the slap of conclusion

When they finally released me, I left with a fear of women. A fear of what they can do and a stronger fear of what they can't.

How, where I was, I came to the conclusion I did is best left to the guesses of people who can more easily thrust themselves into thought than I can.

It's not that I didn't have time to think. I did. I had time; it ran off me. Then there was the rethinking. But there was such a small population of thoughts in me. The only ones I latched to were vile and absurd, rainwater beading on cracked walls in a building on the outskirts of a city at the pinpoint center of a country that's been left to crumple.

And women never took up residence anywhere, not once that whole time.

Life can spring out of unexpected places. Opportunistically in sidewalks, say. Or science scaring it out of a barren womb. Life can shrink and grow, expand and collapse. Disappear if it wants.

What I came to, the slap of conclusion, was between. Not swollen or skinny, here or away. Not even living or the opposite.

Between, somewhere between.

But real. This fear, my fear, is real as the history of your own life. Women. I hide my head from them. Not from shame, not out of reverence. Not because I'm any more like or unlike them than I've ever been. But because it's the only thing there is now.

town of planks

Sunlight mounted the room as pyramids. The heat, and there was so much of it, coughed up a sleazy barroomish haze. I was choking on the humidity, but the windows had long since swollen stuck and I'd promised I'd wait there.

This was around the holiday, but after.

The town—three irregular peels of streets hemmed by shops filled with dunes of souvenirs—was in its midweek slump. It was like how it becomes when visitors leave after the on-season finally gasps to a close. Only then it’s stiller and we sleep easy.

I'd been a beast, something slovenly and low. So when she'd said, "Wait, I need this," with stabbed-through urgency, I realized this might be the chance I thought I'd never have to bounce back to being the way I'd always imagined I could.

She wasn't from here. She was another of those who filtered in and out during that brief stretch when the weather lets up and unfreezes the lakes. Her features were toneless; she didn't stay for long, but we kept in touch over a diminutive pile of years. I'd pay for tickets to visit her in the denser southern part of the state.

For the telling, she'd managed to tug extra life out of her time off, so I said I'd be here and I was, drained-feeling, asphyxiated and fluvial in the hot room.

Then the sun got lower and I finally heard the gravelly sound of her approach. Looking out, I saw her mouth hitched into something like a grin through the snare of her windshield. What she'd put to me, I knew then, would not be what I'd wanted.

skull

A still-hardening skull crashes into a crib of gravel. It’s like a spool letting loose, the clattering of tension, a rolling that lasts from here to the hospital bed. That man, the one of whom you’re a parcel—an unanticipated exclamation launched through hollows—folds you over his shoulder. You’re six plus feet up, ears ringing like the testing of a tornado siren, and he’s murmuring to you, just barely, over the idling autos, pushing along his bike and yours.

The vacation has been called off. You’d been presuming sprung pup tents, the cool moisture beading over you—a storm, maybe, smothering the fire and relegating everyone to the lighting of flashes.

Where you are is named for saints. There’s no record of how you made it here, but this is where you’ve come to be entangled. You’ve sprouted tentacles. Their guts are as empty as your own, but they manage somehow to lend you cloying moisture at specified intervals.

He had a story that he always told on camping trips about a one-eyed banshee named Cy who’d taken an axe to the breadth of his family tree. Transient, wayward, county-hopping, Cy was always at the heels of your hiking boots. In the same way dreams inspire treacherous rebirth in supplicated combatants, dusk awakened the fury of termination in Cy. There were rumors that he’d licked the blood from his axe, so to say he had a taste for it was not just figurative.

Early summer, the smells and sun melting over everything. There is no way to retract the windows—the coverings are pulled tight most of the day. You have the vague feeling of nothing really being wrong with you, that all of this is just something into which you’ve been wrongly placed. They feed you into machines that swallow you whole. Blood is drawn; cards pile up, flimsy toys bought in the lobby below. There are other visitors, but what you’re aware of most is how he keeps watch over you, pacing back, sitting down, occupying himself by stroking your brow.

It’s all a rehearsal for the way that days can wind down. Statistics bob over you, incomprehensible charts. You’re just beginning to understand the significance of numbers. Percentages lilt. The doctor, who is covered with a field of exploded follicles that pause only at his eyelids, pays intermittent visits. He speaks a language that translates to silence—eventually he palms your crown.

As you’re putting your shoes on for the first time in a week, they come across with a menu. You’re horribly tired of frozen grapes. But you’re rushed out with nothing.

At home, still disappointed that the fennel-laced accouterments could not be yours, you take the glossy sides of Mylar balloons to the uncombed mess of your chlorine-wrecked hair. They cling to the wall and stay there until they pale.

***

It’s well known that lights kept on in skyscrapers prompts the collision of birds in the night. There is that sound, that smack, late, against the taut slant of the tent wall. The tapping of an axe. You crouch deeper into your pumpkin-colored sleeping bag and flex your leg out to make sure that he is still there, keeping watch, lungs expanding.

marilyn (feather ceiling)

Marilyn's face would have kids lassoing around her, wide loops of wide and not so wide kids, the fat or bones dancing on their bodies as they whooped up and down, taunting Marilyn with weird constructions. "Helium buttons, balloon skin!" "Frosty the Snow Bitch!" "Baby woman, go home on the range!" "Knotty tree cranium, sick, sick!" "Scareilyn bear face!"

Marilyn opted out of caring. "It's a coping mechanism," the doctors (specialists, all) would tell her father, who loved her very much, and her mother, who buried her shame in thick, boastful gradients of pride. It wasn't that at all, the reason Marilyn more or less sealed her lips shut for anything other than to eat and drink the things she liked.

She'd kick down the country roads that lead like a cross from her house. She'd walk until long after her knees were sore and her shoes started to slope from outward pronation.

As she walked those roads, she'd listen to the wind scrape the leaves on the trees and the nearly blond wild grass until it all rattled, and tried to align cadences with the shuttering cicadas.

She'd take it all in. She'd gulp it down like it was lemonade. Predators swooping out of the sky to swiftly murder prey, the patter of chipmunks on mud, a branch smacking down, roaring. She'd reach up to her horrific face (they said that and she agreed so it must be fact) while continuing to walk and wipe away bits of sweat that the humidity of late August pulled from her.

The reason she blocked it out, all the theories and taunts, was this. This was all that really mattered, she knew, was all that was real. And the falseness of the rest of it terrified her.

every muscle sore

On the battlefield of words, all soldiers are asleep, having dreams like whispers about the way things might have been if they hadn't ended up as they have.

It happens, just does. Night arches its back and they assail each other like a hailstorm. There's a wicked hardness to the pellet of each utterance. It's as difficult to stand as it is to stand up to.

So they sleep again tonight like men who have almost died.

Eventually they'll wake, their smallest muscles jousted through with soreness, coughing up fog. They'll agree and say for not the last time that this change, now that it has finally come, is more than good and that it will last nearly as long as forever.

Seymour Reid Cartographic Cinema Society

Dear Seymour Reid Cartographic Cinema Society Members,

Mr. Seymour Reid, former Director of the Seymour Reid Cartographic Cinema Society, now Assistant Director of same said Society, is a man of operational salaciousness. That is to say that, since our incorporation, he made the workings of our Society look infinitely sexier than they actually were.

Turns out Seymour Reid is a rat. That is the reason that the Board of the Society has hacksawed a leg from the chair of his appointment.

And now that we've identified him as rat, let us tell you what type of rat he is: He is pack rat. Yes, that horrid sort of rat who scrounges life's flotsam and jetsam, like a greedy squirrel guzzling more than his fair share of acorns. Reid's apartment teemed with canister upon canister of original prints of one-off films, coiled copies of luminary cinematic cartographic works of all genres: Drama, comedy (black and romantic and slapstick), chick flick, foreign, pornographic, and horror.

The list goes on, but if you're not getting the gist, well frankly there's something wrong with you. Maybe you should consider our continuing education course SRCCS095: Cartographic Cinema Studies for Beginners, Returning Students, and Complete Dolts.

Next round of classes start in mid-June.

But back to thick of the plot: When the Society's "alleged" "remote" "film shed"—the one that "only he" had "keys" to or knew the "location" of but couldn't map from "memory"—"allegedly" "burned" "to the ground", we members of the Society all sobbed together over our collective misfortune.

The insurance money came through though, and we cooed at all the zeroes that trailed the 7. Remember how we cooed? Oh we cooed. But no amount of cooing could ever quell the tremendous sense of loss we felt. Am I right?

Remember how, in the Twinesdale Library's Community Room, we all talked for what felt like weeks about how it didn't matter that we didn't have a single masterpiece remaining to fill what would have been, without all the talking, an evening silence and charting of coordinates? We shared our feelings, became One, which is so much more than Many.

It felt romantic, didn't it, to be missing something loved by so few? It did.

But the shed? There were never any films stored there. That shed may as well have been a leprechaun crowned king of the Bermuda Triangle, because it never existed.

This pack rat, our rat, (now) Assistant Director Mr. Seymour Reid, was at home every night, hosting private showings from our archives for a party of one.

He used an antique film projector to disperse the images and dialogue that express who were are over his filthy, off-white living room wall. He'd constructed his furniture out of some of the canisters and used others as artistically painted wall-hangings, and still others he used to warm tortillas on his stove. He was, almost literally, completely surrounded by things that are and should have always been ours.

Well, we've reclaimed them! They are in their rightful hands once more. Our hands. The Seymour Reid Cartographic Cinema Society's hands. Now please set down those towers of life-saving canisters and smack your hands together in a little clap.

Haha. I'm giddy, giggly! Can you tell? But in all seriousness...

The rumors will continue to grow, and the Society’s official position is: Let them.

Let them be like a desert overrun with Jumping Cholla Cactus. Let them be like Romanian infants gone stir crazy in their cribs, who gets more aloof and angry as their flesh and bones bellow toward adolescence. Let them be like a bathtub full of snakes in a place where mice don't exist, so the snakes feast on each other until the strongest becomes the sum of their total.

But please, be civil when you see Mr. Seymour Reid at our meetings. And please continue to make your membership dues payable to him. The Society is his namesake, after all.

Sincerely,
The Board
Seymour Reid Cartographic Cinema Society

a particle through

I'm cutting the shapes of all my concerns into folded sheets of white paper of a standard dimension. I have dilations of apprehension and contractions of doubt, tonight. The moon is cutting through with a cocky grace you can't really be sure of.

For now, the sun's absent from the scene, totally blotted by an opposing meridian.

Here's the crux of my problem: I'm terrified that the bulb up there has popped and is forever gone; that it won't ever buoy up again.

It's love, I guess. One that bubbles up your skin, makes you recoil from even gentle touch, and then makes it come off dead in layers. It's a love that impregnates itself in your pores, latches to your tissue and metastasizes.

It's something to love in beaches and parks, bringing stained glass to life, cleaving through dastardly gray clouds, breaking up the dull eave of woe that overhangs winter. It's something to pray for, or beg for if your prayers aren't answered quick enough.

I keep cutting and the scissors start to dull from my constant snips. The result of my work is piling up around me. I'm like the jut of a mountain whose foot has been erased.

Somehow, cutting helps balance the scales of my worry.

There's a pattern that's starting to emerge.

The house is waking up. Slippers scrape softly from all of the rooms and converge in the kitchen. There's drowsy, bad-breathed laughter and the acidic threat of caffeine. There's the dry tumbling sound cereal makes as it gets dumped into a ceramic bowl.

And footsteps once again. Predatory footsteps this time. Many feet gently swarm outside my door. A hand encroaches upon the long brass doorknob.

The door opens without any kind of plea.

Mom shakes me. Dad shakes me. Sister and brother shake me. They take what I've done in handfuls and let it fall over me, laughing.

And the edges of the windows warm with the first indication that there will be another day.

the caretaker

The caretaker
My caretaker leverages a tangle of muscle from my shoulder bone. He does it with practiced ease and grace, like a rail-thin waitress hefting a platter of filled coffee cups across the length of the diner.

I'd not hired this man to do these things. Or anything for that matter. He'd come to me without expectations on either end. We were both echoes of people, and together, we decided, we could temper ourselves into a single steady voice.

That never happened. Or maybe happened too soon. Whatever it was, we eventually found ourselves tumbling into vile domesticity.

As my life constricts around me, he only becomes more robust. He exterminates every speck of dust from the surfaces and then builds new surfaces. He deftly rearranges, spit shines, mows diagonal shapes in the lawn, and hauls wood for the continual fire.

He's expansive and tends to me in a way I find disgusting.

The quandary
It's a quandary. Am I expected to care for someone who gives me care if I want it or not? Does it have to be reciprocal? Or does care negate care?

I think about this a lot, but then he moves toward me, carrying things to comfort and cure, and the answers dart away like a shoal of erratic, translucent minnows.

A few slow bars
When I die, I want to come back here as a termite. I'll fang at the spotless unknown until the structure gives way and all is just collapse. It will make a glutton of me and I will be glad.

The muscle will climb back up onto the bone by sundown, but for now I feel ok. I can pad throughout the house without pain. Maybe whistle a few slow bars as I go.

is the heat even on?

1.
"Is the heat even on?" was the first thing that came through my blistered lips this morning. I was still wearing my suit, black insulated coveralls with reflective piping. My head felt like a Mountain Dew can shot through with the beebees from those toy guns the three of us would shoot before we were were allowed to have the real thing. There was no blanket, just the suit, and I was using a Sorel as a pillow. I felt a burn across my knuckles.

I was on the floor, at the foot of the couch.

I sat up, looked around; the places they usually ended up were empty. I was alone in the cabin. The potbelly stove held only reddened cinders.

2.
Most nights, my dreams are veined with violence. It pulses though me. I've seen the way my own death will play out, and I've brought death to many others. There have been quarries where bodies go unnoticed, empty factories and silos set ablaze, dogs and cats impaled on galvanized steel stakes, eyelashes plucked out one by one, blood beaded surfaces.

But my waking life is like a sieve for these things. As soon as my eyes open, it's like the thoughts never occurred, as if I wasn't capable of it at all. Nobody would imagine I could dream up such things.

Go on, ask. Everyone will say I couldn't, that it's not possible. Not me.

3.
Last night, I remember the tavern. The old men there and especially the girls. There was one girl who was maybe the onus, the reason the night cracked, splintered, and dropped like a sick tree. That girl, she has name that is as common as one of those trees, the ones that backdrop everything up here: deciduous, fallen, first overcome by borers and now overtaken by fungus.

She told me about her job scrubbing up after emergency surgeries, the harsh chemicals that sting her eyes.

Shots of whiskey were spliced between pitchers of beer that seemed to keep coming. I paid, insisting, inching closer, pretending the music was too loud and this was the only way to hear. She knew better and played along.

Our talk become more personal. She had an uncle who killed his best friend last fall. Gun hunting season had been extended. The population of deer was so massive that everything was at risk. Cars were getting wrecked, people were getting hurt. Killed, even. Deer were decimating the fields rowed with pine saplings. Predatory wolves were strong on venison; they were breeding like mad, running amok and killing domestic dogs.

One shot did it. The uncle was in his stand and the bullet went through the crown of the best friend's head and dropped him right there. The uncle blamed tiredness and a heavy morning fog, but the jury saw it as malice. It later came out that they were right.

My mom had died, I told the girl, bubbles in her bloodstream. She fell over in the gift shop she ran for the tourists. It was the off-season and nobody came by so nobody noticed she was dead until hours later, when we got home and dinner wasn't on the table. We drove out there and found her curled into herself on the worn linoleum. Her features were as gentle as ever.

We couldn't afford to bury her a casket, or pay for any part of a funeral for that matter. But the community rallied and helped us out with a modest goodbye. My dad never got over her, but he remarried less than a year later. My sister was too young to remember her. I'm somewhere in the middle. There are images that come to me, but nothing I can invest myself in. She's just someone who was there once and now isn't.

4.
The girl and I drank more. We exchanged numbers, put them in our phones, texted just to test them out.

Then there was a split second where something set us off. You've been there before, I'm sure. It's where the slack goes out of the conversation, suddenly everything said before that is phantasmal; the only thing that matters now is the tightening, the tensing. You both recoil, even though, seconds later, there's no concrete trace of what was said or who said it.

It just happened. It always seems to happen.

She went back to her friends. Mine came to me. We yelled for more shots, demanded the whole bottle.

Last call had already been called, but we hadn't heard. The bartender kept slowly picking up glasses and mopping up the rings they left. He looked at us in a way that showed he was apologetic, but not truly sorry.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her leave.

I ran to the door, yelled out as loud as I could, "Fucking bitch!" She didn't even turn around. I hoped she hadn't heard, hoped my voice was just held hostage by the cold air.

5.
I ran back to the guys and said let's go. We'd follow her, keep apace of her car. We'd catch up. I could make amends, apologize. Let her know that I was sorry, that most of the time I just mess things up and could she forgive me? Could she love me, not right away of course, but eventually. Could we work up to it? I thought we could. Knew it. I was sure. I wouldn't say that, not yet. But she just needed to hear me out. It was the drinks, I'd tell her. The beer, the whiskey. Us, both of us, we're just fine. We'd only get better. I was sorry. Did she believe I was sorry? Did she believe that I could be sorry?

By the time we got the engines running, she was gone. I just kept muttering "fuck, fuck, fuck," feeling totally lost.

Snow had been falling. We realized they were the last ones to go out of the parking lot, so we found their their tire tracks and followed them.

6.
It was the usual brutality of my dreams.

We gunned it, weaving in and out of each others' path, going in circles. The world sped up, everything more urgent than ever, the way it is when you're drunk and feeling desperate and chasing some purpose that keeps slipping your mind.

The moon was bright, reflected by the snow. It was so bright we cut the headlights.

Fields of alfalfa we've hunted a million times. Fields we've ridden across even more.

Startled, they ran, sprinting off in a different directions. There was screaming—I didn't know they scream. I didn't know they know how to scream. We kept at them until several fell. We rammed them, kept at them.

With the engines still running, I jumped off and knotted rope around the leg of one. I threw the rope over the tree, pulled it taught, heaving it from the ground, and tied the rope off on a branch. Blood drained from between its watershed ribs. The thing hung there, still alive but barely moving.

Back on the seat I motioned, let's go.

They followed, throttles pulled.

Eventually we stopped, the way everything stops.

The door is never locked; we walked in and that was it.

7.
My phone was in my back jeans pocket, so I unzipped the coveralls, reached in, checked it and saw that I hadn't missed a single call. Nobody had tried to reach me.

I went to the window. The were right outside the cabin, spraying a hose and a using Brillo pad to get between the grooves in the treads.

They looked at me and made no gesture, just kept working. Kept at it, spraying and scrubbing.

The runoff stained the snow bright red.

beaten by the sun

These kids, there are so many, and all of them look so different from each other. We have cameras fixed on them, and the bulbs of our mics capture what they say, though they talk without sound. Right now I'm interviewing this rod who has what resembles a chandelier of carrots sprouting from her scalp. Her eyes are squinted, so I can only guess that there's an intensity to her answers. A second later, she's sprinting back to the mound.

A neighbor, one who feeds rabbits to swell them for skinning, tipped us off to the kids and mound, but swore us to a secrecy we won't uphold. He told us that the kids came to the land on the coattails of dusk and started stabbing at the dull yellow drought weeds. He slept inadvertently through the night, in a chair on his porch, with a virulent, unloaded shotgun balancing in his lap.

He woke up, beaten by the sun, to see the kids impregnate the mound with a single frisbeeish landmine. They kept digging at the earth, the kids did, growing the mound with each shovelful. The man contacted us a little before noon. We came right out. He was the first one I went to see, but he refused offer up anything more than, "I already said all I know." Then he pointed to the other side of his property line to where the kids were, made tiny by the distance of two acres.

We trespassed only because we couldn't think of what else to do.

I'm serious about these kids. Not one of them looks like the other. They're moving though, really moving. They're bounding up and down the mound. Some spin like a maple's helicopter seeds, others are doing different types of jumping - rope, jacks, jumps that hadn't been invented yet when our news team was their age. So the opposite of alike, they are; damn so. One similarity though: all of their mouths are wide, un-volumed O's.

I knew immediately that we were the right choice to break this story. Finally we were getting what we deserved, even if we didn't understand what it was.

Something else I can say is that these kids are polite. They've really taken to the whole idea of being seen and not heard. From a ratings perspective, this troubles me a bit, but from a personal perspective, I'm immensely happy. I tap one on the shoulder, interview him for a bit, and when he starts to get antsy, he runs off, tags a friend and sends her to me; the friend moves her mouth in front of my mic, grins into the cameraman's shoulder-cam, and then darts away. I tap another on the shoulder, etc. Each time it's a verbal flat line.

Still, there is no shortage of volunteers. They are all so damn happy. Since they all look so different, they're easy to tell apart, even as the day teeters to its edges. I can follow each past interviewee as he or she moves around on the mount. Their gestures, though each unique, are all equally ecstatic.

A couple is grinding their heels into the mound as they twist in and out of each other, square dancing. An angelic blond takes up pantomime. A boy in a red cape does the Robot. An egg-shaped one genuflects, rolls down the mound, races back up it, genuflect, rolls down again, lands spread out at the bottom.

The cameras roll continuously.

My questioning lasts several more hours. I'm keeping each of my subjects straight, never posing the same question twice. The inquiries get more outlandish because, as I learned in broadcast school, the further you get from the crux of a story, the more likely you are to find it. I'm shouting into the vastness of this piece and, I think, I'll eventually hear an echo back.

We keep documenting, call in more tape.

Finally, some girl's kitten heel finds the land mine. It detonates and undoes the mound in a split of a split second. The kids are joyous, happier than ever. They ascend into the heavens, these kids do, mouths ringed beyond reason, and then just as quickly, they return in stumps to the flat of the earth.

When our piece aired, the station manager made us edit in their screams and the loud aftermath of gurgles as the valves of their throat opened up and fill with blood.

For dramatic effect, he said.

herb harp, accordianist

The accordion player, Herb Harp, had a nervous breakdown mid-squeeze.

He'd always been an impatient man, but a miserably unsuccessful impatient man. And so his impatience mainly manifested itself as impatience for the success he lacked.

Herb used to stay away at night, counting the small piles of currency that strangers pelted into his upturned bowler cap as he played popular songs downtown during lunch hours.

As he counted, Herb multiplied by swelling sums. He had it coming to him. The blood running through him was that of a rich man, that much he knew. But for some reason, try as he may, he couldn't bleed enough while performing to let the public know the same.

His voice was clear and beautiful, rasped just enough to lend authenticity, like the smudged words and bent corners of a palimpsest. The sound of the accordion, no matter what tune was played, was as warm and familiar as your best memory.

++
But still he failed in those early years, just as he fails now.

++
You might not remember this, but 1996 was the year of the great accordion revival. Grunge and its offshoots were crashing to the ground like limply-tossed meteorites and the boy band epoch hadn't yet began. And so 1996 was the year of the accordion.

Revisers of history have redacted it from the books, so I wouldn't recommend researching those brilliant times when accordions filled their lungs and bellowed loudly throughout the world, holding everyone rapt.

And we have Herb to thank for it. He was the trailblazer, the pack leader, the showman to end all showmen.

For that period of twelve months, Herb, with his dark sunglasses and bowler, was everywhere. He played inaugurations, Central Park, the world stage. He made love to countless gorgeous anonymous women. And men. He was a gossip column golden boy.

Best of all, his success made him so goddamn rich that, even when he counted without embellishment, the sums were so high that they made him woozy. So he hired someone to do the counting for him.

++
But now we're here, December 15, 2008, on the low point of the downward curve of Herb Harp's success. Everything inside his body feels dismal, dull, and pointless. He aches, his arms have almost atrophied, but still he squeezes out some ugly sound. He's staring into his bedroom mirror, looking foolish, he knows, in his dark glasses and bowler.

He's mouthing to himself, "By god. By god. I wish to buy God." It sounds like the chorus to a song that was never written. And he know that, at this second, he's so broke that he couldn't even afford salvation, as if that were even desirable or an option.

++
In the end, after Herb superglues the shatter of his life the best he can, the only only thing that that will preserve him is the same thing that preserves any of us. And that's the thought that there's some other place out there in the pitch ether where time slacks so much that who you were when you became who you think you should be is the you who will live forever.