cindy wondered if her mother wasn’t as insane as she’d turned out to be, day in, day out. She wondered if her mother had learned to hide herself somewhere safe, in a movie theater or a hope chest, in romance novels, in trips to the mall. She wondered if her mother had remained 18 forever, or if she’d made that invisible light blink off under the strain of giving herself away to her daughters, to the expectations of family.

She wipes the sweat from her palms on her knees, stretches out and thinks the thin layer of moisture forming on her legs is… sexy. Would have been sexy if it mattered anymore. She would love to feel eyes on her, still.  She feels no guilt. She’d love to walk upstairs and begin the ritual of beginning again. Shaving in the shower. Drying her hair. Standing in front of a mirror. Feeling awful, gorgeous, then awful again. She wants a man to buy her dinner. She wants to watch him try. She wants to smell someone new. Wants to be pressed against a bathroom wall. No part of her wants to spend the next thirty years kissing that man. Cooking these men dinner. Being where she needs to be for them, and only for them. She sits like this a long time, feeling the sun, the late May air evaporating her daydreams off of her skin, her son pounding the basketball in the background. She’s patiently desperate, and no right answer in mind but the passage of time. 

I AM HELIUM

        the back splash behind the kitchen sink is a brownish blue.  i’ve tried to scrub it clean.  all the different techniques on the internet.  nothing.  it’s just worked too hard, is all.  the tile has been put through too many tenants.  too many smoky writers and teenage 20-somethings.  it still does the job admirably, and the grout scrubs white with some effort.  it looks nice in the afternoon light.  the grey counter-top probably looked ‘sharp’ against the tile to the landlord thirty years ago.  i don’t know why i care.

        the last of the dishes are done.  i’ve been standing at the sink for ten minutes, turning to the fridge, to the pantry, to the living room.  friday night.  nine.  i know that this is how it goes after a while.  a few move away and a few more go with the ex-girlfriend or the pregnancy.  at some point you stop feeling lost.  alone, too.  at some point there was a me that split—i don’t know, a few years ago.

        i split into the me in my apartment boiling water for a french press and the me who has a new girlfriend every other six months that never makes it to I Love You.  the me who spent a week of evenings tuning his equalizer to play Paid In Full to no one, and the me who tries desperately to feel comfortable after two hours standing at a show in a bar with no one to talk to.

        somehow these two became bifurcated in my head.  the me that is home, alone, above it all, and the vestigial me which keeps trying to create a life.  a feeling of community or at the very least of being human. a ghost of something gleaned from the odd touching moment in a film or the song that makes me long for a distant lover i alienated years before.  there are these things, these things which flow from one self to the other, a blood supply which won’t allow it to die.

        as i stand here, though, free from inputs pulling my strings, i don’t care.  i could stand in this silence, the corner of the formica drawing lines in my palms, all night long.  i work tomorrow.  i will come home.  i’ll lay on the couch.  smoke.  put on a record.  tire.  the other self hiding in the background, waiting for me to put on side B, the track about waking up in the back of a car.  i’ll remember her name, and that she txted me yesterday.  the other me will stir a little.  hoping that this time it will win.  i’ve grown much too tired to care about the outcome.