Dayenu

by Alanna Schubach

with photographs by Eryk Salvaggio

You imagine time flowing backward, back upstream: the apartment door swings open and the messenger from the lawyer’s office comes into your living room, loads up the boxes onto a dolly, and leaves with them. The dust falls through the beam of light from your window and settles back on the scarred wooden floor. The boxes wait again in the corner of the lawyer’s office. In the hospital, long wiry hairs suddenly lift up from the musty pillow, re-implant themselves in your mother’s dented skull. (The abiding image, for some reason, is her hair at its healthiest: dark glossy coils of it. You had a dream recently that you came home and found it winding like a rope along dream-lengthened hallways, and you followed it with the growing sense that where it would ultimately lead would be unfamiliar, not really your mother at all, some demonic reverse Rapunzel, and yet you were nevertheless propelled forward, as though someone were tugging at the other end.) Eventually she sits up, combs her long hair, more hairs returning from the brush to her head. Doctors remove the morphine drip. Her flesh puffs back into firmness. She leaves the room, sucking the sick air into herself, drives to the office to retrieve the boxes. At home, she opens one and takes a sheet of paper. Ink flows from the cramped cursive on the page and back into her pen; words into her brain. Her thoughts curl once more inside her, unform themselves into vague image, memory, piled heavily atop each other like drifts of snow. As you back into her house at the end of your visit, she tells you she thinks it will be all right. That you can go.

But no: here are the boxes on your living room floor, here is the disturbed dust swirling in the intruding sunlight. Your mother, the poet Valentina Veselka, is nowhere. And you have a decision before you: to obey her imperative, the only thing she has left you, or not.

* * *

You meet Mary and Knut at a characterless bar in Midtown East, chosen for its equidistance from your apartments. His real name isn’t Knut; you came up with that before you even started dating him. The first time you met, in the dorm room party of a mutual friend, he was reading Hunger by Knut Hamsen, whom you’d never heard of. You were pleased by how antisocial the act was.

“Hey Knut,” you’d said, and each time after that. It fit doubly once you learned that he was a bit of a nut, and it sounded nicer than just saying so. Now that Mary’s dating him, she calls him Knut too.

Mary is wearing a short green skirt, a snug black top, and enormous rain boots. She’s a dominatrix at a dungeon downtown called Mistress Genevieve’s. You like casually weaving this into conversation with people, how impressed they seem with your life, in which having a friend who pisses on men after grinding boot heels into their soft bellies is no big thing. You can sort of see some far-off future in which the mention of her truly will be casual, thanks to the intervening life between now and then grinding the unorganized mass of all things for you into stories, each with its own sensible place.

“Sit next to Remy so she doesn’t feel alone,” Mary says, and Knut plops down beside you in the booth, splashing up a familiarly spicy smell: you see him at home, still obediently applying the same deodorant each morning, maybe pinching at the skin beneath his chin, which he always worried was conspiring to form an additional chin. Mary had, at least, first asked your permission to date him.

You make up your mind to tell them about the lawyer, the boxes. Every decision is a turn off a long hallway into an ever-narrowing series of rooms, you stumbling forward through the succession of doors failing to block the feeling of the abandoned ones pressing against your back, accusing. Now you have stepped into the room of this conversation, a room of concern-flooded eyes, confession.

“Valentina,” Knut says, shaking his head. “She had to leave you with some intangible.” He still seems to feel an entitlement to your family, the right to warm weariness.

“Well it’s a legally binding contract,” Mary says. “That’s pretty, like, definite.”

Knut asks you when you’re going to do it.

“I haven’t decided if I’m doing it at all.”

“What will you do instead?” Mary asks.

“Send it to her publisher?”

Knut turns to you already full of objection. Looking at his outraged face makes you want to punch it so you throw back your drink and stare instead at the pockmarked ceiling.

“Look, I’m a huge Valentina fan,” Knut says. “I think she’s brilliant. But you have to respect her wishes.”

“Why?” Mary says. “Like the dead care?”

“She cared enough to make these preparations ahead of time.”

“People want more,” you say, mostly to see what will happen.

“Tough shit!” Knut says. “It’s not like they deserve it.”

“I wonder if I could be held in contempt.” You say this wonderingly, loosely, rolling around the idea. You know at some sober point later it will harden and become genuinely worrisome.

“Look at Remy,” Mary says. “I love how fast she gets drunk. Remy, say something outrageous.”

“Pretty soon Knut is going to try to come on your face.”

Mary lets out a whoop of laughter. This is why you keep her, you think, this and the ability to tell people you know a dominatrix: how you feel lighter, meaner around her, how so much is not only permitted but rewarded.

“You’re late with that warning,” Mary says. You’re pleased to feel Knut continuing to sulk beside you.

Later they walk you to the train. As Knut staggers over to the halal cart outside the station, Mary quickly presses her fingers into your palm and leans in. “You sure you OK? You don’t want to come back with us tonight?” You imagine Knut glowering at you from the dark corners of the apartment like a territorial cat. “Don’t worry,” you say.

“No, I don’t worry about you,” Mary says, her eyes full of worry. Guilt closes in on you, at the ease with which you dispassionately judge her, every minute.

When you close your eyes the train slowly revolves around you, and you know at some point you will vomit. When you get home, you move down the hallway without flipping the lights on, and see the grayish hulks of boxes piled in your living room. “Still here?” you say to them, and laugh, the sound hoarse and separate from the smooth gliding of New York traffic outside your window.

* * *

A memory of Knut:

You two walked the grassy edges of Route 48 on his first visit home to your mother. As the sky darkened the stars began to poke through, one by one. He was talking about how he loved the city but wasn’t sure the love was good, helpful. He knew he had something to say but was afraid it got engulfed by the bright lights, the noise, the belching smoke and exhaust. Maybe he ought to be out here, in the suburbs, where he could hear the wind in the trees and the crickets. Maybe if he had stillness, what he wanted to say would rush in to fill it—or not to fill it but to give the stillness a texture that he could run his fingertips over and then transmit to everyone: a messenger, bearing his own singular message. It was in there somewhere but so difficult to find.

“How does your mother do it?” he asked you.

“Ask her,” you told him, your words a doorstop against the flood of earnest feeling. He felt you did not try very hard to understand. He would see your eyes glaze as he spoke into worries about dinner, train times, your boss’ frustration at your lack of attention to detail, black rocks that his concerns, at once dreamier and realer, simply rushed past. You resented this: how he wouldn’t help you clear the dishes and rinse them and put them in the dishwasher, because he had become absorbed in something he was reading, he was writing, he was listening to—as though those tasks were beneath him, but not beneath you. I’d like to just ignore them and get lost in a book, too, you’d tell him, but this has to get done somehow. You’d say this, but were not certain that any of it was true.

“OK,” you said. “I don’t think she practices anything—not stillness, not seeking. She’s just like a channel—a medium. It just seems to move through and out of her, without any effort.” He was staring ahead into the dark road but also, it seemed, looking at you. “I guess that sounds mystical.”

“It is mystical,” he agreed. “I believe in that. I’ve felt that way before. But it’s very rare. It’s something you have to tap into, but you can’t make yourself tap into it.”

“Yeah,” you said. “She just like… is.” Thinking you sounded like a parody of a college student. Of an aspirant. What you most admired about Knut was his embrace of that risk; a decision he’d apparently made long ago to simply walk through the walls of irony, cynicism, that kept others in tiny, bitter courtyards. Your mother, too, continuously opened her arms wide to earnest feeling, but it seemed to have never occurred to her that there was anything else to do—therefore, Knut was braver. A familiar annoyance twisted inside you at her seemingly secret world, one you suspected you understood better than even she did—but there was no way to relate this, so you were condemned to be the thick one, the slow, the enmeshed in the molasses grind of day to day life while she floated above, somewhere else. Knut thought he had more in common with your mother than with you, and he was wrong, but there was no way of dissuading him. The few times you had tried to explain a feeling to him, one of the deepest buried ones, he responded, “I understand what that’s like,” or, “I know just what you mean,” perhaps meant to comfort through communion, but it said to you instead, there’s nothing you can think I haven’t thought. There’s no unknown territory in you to explore. His footprints had crisscrossed every corner.

You decided to try it with him. “Anyway,” you said, “I know what you’re saying.”

He outstretched an arm, encircled you, pulled you in. “Thanks hon,” he said, but what his eyes said was, no you don’t, you don’t, you don’t.

* * *

On the train ride to your father’s house you catch through hangover blear some graffiti on the wall of a gray municipal building, something about fuck this town. How quaint, to hate a town. To resent your feet staked to its well-worn earth. To actually be staked!

Out of the limpid pools of memory floats another graffito: Life’s a bitch and then you die so fuck the world and let’s get high. Wavering black on the wall of the handball court at your elementary school. You and your mother passed it on a walk one day and she said that it was the perfect poem: the simplicity of the rhyme, the absence of syllabic variation, its bravado and despair. “There’s no response to it,” she said, “and a million responses.”

Once when you were seventeen you got into a fight with her in the car and finally exploded at her nonchalance, her un-understanding, “I hate you.”

“Good,” she said, in that accent that sounded to you at such moments unbearably thick and stupid, “then go.”

She pulled over and stared at you with flat blue eyes. A car behind you began to honk with a franticness hilariously out of sync with the surroundings, the corn fields and tilting empty sky, but your mother didn’t acknowledge it. You teetered on a moment between rage and laughter: you could have laughed, she would have too. You opened the door and climbed out and slammed it and she drove away. Her car waned to a dark smear on the horizon.

On the three mile walk home you plotted revenge. You could just wander; circle the pastures or hide in the aisles of a 7-11 long enough that she’d worry some hick had snatched you away. Or you could take the bus to your father’s, but he’d turn his face away: “You must have done something.” He refused to come between the two of you even when it would be to his advantage. You hated, too, his piety, how he hewed to it no matter how inconvenient.

The sun dropped lower and roadside grime coated the soles of your feet. You were wearing sandals, and the layer of dust that collected between your skin and the leather gave you chills. You were hemmed in then by everything, the dumb darkening sky and the lonely cars on the road, their headlights pulling them home, the sign that was your halfway mark reading Welcome to Long Island Wine Country, your mother, the ridiculous petulance she coaxed out of you even in these last days of your young womanhood, the cicadas buzzing, the excruciating familiarity of it all: how could it ever let you go? You had worn a circle around your whole life.

You had hoped to outwalk the sick throb in your chest, and when you arrived home, grubby with road dust and sweat, it seemed your mother at least had. She greeted you casually, without even a thread of irony woven through her smooth voice, led you to the dinner table in the dining room under the slow hum of the ceiling fan.

Which was it? The game she invented? The one you did? Or was it the one you decided upon silently, together, the one you thought you’d play for all time?

* * *

You told your father you would walk from the train station, but when you arrive at his house you’re sticky and bitter at the stickiness. He should have insisted on picking you up. You ring the bell and it echoes inside the empty house.

He’s in the back, crouched over his tomato plants, smoking a joint. Pale hairy legs that end in bright yellow gardening clogs. Your friends always used to say, “Oh, your dad’s so cute,” as though there was no awareness crouched behind the quirks, as though he thought he was normal.

“They’re big,” you say, of his pale green globes.

He rubs your head with a dirty hand. “I have no idea how it happened,” he says. “I was just messing around.” He likes to do things vaguely like this, poking at random from all sides, accomplishing without really inhabiting reality. He passes you the joint. He was always pleased when you’d get sidetracked in the midst of a project, unlike your mother, who would stream like a harpoon through the murky depths of an idea.

Shortly before they divorced—you were fifteen or so—you helped him clean out your grandparents’ basement. Digging through a cardboard box filled with old tax returns he unearthed his high school yearbook: Pike Street School, ’71, Reach for the Skies! You hunched with him over the sharp black-and-white photos; the lost kids, with their funny thick eyeglasses, their towering haircuts, smiled brightly back. Every now and then your father would point out the ones who died: “cancer,” or “drugs,” or “car crash,” punctuated by a “hmm,” a “huh,” sounds of bland wonderment. Then he reached a girl with soft blond hair framing a round face: “They found her in a hotel room—” and stopped. You knew you could push him forward, learn more, but you sensed that behind the membrane of casualness that there was something throbbing and dangerous. So you said nothing and gazed with him at her square on the yellowing page. The same square for everyone, no matter the size of the impression they left.

There was an old graveyard near your house where you and your mother would walk, and one day shortly after the basement cleaning you stopped in front of one of the stones, Jonah Friedman, 1917—1969, thinking the — was everything, the — held all the gems and detritus of a life, and sensed her watching you, and again did not speak. You knew if you had, there was the possibility something would be taken from you. Converted through her weird alchemy into art.

You follow him into the house and take a seat across from him at the kitchen table. You trace an index finger along the edges of a stain from a coffee cup, a dull brown ring, thinking that it makes sense the house will fall into disarray now that your mother’s gone, even though they hadn’t lived together for ten years. Your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth and you ask for a glass of water.

“Lightweight,” your father says, and pours it. You find yourself telling him about the boxes crowding you out of your living room, back across the long miles in Queens, though you hadn’t planned to right away, you had thought instead that you would ease into it over the course of the visit.

He shrugs. “Guess you better do what she says.”

The cranes sit atop the table, stationed on either side of the stain. Your mother bought him the gold statues for his birthday many years before. One is bent over as if to drink from a pool; the other extends its neck skyward, about to open its delicate wings. As your father opened the gift, your mother stood tensed over him, ready to pounce and share his delight. Instead he looked up, his face a question.

“Stuff?” he asked. “You got me stuff?”

“Oh no,” she said, and started laughing. “I thought you’d like them! They’re from that antique store on South Plymouth…”

“I like them,” he said, “but, I mean…” and his words scattered away into his own laugh. “Do you know me at all?”

“Remy convinced me,” your mother said, although you had done no such thing, only agreed with her that they were quite pretty. “We just got caught up in a moment.”

He lifted the tall one. “A backscratcher?” he said, and arching his hand over his head with it, scraped its beak along his broad back. You stood and watched them tangled in their joined laughter, tears coming into your mother’s eyes, you smiling too but also thinking that behind the smile there was something unspeakably sad. Your mother hadn’t really known him, or anyone. She couldn’t have written those poems if she had focused on knowing anything but the contours of herself. You think now that maybe it hadn’t occurred to her at all, the way her imperative would challenge and exhaust you, or that if it had, she didn’t think much of it, since that was all she had ever done to you. You think, looking at the cranes, everything has a daytime side and a nighttime side. You realize you’re pretty stoned.

“Look, why don’t I drive you back to the city?” your father suggests. “I could help you destroy them. We could take them to the bridge and throw them into the river or something. It would be a nice memorial, don’t you think?”

The idea is so comforting. It flows over you like warm bathwater. He looks at you, red rimming his eyes, this time waiting on you to receive your gift.

“No,” you tell him. “You can’t help me.”

* * *

Your mother wrote about babies haloed in plastic and thrown in the trash, she wrote the psalm of a murdered twelve-year-old, she wrote about a drive from San Diego to Mexico and how the dead insects splayed on window glass became increasingly exotic, angels from an alien world, she wrote about the silhouette of a man in a dark hotel room on a sunny day, she wrote about her own image bouncing back at her in the bright blue pool off her father’s sunglasses when he taught her to swim at the resort in Sochi, about the animal terror she felt for ten minutes at losing you in a shopping mall herd.

These were just hints at the shadows in the valleys of her world. Which is why you decided to go to Russia your junior year of college: all the stories began there, and you had none. Which is also why you decided you’d let slip the tight ropes around your chest for once and breathe deep, taking in even the smog. Which is why that night you ventured far out past where you had once decided your threshold lay, why you waved your friends out of the club and let it dawn gradually on you, like the creeping up to shrill violins of a horror movie soundtrack, that a strange man was rubbing his erection against the sweaty small of your back, too far underwater with the pounding music to push him away with any force.

Then there were two more men with scary-blue eyes at each elbow, leading you onto the coughing streets and easing you into a cab, as you realized that in the morning you’d be embarrassed at how easily you’d played the naive foreigner, but also didn’t give a damn right now. How lucky, how lucky I am, you thought, settling into the black leather nest of the cab’s back seat and then beyond into muggy drifting, when a blast of cold and another arm dragged you back into the world. You were wavering on an empty sidewalk, the black sky hurtling above you, the cab driver staring at you.

“This isn’t it,” you said, and gave him your address in Russian several times, ashamed of your sloppy accent.

He kept shaking his head. Then he pointed at your mouth. Then his crotch.

“I don’t know,” you said. You couldn’t figure out what he was trying to tell you in his weird sign language. You just stood and giggled in embarrassment, until the embarrassment morphed into a dull black horror of comprehension.

“No,” you said, “no,” and started crying, and in the midst of your crying thought that maybe you could do it without throwing up. Just to get home and get to sleep, it won’t kill me. You had nearly convinced yourself when he got back into the car and drove off. You stood watching the red smear of brake lights fading against the oily black of the street. You thought of your mother at that very moment, in her pink terrycloth robe at her desk with her mug of coffee, squinting her sharp eyes at the chickenscratch in her notebook, how she would always stop for you, and for no one else. It was a generosity you couldn’t conceive of, you, who resented your roommate’s cough when it woke you up, no matter how sick she was from walking to class through the bleak winter gusts. You were sobbing so hard there on the street you thought you might die when you realized you were on your block. You had staggered toward it on some mysterious instinct, you with your pitiful sense of direction. And you thought that there was no poetry in this, your shaken cluelessness in the center of vacancy, dead leaves skittering like rodents in the street gutters.

* * *

You leave your father’s house the next morning before he wakes up and walk to the beach. It’s a north shore beach, rocky and unwelcoming, already cool and empty though it’s only mid-September. September has always struck you as a pensive month, a time to prepare for the unlocking from heat and light. Gulls circle and cry above the blank sand. You watch them warily, as though this will prevent them from shitting on you and ruining your perfect vision of yourself as a lonely and profound outline of a girl, a bright flaw in the eye of the world.

You realize her death is also the death of all the in-jokes and shared knowing looks, the secret language of your family, the passwords to the triangle you and your mother and father formed together.

You’re seven: you’re on the floor playing with Legos, your parents seated solidly behind you on the couch, when a Burger King commercial comes on, beaming a new jingle into your living room. Hold the pickles / hold the lettuce / special orders don’t upset us… your father laughs.

“That sounds exactly like ‘Dayenu’,” he says.

You turn and look up at him.

“You know, the Passover song? Ilu hotzi, hotzianu, motzianu mi mitzrayim, Dayenu.” He sings it, to your delight. It’s the highlight of the seder every year, belting out the sunny, mysterious words.

A weird expression settles over your mother’s face. “Do you two even know what that means?” she asks. She doesn’t wait for an answer. She stands up and climbs the stairs to her office. You hear the echo of her firm closing of its door.

‘Dayenu’, you know now, means “it would have been enough.” The song names the fifteen gifts from God to the Israelites, and swears after each that it alone would have been enough, had there been no further miracles. ‘Dayenu’ is also the name of your mother’s most famous poem. It’s a celebration of true freedom: the moments that you separate from the tireless string of your desires and dreams, and the quotidian aches that wrench the string continuously from you, to be nothing but particles touching other particles, vibrating, sated by communion. The moments that are so fleeting as to be only the auras you see after a flash of light, rather than the light itself, except your mother stopped them and solidified them and engraved them into paper.

But life constitutes the vast chasms between these moments. There is no “it would have been enough,” not for you or your mother or her sea of admirers, whom you envision as slender, bookish women, with thick eyeglasses reflecting pearly light, curled on their couches around hardcovers.

It doesn’t matter what she wanted, you think. Or, it is all that matters. You take off your shoes and socks and step into the slimy sand where the water begins. You wade into the icy ocean and await further instructions.

Alanna Schubach’s fiction has appeared in Prick of the Spindle, Post Road, Underwater New York, and The Bellevue Literary Review. She is originally from New York and lives in Fukuoka, Japan.

Eryk Salvaggio is a New England expat living in Japan. His photographs and writing can be found at www.thisjapaneselife.org

It is universally admitted that the unicorn is a supernatural being of good omen; such is declared in all the odes, annals, biographies of illustrious men and other texts whose authority is unquestionable. Even children and village women know that the unicorn constitutes a favorable presage. But this animal does not figure among the domestic beasts, it is not always easy to find, it does not lend itself to classification. It is not like the horse or the bull, the wolf or the deer. In such conditions, we would be face to face with a unicorn and not know for certain what it was. We know that such and such an animal with horns is a bull. But we do not know what the unicorn is like.

— Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths

*

The black unicorn will be here, I said to myself, as the deeper shadows of what must be the Underwood reared up ahead. If the black unicorn can be found, here is where I will find it, I said. And I couldn’t come back without the unicorn, this went without saying. The black unicorn, with its glorious gold trim. I’d told them I would return one day, perhaps soon, perhaps not—but when I returned, it would be with the black unicorn. Or on it. On the black unicorn, with its gold trim. An obsidian streak across the sunset’s candied sky. Why had I promised? Only a fool makes such a promise, I said to myself, as I paused to wipe more sweat from my brow, leaning against the broad trunk of some deciduous tree, as the light waned.

The hills that fringe Underwood Forest are populous with wild goats. Most are harmless. But I was raised among goats, know their fickle affections all too well. As a rule it’s best to proceed with supreme caution and never to assume that a goat is docile or would care to be your friend, even if your first impression is of a docile creature inclined to be your friend. The goats are for only the goats, and harbor no illusions as to others’ allegiances. Wise policy, I said to myself, as I pressed on through these final outlying hills, casting frequent glances to all sides, searching the gentle slopes for signs of inimical goats. I bore before me my father’s staff, gently thwacking my palm as I walked.

She’d never understood about the goats, I thought, as I approached one last modest rise. And beyond, what could only be the true Underwood’s black vastness, the far foliage crested by a bloody fingernail of sun.

“Gold trim?” she had asked.

“Gold hooves, tail a tuft of sparkling fluffy gold. Horn, too, of course. A sleek golden horn inscribed with a helix rather than the traditional rings,” I had said.

Few people in these remote parts have seen a unicorn. Much less a black one, with gold trim—which of course no one will ever have seen, until they see the one I cannot come back from my journey without, I thought to myself, as I once again shifted the heavy load on my back.

“I can’t picture it,” she had said, I recalled now, as I shrugged my pack higher and entered the forest, the surrounding verdure immediately beginning to grow thick.

“You won’t need to,” I had told her. Arrogance!

In Underwood Forest, what paths there are seem to fold up under themselves, so that upon glancing down at the narrow dirt track beneath your feet you will often catch what would appear to be glimpses of lustrous pearl sky, far below. And above you? Through slits in the intricate branchwork? More sky! Of course it is insane, some skewed perspectival trick—and yet men have gone mad, I thought. Better men than I. Best not to look too hard. Keep your eyes ahead, I said to myself, peering into the darkness before me, seeing very little. No one could guide me to the black unicorn; the black unicorn would not exist until I found it.

The solar bear subsists primarily on sunlight, drawing supplementary nutrition from the lightsap found in gem-pines—“cocaine trees,” in the traditional folk parlance—clustered principally in the Underwood’s outer circles, I recalled, as the shadows seemed to deepen around me, silently reciting verbatim the brief account my father had found for me in his files—notes left by the last explorer to venture into the Underwood (a close friend of my father’s; they’d sailed together in his youth), some several decades before. Now deceased. And what had he wanted with the Underwood? Difficult to say, exactly, his otherwise-elaborate field notes being muted, even cryptic on the subject of ultimate aims. Naturally there was no mention of a black unicorn; but in the man’s crazed obsession with Ursula Solaris did I not detect a whiff of my own ambition?

As would be expected, the solar bear therefore prefers to roam during daylight hours, and between late morning and early afternoon may often be observed atop sturdier gem-pines, luxuriating in the nutritive warmth, paws sticky with plundered lightsap, growling his pleasure, I quoted to myself, surprised at the precision with which I could recall this ludicrous, possibly-fabricated text. I began to hum a tune I had not heard since the days when my mother, God bless the dead, wandered the house singing softly, poor woman, while my father chased his goatherds over the mountain range.

It was unclear what I intended to do with the black unicorn with the gold trim I had sworn to find and possess. Would I keep it for myself? Would I really want the black unicorn? If I ever found it? (Which I was bound by my promise to do.) Would the black unicorn be enough? Would I give it away? To whom?

As sated solars, during said hours, will frequently roam the pathless forest seeking challenge or prey, the wise wanderer crosses outer Underwood in the dark. The solar bear is unlikely to attack after sundown, unless roused from its slumber, which is deep indeed, I recalled.

My father had rummaged through several storage trunks to find an old volume of bear-repugnant limericks. “As a safeguard.”

I told him I was not afraid of bears—or anything, for that matter. I would face whatever I encountered on the road, as a man. “Take it anyway,” he’d said, “just in case. Better to be safe.”

“Safety is for cowards,” I’d said, I remembered now with a wince. The volume’s saffron vellum cover coated with dust, I recalled noting, as I’d slipped the book into my pack under his insistent gaze, waiting like a coward until I’d left the ranch’s sprawl around the road’s first full curve to throw the useless tome into a ditch. I shouldn’t have done that, I conceded to myself, as I scanned the darkness to either side of the disappearing path, hoping to reach the interior before dawn. Even a limerick is better than nothing.

“With golden wings,” I had added just before setting off, as I stuffed the last bit of goat jerky into the pack, my father standing a bit behind my wife. “A black unicorn with golden wings.”

“So a Pegasus, then,” she had said.

I didn’t know what to call the creature I sought other than a black unicorn with gold mane, tail, hooves, and wings (and, in truth, I had only just decided to incorporate the wings—now it was too late to take them back—though I didn’t necessarily regret their addition). No one had ever seen it except for me—and I, only in my dubious visions or dreams—so perhaps it had no name. Beyond “the black unicorn,” which designation I’d stubbornly repeated—with unnecessary sullenness, I now saw all too clearly.

“Well, but what you’re describing sounds just like a Pegasus.”

 *

Not uncommonly, however, the solar bear—particularly males of the species—will at once meet both dietary needs by quaffing sunhoney mead, brewed by stirring paw-kneaded lightsap ferment into vats of raw sunlight. Resulting crapulent sprees may stretch on through sunshine and darkness—traveler beware!

“The eyes will be emeralds,” I’d declared­—madly, I thought to myself, as an unearthly howl clove the indeterminate dark. She’d never tried to convince me to stay; I had steeled myself for theatrical weeping, desperate cries of “God, don’t leave me!”—not this placid nitpicking of my vision. “Don’t you know I’ll probably die? or at least go mad?” I could have shouted. I wished now that I had—though of course it was far too late for wishes. Instead I’d only described in greater detail the sparkling silver striations of the beast’s emerald eyes while she fixed the collar of my cloak, the cloak that even now was affording me laughably little protection from the Underwood’s unholy gusts.

Of course I would have preferred to don the forest shroud, I thought to myself, startling at what was probably only the snap of a twig. But she’d sold the forest shroud. Along with a garden hose, some wicker chairs, beer steins, binoculars and lepidopteristic texts, as well as several of my moths I’d collected at university—all pawned away during that bleak late-autumn, as we scrambled for means, my vision of our shared life disintegrating. And was it strictly my fault that while her beauty virtually guaranteed her an easy succession of office-clerk appointments in that middling university town, I couldn’t find work after Claudstein abandoned me? That for a season, yes, I took solace in the cup, before we’d at last conceded failure, returned to my father’s ranch: in shame, certainly, I thought to myself, as another chill blast penetrated my feeble cloak. My father had urged me to learn a trade, at the very least, if I refused to have anything to do with his goats, if I was hellbent on handing over my inheritance to the university in exchange for a useless, indulgent degree. Will your moths put a roof over your head, Son? Will they buy you your bread? Why not mail them your next request for an interest-free loan?

“You’ve never tasted beauty, Dad, and you never will,” I should have shouted, I realized now—instead of choking this rebuttal back until I’d reached the sanctuary of my garret, where I spent the remainder of that winter interregnum muttering bitter variations on the sentiment, rereading favorite works of lepidopteristic theory, including, naturally, Claudstein’s epic, The World as Wings and Representation (which I’d already scoured several times).

And before our return, she’d never even seen a goat, had she, I thought. Hadn’t she laughed at the stories I’d told of my father and his ridiculous retirement, his faux-idyll, his belated embrace of pacific tendencies? She’d said the very least I owed the man—by whose alleged goodwill, whose extravagant grace in taking us in, welcoming me back (in shame) I’d been made violently sick—was to tend and keep his flock as he advanced through his middle age. Middle age? I’d scoffed. Middle age implies a decline, a downward arc, an end: that man will never die, I’d said.

I watched her learn the work, watched her apparently learn to enjoy it, laughing and whooping as she chased the mindless creatures down the mountain, riding Sheryl, our pony, flanked by the exuberant dogs, the goats’ flight an ensemble of hideous bleat. I still see her smiling up at my father, her skin a luminous bronze in the fading light. Of course the labor fulfills her, I’d thought many times, I recalled now, tugging at the loose flesh beneath my chin (a near-unconscious tic accompanying serious thought): she hadn’t learned over a lifetime to loathe it and fear its inevitability. She’d never known desperation, had she? Never wanted more. What did she want? Nothing! Nothing but what joy or contentment could be found in each insipid day: the rush of a crisp westerly wind, the satisfaction of a newly mastered task, freshly-churned goat-butter on her tongue. Why can’t you just be happy, she’d often ask, offering me a languid smile, while the goats grazed vapidly out over the receding pastures. Perhaps she would understand what I had always been waiting for when she saw my return—like a late-annointed king, high overhead, astride the black unicorn, I’d stupidly hoped, I reflected now, smiling bitterly. Owls or some other nocturnal birds hooted nearby. She wouldn’t be watching the skies for me.

Three days ago, under that late-morning sun, I strode down the walk from my father’s estate, my carriage erect and assured—but even then, I remembered now (peering up at what stars could be seen through the Underwood’s reticulate canopy of branches and leaves), I’d been plagued by certain questions and doubts.

For instance: how would I find a black unicorn with golden hooves, a tail like sprayed fire, horn a glinting spear, eyes like emeralds, seraphic wings, when I couldn’t be sure such an animal existed? Did such an animal exist? Why should it? Where had I first got the idea? From a picturebook? A nursery rhyme? A dream? Evenings I would sit on the rounded wooden beam of the ranch’s vast pennery, staring up at my father, his staff raised high above his head, arm an unwavering rod, as if to scorn the winds shrieking down the slopes of Mount Boom, whipping up his great musky cloaks, a cavalcade of goats rushing past to fill the lush feeding fields—the entire tableau filling me with nausea and despair. Imbued me with a bottomless dread so absolute that I would leave behind my only golden one (will I see her again?), the only woman to ever love me, the only woman I will ever love . . . here in the Underwood, utterly lost, chasing a conjured beast, a dumb salmagundi of some slow child’s dreams. . . . I was a fool! Should I have heeded my father? Learned to minister to the goats? Settled down on his capacious ranch? Would she have been happy? Was this all she had wanted?

I will never find the black unicorn, I thought. There is no black unicorn. If there is a black unicorn, it isn’t for me to find—but most likely there is no black unicorn. I will die in the Underwood, alone and without hope. Exhaust my supply of goat jerky, fall from the treacherous path, plummet into the heart of whatever strange phenomenon casts its mirage of nacreous sky underfoot, I thought. I’ll be eaten by a solar bear.

Why carry on through this lugubrious gloom? For a vision? But what a vision! I see her on the slatted porch—her long blond hair aflutter in goat-scented breeze, she gazes skyward, wistful, forlorn, searching a cloud-obscured horizon . . . and then: an iridescent speck, glinting high against a cobalt sky, slowly swelling, at last assuming half-familiar form: yes, me—atop the fabulous steed, borne back on heaven’s roads, the beast’s wings refulgent, a glorious blaze of gold, we swoop down from above, skim the vast pastures that feed and fence in all the goats of my father . . . and I return, in triumph. . . . But supposing I were to turn around. Would she take me back without the black unicorn? (Certainly my father would, with a vindicated grin.) If I found the black unicorn, would I let her have it? What if I wanted to keep the black unicorn. What if I wanted to fly right past my father’s ranch—Westward a young man must always go—

“Why won’t you just lie down and die?” I shouted, wildly addressing the walls of dark foliage, looking for I wasn’t sure what. (A witness?)

As a boy I would lay my head in my mother’s lap, and she’d sing to me in a doleful minor key a lullaby about the end of all things—

Nothing is coming, she’d quietly sing, Nothing is coming to bear us away . . . Nothing is coming to carry us home. . . .

Goodnight, sweet little prince, she’d whisper as I drifted to sleep——

Bats!

Mindlessly, as if acting out another fool’s vision of lonely valor I withdrew my father’s sword, and with it began to carve clumsy arcs through the fluttering night. My antagonists’ eyes glowed like droplets of blood, casting their rustling forms in faint, unreliable light. Their screeches were the wailing of the dead. They came in twos and threes, flapping like wet cloaks given unholy life, swirling round me like a clotted wind, avoiding my axlike heaves of the paternal blade­—because I was never any good with the sword.

Few in this far-flung region now recall, but my father did not always herd goats. In the days before Elsinore Ranch no man but a fool would dare challenge him to a duel. My father, now a quaint provincial authority on the raising of goats, distributor of the district’s best milk, renowned healer of farm animals, a presence quietly venerated for his patience and hard work. Once a master of death. A man not to be trifled with. A legendary consumer of rum. The quondam Pirate King. With eyes like hellfires and a rage without likeness. Lord of the Night. Scourge of the Eastern Provinces. The Power and the Glory. The Thunder and the Rain. Hamnlet the Blade. In the end, retired to dismal distant mountains, to raise his herds (and me) in peace.

He was too kind to me, I thought, as the borrowed sword seemed to swing me, instead of the other way around. Too easy. He thought he was sparing me something. Saving me from something he’d taken on, so that I would never have to suffer—but all he did was leave me unprepared: Unprepared for battle. Unprepared to fight for myself. Unprepared for unexpected combat, with bats, in the deep darkness of a mysterious forest, on a vapid quest now for the moment all but forgotten as I struggled for my life, frantically fought off the rodential scourge as well as I could, which was not very well at all. (Aware all the while that these were only bats; what would happen when the solar bears came? Let alone the thunder wraiths?) He left me unprepared, the old bastard, for anything but goats, I thought, crouching low as the bats left suddenly of their own accord, for now, a sob welling in my throat.

*

At the university I was a man of science, a thinker, an unassailable intellect, lepidopteristic savant, the land’s leading moth scholar, collector of incomparable samples, intuitor of hidden migratory trends, the discipline’s rising scholarly star—I was respected—revered—for my considerable (but theretofore unacknowledged) cognitive gifts. And Professor Claudstein was like a father to me, dispensed unto me alone all the wisdom acquired over decades of tireless labor in the service of our shared passion: At sixty-seven he could still be found, afternoons, careering down emerald hillsides, slicing his custom net through perfected patterns of ensnarement, a hale physical specimen in spite of his advancing years, and in spite of the decades of nightly lucubration well into the lightening pre-dawn. I trusted Professor Claudstein. I was his chosen favorite, his only true pupil, he was meant to mentor only me—Claudstein, why have you forsaken me, I thought to myself, the whole of Underwood Forest seeming to deflate and collapse around me, quivering like a pinned specimen at its hub.

Of course, I might not have been the student he’d said I was. He might have been deceived, gradually disillusioned with my ability. I might have shown more promise than I could keep. Or perhaps he’d never harbored such illusions: was it I who had been deceived—duped into grandiose notions of my own worth, deluded by my beloved Professor C, who had never really reciprocated my veneration—or love—but had merely allowed me to believe what I would? Because he was too kind to give me the truth? Had he, too, meant to “spare” me—only to leave me ten times as vulnerable to the inevitable apprehension of my limits, the folly, the sorrow of weakness, under which I would eventually be crushed? No! Claudstein never would have hurt me! I would have died for that man. Given over my choicest specimens, all (excluding, perhaps, my cherished Crimson Luna). Ceded almost all glory to him. Served him to the end, asking in return only that on the day I finally deserved it, he might put his hand on my shoulder and say, “Well done, my boy: well done indeed.”

In those halcyon days I foresaw a scholarly dynasty: I would follow in the master’s footsteps, as he made his inexorable ascent, attained heights of unimaginable achievement. I foresaw brilliant new species, with wings like spun gold or shattered gems, sparkling as they fluttered through the weak light in recessed pockets of the earth. Our names ornately embossed on the pages of all the best periodicals. Fanfare. Symposia. Fortune. Fame. . . . Claudstein!

Of course I ought to be grateful for the time I’d been given; Claudstein was only a man; to expect more of him was to invite pain. Pure misery to indulge those foolish visions of Professor Claudstein and me carousing from tavern to tavern, deferred to wherever we went. On the porch of his on-campus-manse—endowed by a wealthy baronness—where we’d smoke tobacco-wheat pipes, seated on stools he’d hand-carved (and that I’d helped to varnish in mahogany and inscribe with letters of bronze, silver and gold) . . . later, with lyres on our laps, improvising melodic loops for hours on end, caught in an endlessly metamorphosing scheme, twin intrepid sensibilities loosed to gallop off on harmonic expeditions into the unknown—where all true endeavor must lead, as he’d so often (rightly) insisted. We might have visited his favorite brothels together. Breathed the fumes of boiled gem-pine sap. Watched the prismatic sunsets of his private butterfly collection’s wall morph in hallucinogenic light. He would have proudly witnessed my own nocturnal collection multiply in lunar grandeur. . . .

 *

On the Underwood path I sat with my legs folded, knees to my chin. As a boy, I reflected, I was useless with the bow and arrow.

“Pop,” I would say, “why can’t I hit the bull’s-eye? No matter how hard I try?”

“Son,” he would answer, a twinkle in his own graying eye as he looked fondly out over my shoulder at his massed goatherd, all that marshaled fleece casting a faint silvery sheen up into the dusk, “you come close enough.”

But he never emphasized that I might develop my technique; never suggested that I might strengthen my feeble arms; never pointed out that I failed to sand or polish the shafts of my arrows, as all the other boys my age did, that I heedlessly left them lying around the cottage while I, too, lay around, like a vegetable staring stupidly into the radiant flames as they danced on the hearth. Even during daylight, while there was work yet to be done. I had always been a slothful, fat, pathetic child, I could admit now. The village boys had been right to call me “Goat’s milk,” I’d deserved that, and the beatings, and each of the schoolmaster’s lovely daughters’ scorn, and everything else (he never told me I should be better), I understood now, and would continue to deserve it, I’d never made a promise I could keep, I saw now, feeling weak with self-knowledge, as the fatigue began to settle into my bones, into my heart, I could never go back without the black unicorn. My father would expect me back soon—without the black unicorn, with nothing but further failure and shame, which he would unquestionably forgive. I could never go back.

The forest seemed to shudder or heave, and I lay down on the rutted path and sobbed for some time. My father’s sword lay beside me, blade unblemished with bat (I hadn’t actually so much as grazed a single one). I could take it, thrust it through my heart, could I not? The bats would eventually be back. Perhaps this time with a clearer sense of purpose. And if not the bats, then the solar bears, assuming there were solar bears. And if the solars, too, were mere fantasy, then I would starve to death. Or die of thirst (my goat-hide canteen already having grown disconcertingly light). I couldn’t leave the forest without the black unicorn, and the black unicorn (it was time to face it, someone ought to) did not exist. I was going to die in the forest. Sooner or later, I was going to die, I thought to myself, pausing for a moment, to let the truth settle, before continuing to sob. I could lie here and wait for the bears or whichever other forest element would eventually be my doom . . . wait for death to take me, as death surely would. . . . Or I could take up my father’s sword, raise it high—and with a shout thrust it home, through my ribcage, into my idiot heart. Or I could chop open my throat. Detach my own head, if I was strong enough to do so (which I probably was not). Slice open my wrists, if I wanted it to be easy . . . or plunge the saber deep into my stomach, carve through the bowels, twisting the blade within the viscera for as long as I could stand it, as I’d heard was the fashion among despondents in the East.

“Death will take care of me soon enough; why should I wait for it,” I wondered aloud, staggering to my feet now, though still hiccupping and sniffling, my eyes not at all dry. What an amusing malapropism “can’t hack it” (as the village children were wont to say of a weak boy who could not keep pace with what was daily expected of him), might prove to be if I were to retrieve my father’s sword from the dust where it lay, glinting a bit in what was presumably moonlight, though I certainly couldn’t see the moon, and hack myself to death, I thought, laughing aloud. “Who decided,” I soliloquized, “that it is more noble to go on fighting—to go on struggling against an ocean of woes—to take ridiculous arms against them all, when you might with your father’s bare saber or bodkin” (I’d brought with me both) “reject the fate you’ve been given? . . . I could do it right now,” I affirmed, nipping in the bud my loquacious propensities (no doubt a lingering academic affectation, I supposed, pausing once more to curse my beloved Professor C.).

I could end it——

Only what if the sword were not the end? What if I were to wake from one nightmare to find something worse? Did I dare really believe this folly was a nightmare? (Hadn’t I heard a tale of real terror? Hadn’t my own father looked into the red depths of real nightmare, pausing for a triumphant moment to peer down into ocular wells he’d uncapped with a flourish of that legendary blade, the bodies that were not yet corpses of countless enemies left screaming, writhing, blind in his booted wake—his, as it were, signature he’d once sickeningly revealed to me late one evening toward the close of the only prolonged discussion of his infamous past we’d ever had.) Perhaps it only seemed such to me now, at the height of my weakness, or the nadir of my “strength.”  Did I dare? Would I ever dare?

I lay back and considered: Perhaps I simply hadn’t penetrated into the forest far enough. Perhaps I ought to rest a while. Perhaps a solar would come to kill me in the morning, I thought, my spirits now beginning to lift a little, as I sheathed my father’s sword in its leather scabbard and laid it down by my side (noting the twenty-three tabulatory skulls notched into the grain). No need to act, but merely carry on. Whatever would be, would be.

For some time I lay, quiet, on the forest floor, perhaps even briefly nodding off. When at last I stood up and resumed my clumsy progress further into the shadowed Wood, I felt entranced by a clarity that was almost hypnotic in its focus. Deeper into the darkness: where death or the black unicorn lay in wait.

 *

Near dawn I came across a silver piano with keys of emerald and polished ebony. On a small throne or dais sat a knight whose armor was like wax, a corrugation of rippled gold, burnished and gleaming with hints of rose in the day’s first light, fit to the contours of his body as if it had been poured molten over him and allowed to cool, hardening as a gleaming cascade. Beside him, upright, was a great flaxen bear.

The piano stood beneath a stately cocaine tree, from the trunk of which corkscrewed a segment of tubing with its terminus in a hole punched through the rear of the knight’s helmet. This cannula must have been of some clear, rubberlike material, as it seemed to pulse or throb with the flow of the gem-pine’s viscous white sap.

I stood still, until the knight, as if keyed into motion, with his gauntleted fingers decrypted from those emerald keys a circling melody, simple, pure and sweet, and yet intricately glazed with such spectral flourishes that the enchantment, I imagined, standing rapt, transfixed, must entrance, not only me, but eternity—bearing hearer and creator aloft, away from witness or memory . . . and I saw myself in my own suit of gold, my fingers lifting the emerald keys’ hoarded tones, braiding the sweetness in an everlasting round, endlessly augmented, twisted, fluted, finessed, a kaleidoscope of fragile harmony bursting, relentless, like a lattice of sparks in the night.

And I thought I could see, poured through the motion of my fingers over the glittering keys, my own soul made bright, given chiming form, in the music permeating the depths of those haunted woods. . . . And it seemed that the knight played for neither me nor himself (nor the pale sentinel bear), nor for anyone, I understood, but he continued to play, and meanwhile I was under his spell so that I came to suspect he had been there forever, or a very long time, and likewise would remain . . . and here was a place I, too, could stay, I felt, for a moment undiluted by words—my breath caught, I disappeared for an instant, vanished like the silence in this sudden startling gap in the forest, I was swallowed by the interlude, and dissolved into the knight’s honey-fueled song that was itself like a kind of honey, suffused with some pale amber glow, pulsing like the white sap that seemed to be its furious source. . . . Could it be that the rush pumping into that knight of gold was passing through him unabated—but transfigured, entering the dusky bower’s air as radiance, as a shimmering, mystic transubstantiation of sound? A miracle song on which the hungry might feed, from which the thirsty might sip, under the canopy of which the beleaguered chaser of a black unicorn might lie down to rest . . . an aural vision passing through this strange figure, so that he was not the light, but an echo of the light, as it shone through the endlessly uncoiling variations that were his and were not. He was a conduit of the forest’s light . . . and the thought stirred in me: Could I be a conduit too? Deeper into the forest: might I find my own piano? A different instrument? An enchanted lyre? Would the song take a different form, just as this knight’s liquid light seemed transposed to song? Would my own light or song take its own, separate shape—for instance, that of a black unicorn? But what about the black unicorn? Would the black unicorn even be a black unicorn? Might it come as something else? As a lightpost? As a moth? As an echo (of an echo)? As a cloak? As layered whispers on a chill breeze at dawn? Had I already found the black unicorn?  Who could tell me? Whom could I ask? Claudstein! Father! (I saw her standing on the porch at dusk, waiting, arms across her chest—but with shining emerald eyes upcast, as a mountain breeze wisped golden hair.) I walked on.

Jonathan Callahan’s first book, The Consummation of Dirk, was selected by judge Zachary Mason as the winner of the 2011 Starcherone Innovative Fiction Prize and is forthcoming from Starcherone/Dzanc Books in early 2013. His novella, Notes from a Burning Underground, was recently published in sections across Quarterly West, Used Furniture Review, and Keyhole. Other work appears or is forthcoming in Witness, The Collagist, Pank, >kill author, Fringe, and elsewhere. He lives in Fukuoka, Japan.

My mother, a kick-ass Catholic, made a deal with me. If I kept my virginity until I got married, she’d give me two thousand dollars. We came to this agreement when I was seven, before my hormones went crazy, and when two grand was serious money. Still, an agreement is an agreement and I’m not the most popular person walking the face. Physically, I’m best described as “plain”, and when friends try to fix me up on blind dates my biggest attribute is “she’ll listen to every word you have to say.”

So fast forward to last week when my mom leaves town with Floriano, a guy who came to the house to wallpaper the kitchen. He was there less than half the day and never even completed the job. Mom left a note which read: I have found my soul mate. There’s chili in the freezer. We were left with a permanent reminder of her departure: a kitchen half papered with pineapples and palm trees, half with strutting roosters. The point is this. As far as my personal purity goes, all bets are off.

I thought I had the perfect guy. Colin. He works the midnight-to-eight shift as a watchman over at the wire factory, but he claims his true calling is optometry. He isn’t actively perusing the profession because according to Colin laser surgery will soon make glasses as useless as the keypunch machine. I never told him about the agreement I had with my mother because frankly, I didn’t think it was anybody else’s business. I just said I didn’t want to rush things.

“Marcie, you’re twenty years old,” he’d tell me. “People get brain cancer younger than that. It’s like you put things off and the next thing you know…”

This is where Colin would drag his thumb across his neck as if he were being beheaded by some terrorist.

By then I’d been seeing the guy for like eleven weeks. It wasn’t as if he was going home frustrated. We did stuff. We just didn’t do… you know. The thing.

Last night marked the seventh day since my mother’s departure. Me and Colin were in the playroom downstairs. We’d just got done watching Survivor, and the sight of emaciated, bikini-clad girls trying to make fire had gotten to him. He’d been all over me since the “Immunity Challenge”, unbuttoning buttons, unclasping clasps.

Looks like this is your lucky night, I remember thinking, but I’m not sure which one of us I’d meant.

“Can I tell you something, Marcie?” he wetly whispered in my ear. “At this point in our relationship I consider us married.”

His hand started creeping up the inside of my leg which is exactly where I stopped it. I hadn’t been guy-talked by Colin up until this point, but here it was. The little head saying what the big head knew wasn’t true. I sat up on the couch and started putting myself back together.

“What?” he said, as if he didn’t have a clue.

“Don’t bullshit me, Colin,” I told him.

“I’m not,” he protested.

“I don’t need Mother Goose.”

“Fuck it, then,” he said, all pissed off. He stood, drained his bottle of Molson. “In case you’re not aware, a male has needs that go directly to the bone.”

“Nice choice of words.”

“I’m serious, Marcie. I can’t do this no more.”

We stared at each other. Silence. Finally he blew air out his nose, shook his head, unsnapped the top of his jeans.

“Okay,” he said, returning to the couch. “You win.”

As he put his hand on the back of my head and started pulling me toward him, I realised I wouldn’t see him again after tonight.

*

It’s only me and my dad since my brother joined the Air Force. Since then, my father insists I call him “Phil”. Marcie and Phil. Truth be told, Phil is to parenting what Hitler was to hay rides. He lost his job as stock manager at Tile ‘n’ Such right after Christmas, and has been collecting unemployment since. When I suggest he get off his ass and look for work, Phil has a stock answer.

“I’m in specialty floor coverings,” he goes, “and specialty floor coverings is the hill I’ll die on.”

Give Phil credit. A few years ago he was a stoned alcoholic, but he went into recovery and turned all that drinking energy toward physical fitness. For the four months he’s been out of work, he hasn’t missed a day on his elliptical machine. Lost fifteen pounds along with a wife. Open his bedroom door, day or night, and chances are there he’ll be. Doing his non-impact cardiovascular routine, writhing like a snake in hot butter, one of his Classic Hits of the 80s CDs playing on the Bose. I estimate he could have walked to San Francisco and back by now, but with the exception of his Friday evening Pilates class I can’t even get him out of the house.

Phil knows nothing about the deal. The morning after I broke up with Colin, he asked me how it was going.

“We broke up,” I tell him.

Phil is spooning steaming oatmeal into a bowl and sprinkling wheat germ on top. He’s wearing his standard uniform—sneakers, bicycle shorts, and a glistening coat of sweat. He seldom wears a shirt these days, even on cold mornings.

“His loss,” Phil says, eating his glop over the sink. “Plus I think you’d be better off with somebody with a lower body mass index.”

I don’t even want to know he’s talking about, so I take a package of white powdered mini-doughnuts from the bread drawer and pour myself some coffee.

“Chemicals and caffeine,” Phil informs me. “Not exactly what you need to kick the day’s butt.”

I sit at the table and decide to change the subject.

“Any word from Mom?” I ask.

“She’ll be back,” Phil says without anywhere near as much confidence as he had when he told me the same thing yesterday.

“You really think?”

“I know the woman,” he tells me. “This is an experiment for her. Like dyeing her hair red. She’ll come to her senses and be back here tomorrow, the next day tops.”

“And everything will be like it was?”

“One thing at a time,” he says, spinning a riff on the A.A. motto.

I lose half a mini-doughnut into my coffee, but drink it anyway. Eventually Phil finishes his oatmeal, rinses the bowl and spoon, drops them in the drain board. He walks past the table, stops just in front of me, smiles, pats his tight stomach.

“Not bad for a guy almost fifty,” he says. He walks toward his room and in a moment I hear him on the elliptical, going nowhere, but getting there fast.

 *

At work I talk to my girl Rita during break. We’re both waitresses at this place called The Beef Locker, a huge restaurant so filthy that the roaches eat next door. The “break room”, as it’s generously called, is nothing more than a large janitor’s closet with some folding chairs, an empty cable spool tipped on its side, and a People magazine from 2008. After two and a half hours the lunch crush is finally over, and I’ve been dying for a cigarette since before it started.

Other than me and my mom, Rita is the only one who knows about the deal. She thinks it’s the stupidest thing she’s ever heard. “Man does not live by hand jobs alone,” she’s often said.

I tell her about Colin and she expresses condolences and informs me on what I should do next. She’s Italian, so I listen.

“Rid yourself of the burden,” she goes.

“How do I do that?”

Rita blows what appears to be an unbelievable volume of smoke out her nostrils. “My brother Frank.”

Her brother Frank is a thirty-eight-year-old ex-priest who was defrocked after he got caught selling marijuana to a bunch of eighth graders during a field trip to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Since that time, he’s moved back home and taken a job hanging drywall.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Come on, Mars,” she says. “He could use the experience.” When I continue to hesitate, she points out the fact that as a former priest without much—if any—sexual experience, he’s probably cleaner than the average thirteen-year-old.

“Maybe.”

“Hey, trust me,” she says. “It’s just like getting a shot of Novocain. A little pinch and then your whole body goes numb.”

I light a second cigarette off my first.

“Give him my number,” I say.

*

I do some food shopping and get home after six. Phil’s car is still in the driveway, which surprises me, because it’s Friday. Pilates. For a second I picture him dead, heart exploded, lying next to that damn elliptical like a hamster after running the wheel too long.

But he’s fine. Well, relatively. He’s sitting at the kitchen table, his wardrobe unchanged since this morning, a bottle of gin, a melting tray with ice cubes, and an almost empty glass by his elbow. There’s an open letter in front of him and he’s been crying.

“Are you all right?” I ask.

“Your mother’s gone,” he sobs.

“Yeah, I know.”

“For good,” he blubbers as he pushes the letter across the table.

I put the grocery bags on the counter, open the letter, read. She and Floriano are in Brazil and she wants her stuff sent down. All her clothes, everything. She also wants to borrow five thousand dollars.

“Well this doesn’t look good,” I say.

“Neither does this,” Phil whimpers, and he holds up my mother’s gold wedding band. “She shoved it in with the letter.”

Phil slops some more booze into his glass.

“Now what?” he goes.

I sit down across from him, grab his hands.

“Now this,” I tell him. “You get up Monday, you look for a job, Monday afternoon you come home with one.”

He ignores this. “I don’t know what happened to us,” he says. “Wait. I do know. We lost our speciality.”

“Your what?”

“Specialness. Whatever the word is.”

It hits me then. Like a bag of manure dropped out a second storey window. My parents were not always the pair of self-centered, compulsive auto wrecks I’ve grown up with. At one time they actually liked each other. Loved maybe.

“I can’t do anything without her,” he says.

“Believe me,” I tell him, “if you can work out on that elliptical all day without going batshit, you can do anything.”

“I don’t feel so good,” he goes.

I pull my hands free, stand up, grab the gin bottle and Phil’s glass.

“I’m going to be pouring these down the sink,” I tell him. “You should get up, take a shower, get ready for dinner.”

“Okay,” he snuffles, as obedient as a rowdy teenager who’s just been tasered.

“And Phil?” I call just as he’s about to stagger from the kitchen. “Put a shirt on.”

I hear the phone as I’m putting away the groceries, but I let it ring through. It’s Rita’s brother Frank who leaves the following message: Marcie? It’s Frank Romano. I was thinking you might want to go out for a grinder or something. Give me a yell.

Sorry, Frank. No grinders. I’m going to have to do this according to nature. Maybe it’ll never happen, maybe it’ll happen tomorrow afternoon. I don’t know much, but I know I want what they once had. Speciality.

For some reason this whole thing reminds me of Lent. When I was a kid, I gave up candy for six and a half weeks, and then Easter came, and I wanted the good stuff.

I figure I’ve got time. Not to make a value judgment for anybody else, but starting now I’m looking for the solid chocolate. After going this long, the last thing I want is those fucking pink jelly beans. You know. The ones buried at the bottom of the basket under all that phony plastic grass.

Z.Z. Boone lives in Connecticut with novelist Tricia Bauer and their daughter, Lia. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College (Vermont,) and teaches fiction at Western Connecticut State University. His fiction was most reently seen in the New Ohio Review, and is upcoming in wordriver.

You’re rigged, the Converses, the Levis, the fresh Polo. None of them own Polo like you. A little gold on the wrist. A little gold on the neck. A little gold hoop earring she gave you. The SF Giants hat. SF being exotic to the local know nothings.

“Sup,” you say. You are on your game and those no pony boys do not have it.

“Sup.”

“Sup.”

Two of them circle Diggity Douglas as if D2 is something. As usual, they’re on The Corner in front of the Royal Farms store.

“Keith, where my fries?” Diggity Douglas says. He named himself Diggity. He thinks it sounds ghetto. Those two anteater looking boys snort, them with pants pulled low, white mommy washed undies. That’s all right. McD’s is keeping you in Polos.

“You the man of men,” you say. He doesn’t understand you’re corkscrewing it. You read D2’s mind: he thinks, Everybody knows I’m a pony. But he’s a no pony. No ponies need two chuckleheads saying all the time, You the man, D2.

“What you up to now, Keith?” he says to you.

“Up to the market, D2. You know, chillin.”

“Naw, man, we got a thing. You in?” D2’s always trying to act black.

Grinning no ponies look at me.

“What’s that?” you ask.

“A thing.”

“I got that part,” you say. Last time they had a thing, you nearly got busted for a B&E.

One of the no ponies says to you, “Naw, man, you just got to come along with it.” His black is worse than D2’s. He pounds five with his knucklehead sidekick no pony. Grinning like they think they’re Scarface twins.

But you’re thinking, the world is your no pony, you two saltshaker no counts.

“I got to go,” you say.

D2 starts talking behind his hand at the two slurping ninny no’s, but you gallop away with the clippity-clop stride you got going, right leg in front, holding onto the reins. You hear them behind you while you cross in front of the fire station.

D2 and the twin zeros are laughing, grabbing their package, yelling out, “Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump.”

You don’t do no running, though. You gallop.

Thick neck sitting on a lawn chair in the fire station says, “Wrong with you, boy?”

“Nothing officer, I got a distress call, which I’m tending to right now.”

Thick neck turns to fellow fireman laughing, mashing up a Subway sandwich with bonus mayonnaise in his big open mouth.

That clippidy-clop starts to pressure up your legs, so right at the market you walk like a cowboy pony, open the doors, and step in.

Always happens that the Korean guy at the first counter puts an eyeball bullet through you. You didn’t mean nothing stealing, borrowing, an orange from him last winter. You give him a wave. He reaches down and picks up a sawed off baseball bat and taps the end into his cupped hand. He’s got some gold in them teeth. Wife doesn’t like you either, always bundled up in a puffy coat, looking at you like she got her foot caught in a bear trap. You give her a wave, too. You don’t carry hard feelings.

You cowboy walk up and down. You saw Tina in here last week. She got all jealous of Marnette and the SF hat. You want to pony on that, see what comes up.

For show, you stop and do a feet planted white man’s boogaloo dance right in the middle of the aisle. Shimmy up and down, poke butt out doggy like, reach for the stars, throw out some peace signs, do some standing swim moves.  For all the customers. You can’t help it. If you’re white, you’re white. Some son takes a picture. Two brothers off to the side laugh, hold onto each other. “Yo, let’s bring him to the club, yo.”

You go up to the meat guy, big angry volcano head. Apron splashed with meat drips.

“Um, I want one of those. I like my pork chops thick.”

He doesn’t like you either. You heard him call you a little shit last week to the flower lady next stall over. He doesn’t recognize you. You’re just a little shit to him. He wraps up the chop. Writes on the white paper. He flops it on the counter. “A half-pound cut of baloney,” you say. Repeat of the same wrapping up business. He flops it harder. “A pound of that salami there. Don’t bother to cut.” He starts talking to himself. Then your last order you say, “Quarter pound masserella cheese thin sliced.” You say masserella. By this time he’s sniffing and cursing at you in Greek. Finished, he rings it up. You say, “Put it on my tab.” He starts to step around the counter and you bolt up the aisle, coursing through the Dawn of the Deads who’re eyeballing foods and flowers, knowing he can’t leave his station because a buzzard might step back there and steal his prime beef.

You chill at the right angle of the market, see his bald head retreat back to Meats, and over near Candies you hunt for Marnette who gave you the SF hat which you make sure to cock off center just right, not lip it all the way to the side like no ponies, but right smart teetering it just enough.

You see her with Dragon. The one with the eye make-up, hiding behind a veil of straight black hair, wearing black fingernail polish and tie up boot shoes. That little vampire, she hates everyone, especially ponies.

You do your clippity-clop over to them where they’re sitting at a table. The owner guy offers a deal called the Grand Finale: fill up a cross-sectioned dish with ten kinds of candy. She chose all the number ones: peanut clusters, M&Ms, Goobers, turtles, corn candy, Reese’s. Bunch of others.

You slide down in a seat. You take a turtle. You try for an angle.

“You got my favorite kinds right here. How’d you know I was coming over?”

There’s some wrong air pressure. Dragon cocks her head. Marnette cocks her head. You see that Dragon took lead spot. Last week Marnette had it.

“What’s up?”

Dragon says, “What’s up with you?”

I touch my SF cap. “What’s up with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Marnette, what’s up with you?”

“Nothing, Keith. Why do you keep asking me that?”

Well for one damn thing you’re my hook. If you and her didn’t have this Dragon thing between you.

“Saw D2,” you say. Why girls think anything of him escapes me.

“What’s he up to?” says Marnette.

Dragon rolls her eyes left.

“Not much. What are you two up to today?”

“Not much,” says Marnette.

Dragon rolls eyes right.

You realize this is a science project that stopped working. You decide to blow it up.

“So I was wondering Marnette, if you wanted to go to the senior prom with me.”

Both of them bug eyes at you.

“Keith. Senior prom? What grade are you in now?”

Dragon says knife cool: “I don’t see you getting your high school diploma.”

“I don’t see Marnette and me inviting you over to our house when I’m barbecuing chicken leg and thigh pieces,” you say. “When we’re both finding her noodle salad extra delicious because she made her own vinegar sauce.” You’re an Indian seeing trails invisible to the white man. You’re remembering a noodle salad from the family reunion four years ago.

Marnette’s eyes lock into yours for a mad second and leave Dragon drifting in the clouds, but girl power pulls hard.

“Wanker,” says Dragon.

“And for a minute,” you say, grabbing up another turtle, “I was going to name our first baby after you, but I don’t think it would do well in the world with the name Hater. And Marnette, now that you and Dragon are a couple…”

“It’s not like that Keith.”

“Now that you two are a thing together, every time I look into the eyes of another woman I’ll see you. ‘Cause you were my first, Marnette, and you were the best.”

Dragon slides her eyes to Marnette, wondering if in fact you broke the cherry together because Dragon, she still has hers. She wants to be Big Chief Medicine Woman bringing news to everybody. You still have yours, too, but she doesn’t need to know that.

“First what, Keith?” says Marnette breaking the spell.

You bow your head then bring up some sad eyes and look at the Dragon then Marnette. “First person who tore this right here up from the root,” you say pounding your chest twice with your fist. “You broke my heart, baby,” you say.

“I did?” she says.

Marnette loves you, man. It’s deep.

“It’s never going to be the same for me.” You drop your head. You manage to say, “I’m giving up on girls till I can heal.” You wait maybe five seconds then you turn to Dragon and say, “Can I get your number? I’ve always had a thing for you.”

Dragon is alpine cool. She lives above the tree line. She turns to Marnette real slow like she’s memorized her lines. Like she knows the scene already. She says, “I told you he was a Johnson.”

Up you go, snatch one last turtle, and clippity-clop away. Pony boy, pony boy. You’re thinking that was supposed to be fun, riding the goof wave, saluting to the no ponies. But it doesn’t have any traction.

You clippity-clop south on Falls Road. You got that weird no pony feeling. What’s your new grip going to be? You’ve been searching for a grip. Skateboarding? No. Guitar? No. Chess master? No.

On the way down Falls Road, you think about all them feet around you. Your father grew toenail fungus all his life. Followed him into the coffin. You wonder about the corns, the ingrown nails, the plantar’s warts. You wonder about cracked heels and flat feet. You wonder about foot bruises and bone breaks and picture in your mind people walking with pain spiking up their legs, people wheezing into cloth couches at night crying because their feet hurt so bad, but they can’t quit because they’re taking care of Alzheimer parents or little kids. You’re thinking, every one of these old ponies was once upon a time your age. It hits you like a bird in the face. Every single one of these fat, ugly, sour-ass, sagging flesh, mumbling-to-themselves humpty-dumpties rolled at your age.

You never thought of it before. You can’t stop seeing all those feet in your mind hiding their ugly monkey faces inside of shoes and sandals. You shift over, look left and right, and toss it into the curb.

You get away quick as possible. Last week D2 got snagged by some cops for puking his nasty because of vodka. He got all smart-ass up on them, and they made him sit right down in it till he stopped yapping.

Where did your pony go?

You get to 3^rd and Falls Road and look all the way down to The Corner, and of course D2 is there with his satellites and all the other members of the beehive. You think about clippity-clopping over there to laugh and watch the world with them, but you aren’t feeling it. You circle down the road one more block, go up the alley off of Falls, turn at the T, go down one block, then slip in through the back door where your cousin Mike told you you could crash whenever and forever.

In the basement, go to the left, and there’s your rollaway cot in the little slot off the furnace, near the washer and dryer. You got a mobile rack where you hang your Polos; you got your child’s dresser where you store your Levis; you got your boxes turned open end sideways where you line up your shoes.

You lie down. You realize that the turtles didn’t actually make you full. You know you got burgers galore when you show up for work tonight at McD’s but right now you need to forage. Up the stairs and there she is, Auntie. Smoking at the table staring into the back yard.

“You got any money?” she asks you. You work it with Mike. You give her thirty a week and she’s cool, Mike says.

“I paid you already,” you say.

“You got any money?” she asks again. “Food don’t grow on trees.”

You want to remind her that some food actually does grow on trees, but, you know, you got a cot downstairs. You’re not on the street anymore.

You lay a fiver by her milk filled teacup on a saucer, and retaliate by making a bigger than usual double decker sandwich. Turkey, mayo, yellow cheese, bologna, tomatoes, salami. You pour yourself some orange soda. You pile potato chips in a bowl. You retreat to the basement, sit on your cot, and stare to your right where their cat lies on the washer looking at you.

You done get done and then take a power nap. You grab your McD’s uniform shirt, tuck in into your backpack, and hit the streets.

Up near the Royal Farms is the center of the hurricane. The Corner.

You start clippity-clopping. You can see Diggity D still hanging, must have been up there for eight, nine hours. Where else is he going to go? You walk the line, glance in a couple of stores.

Before you go too far you step into 7-Eleven. You’re trying to work coffee into your schedule. Mike tells you to drink it black, that way you keep it simple. It’s part of staying on point. It’s walking the tightrope.

You look at all the pots on all the burners. All the people over there snap-shaking little colored packets of sweeteners, staring into space. All of them pouring milk or cream or dairy flavored something into their coffees. Meantime, you get yourself a small cup, pour from a topped off pot, walk over to the counter, pay. You’re out the door. You’re a pony. You walk with the wind. You try to tell Mike about being a pony. He tells you, you say one more word about ponies, your cot is gone.

You walk up to the corner Royal Farms. Cars gliding by on the Strip, what 3^rd  Street is called. Crosswise from north, too.

You don’t feel like talking to D2, but of course he feels like talking to you. You keep nodding at him. He finally drifts off, turns his attention to a couple of zero ponies come up to him like he’s the Man, so now he’s got something to do with himself.

You lean against the corner of the building, watching. You hear background back of the background. You’re sipping coffee. Two girls go by and puncture your world with their eyes. But you’re inside the zone, watching.

Birdbrain with a homemade tattoo on his neck comes up and smacks you on your back.

“Keith,” he says.

The zone goes away. You land back outside the Royal Farms store looking at Birdbrain with his hand out, wearing that filthy sailor hat he’s had on his head for a year.

You give him a oner.

“That all you got?”

“Birdbrain,” you say. You look at him from a place he can read so he walks off. You been giving him oners almost every day. They know you have a job. They come up to you.

You think to yourself, what’s the new grip? What’s it going to be?

You hang for a while, take the #27 up to McD’s. Work your shift. You’re back at the cot about 11:30 p.m., and you’re still thinking about the next grip, but you’re not in synch.

It’s Saturday and you pop awake about 4:30 in the a.m. You can’t wrestle it to the ground. It’s eating you. It’s a termite boring through a tree stump. You have nothing. She threw you out and you hear D2 and his no ponies laughing in your head because for a month you had to sleep down near Falls River underneath the overpass. Then you had to shift it up into the woods because two simpletons come up on you middle of the night to kick the shit out of you, no doubt tipped by D2, for laughs. You remember when D2 thought it was the funniest when you couldn’t find a place to wash your clothes.

Mike came back from a construction job in Pennsylvania, found out you were in orbit, told you you got a cot long as whenever. One condition: pay Auntie $30 a week and stay out of her way best you can. No telling about her.

You got it farking bad this morning. You get up, but it’s eating your chest, right behind the bone. You go into the bathroom, wash your face, fold a towel, and cry into it like a no pony. You get your key and slip out the back door and wander around till there’s nothing left in your legs. You come back and manage to crash on the cot after checking to make sure Mike got back. He told you you and him would hang today.

“You still sleeping,” he says from across the basement.

You must have dozed hard. You check your watch. It’s 9:30.

“No,” you say, but you were. “No, just laying out here, you know, up since dawn, waiting for you to get up so we can start the day.”

“Hah,” he says.

You hear him settling in.

“Get out here,” he says. He’s in the finished part of the basement, watching TV, no doubt eating a bowl of cornflakes. He stacked a refrigerator with breakfast food for him and you downstairs so you can avoid Auntie in the morning. His room is down here too, across the floor from your cubbyhole near the washer and dryer.

You go out. The light bothers your eyes.

“Fill up,” he says. You pour yourself some cereal with milk. He’s got an old coffee percolator plugged in. Must be from last century.

You and him watch ESPN.

“What you got going today? You working?”

“No,” you say. You don’t tell him, but you switched shifts with a girl making eyes at you so you could have the day. Promised her you’d take her out. It’s a one-timer for you. “I’m free. We’re hanging out. Unless you know, you’re so PW’d you got to get going somewhere.”

“Hah,” he says. His girlfriend’s a nightmare. You hope he sheds her. Soon. “She don’t know I’m back.” He cuts his eyes over to you. You just been asked to promise. That woman, she’s got radar all over. She’ll find out he’s home. Give him hell about it. You know he’s cogitating on it, but he’s giving you the day.

“Naw,” he says, “I feel like hanging out. How old are you anyway?”

“Hah,” you say, imitating him. “Old enough.”

He scratches his head. “You finishing high school, right?”

“Maybe,” you say.

“Don’t bullshit me,” he says.

“Of course,” you say. You try to keep it in your pocket, but you get A’s and B’s. You got a teacher told you he could help you get into UMBC. You got dreams. You don’t let anybody know that, though. Imagine D2 finding out you got UMBC in your headlights?

“That G.E.D.,” he says. “I’m glad I picked it up, but it don’t have the same git of a high school diploma. Just not the same.”

“So I heard,” you say, wanting him to keep talking. He looks all tired and beat up. Old.

“I’m going to be thirty-one next month,” he shakes his head. “I stand around with a bunch of other morons on highways with cars gunning past us at 75 miles an hour. Grit spraying my face all day. Clothes stink. Listening to fat ass bosses tell me how to flatten gravel.” He pulls his hat off and scratches his head. “I need another gig, Keith. This one’ll kill me.”

“You’re going to start those electrician classes, I thought,” you say.

“She’s been giving me hell. Telling me we need a house.”

“You’ll get a house for her,” you say. “You need your electrician’s license. Then the house.”

He sniffs, crosses his legs at the ankles. “You know, that’s right. That’s right.”

You helped him line up the classes at a good trade school last semester. He didn’t pull the trigger.

“How long’s it going to take you?” you ask. “You got it in your pocket in a year.”

“That’s right,” he says.

You can hear that dehumidifier humming. You go over, switch it off, pull the pan out, take it over to the laundry sink and dump the water. You put it back and fire the machine up again.

“I’m not complaining,” he says.

“Yes you are,” you say.

He laughs. “I’ll tell you, I’m going to be an electrician this time next year. I’ll tell you what. That’s in the books.”

“That’s right,” you say. You’re feeling hollow inside. It makes no sense. You think, Mike can’t give up the tiger. That can’t happen.

You watch ESPN a while. Auntie is upstairs walking back and forth from the front window to the back door. Once in a while you can hear her talking to herself. She used to have a dog follow her around, Mike tells you. Died four or five years ago. She still talks to him.

“Seriously,” he says. He looks over at you. He’s sitting in a La-Z-Boy he got third-hand from a Salvation Army store. Buddy of his works there. They hauled it out the back door an hour after somebody brought it in. “Electrician in a year. That will happen.” He sniffs. “Damn right it will.”

You’re getting the willies. Your heart is pounding. You’re looking for a day of hanging out, slicing the wind. You’re hoping for some laughs.

You watch TV.  Drink coffee like he likes to. You’re riding the cloth couch, slunk down, wondering if you and Mike ever going to make it out the door. You want a day outside. You were hoping to get Mike to take you down to Annapolis. Never been there before. It’s thirty or forty miles away, which sounds like a winning ticket to you. Get the hell down the road somewhere.  Or maybe you could talk him into going to D.C. Maybe you could see some different girls for a change. You wouldn’t mind going up into the Washington Monument. Last time you went to D.C. was in elementary school.

He sees you squirming around, itching to get going. He’s giving you eye slides. Finally, when you’re ready to call it a day and get on out of here yourself, he says, “Damned, Keith, I nearly forgot. Stay here a minute.”

He goes into a back storage room right off the TV den and wheels out a blue stunt bike. Goes in and gets another, this one green. Both brand new.

You sit there. The room spins in a carnival ride upside down then back right again. You grip the armrest.

“I figured you and me, we need to do some riding.”

Your mother told you she threw your bike in a green dumpster – nothing but spite – then told you to get the hell gone. Mike knew that bike of yours was the thing got you up in the morning.

“Which one you like?” he asks.

You can’t talk. You stand up. You swallow and you try, but it’s a zero moment.

“I think the blue one’s yours,” he says.

They’re both leaning against the beam down there. You go over to him and hug him hard as you can. You wipe your eyes with your wrist.

“Come on,” he says. “Help me haul them up to the pickup. Let’s go on over to that park in Catonsville we went to last fall.”

All the structures in that park are made out of old tires and wood. Crazy slides and towers. Little forts kids run in and out of. Heaven for stunt riding.

We go outside and he makes a few adjustments on the seats, and you never touched such a perfect bike. He says, “Let’s get going.”

But you take off for a minute, pop a wheelie down near Nelson’s where the alley ends and gets wide so people can swing around in their cars. You jump up on a tree stump, bounce on the back wheel, jump down, and do front wheelie. He’s up there near the pickup truck laughing his ass off. You never felt the wind up in your hair like you do this minute. You never heard the world hum in your ears like a tuning fork.

You and Mike go over to the park. There’s even an off-road path that heads down a half mile into the woods, loops back and puts you in the park again. You get a few kids stop their bikes and watch you take picnic tables in one bounce. You turn over a wire trashcan and go from table to can to tire slide to fort roof without touching the ground. You ride up the side of a tree trunk, turn one-eighty, and head down. Mike, he puts on a show himself. You stop and watch him a while. When he rides down the path that heads into the woods, comes barreling back out of it with a smile on his face, laying back in a wheelie, you wish you could thank him.

That’s your new grip. The Share. That’s what you can do. It comes into your head like over a loudspeaker. The Share. Just like he did.

You ride until late, near dark. After you haul the bikes back into the house and order a pizza, sit and watch TV a while, you stretch out on the couch. You watch him look at his phone when it rings, but he turns it off before answering her. He gives you a wink, stretches his legs out on the coffee table and closes his eyes. It breaks your heart. You know his green bike’s still going to look new a year from now. But not yours.

My father knew a man who climbed Mt Everest three times. On the first climb, my father said, the man was my age and a teacher. By the second he did not need oxygen.

“Sometimes,” my father said, “sometimes at school we would go for walks. We would have to go for walks.”

My mother nodded. She was eating a breadstick.

“We would go for these walks and things,” my father said. “Nobody would ever want to go but we’d have to. We were at school. I always took a compass.”

“Were you friends?” I asked.

“O yes,” my mother said.

“He never took a compass,” my father said, “he only ever took the long way round.”

“He was very fit,” my mother said.

“He never liked taking shortcuts,” my father said. “But he always loved the walks. He loved to walk up hills. We all tried to take shortcuts but he never did. He would only take the long way round.”

“He did love to walk up hills.”

My father smiled. He looked exactly like I was going to look. My mother was eating a breadstick.

“He was a teacher,” my mother said.

“Physics,” my father said.

“A teacher at your age.”

“He was a teacher, very young.”

“This was over a period of ten, fifteen years.”

“We were all still very young.”

“And the sad thing is,” my mother said, “nobody has heard from him since.”

“Not for three decades,” my father said.

“He fell in with that holy man. That mystic.”

“No, he was a Sherpa,” my father said. “A Tibetan mystic.”

“They fell in together and he stopped climbing mountains. They were in Tibet.”

“On the mountain. They found religion on the mountain.”

“He must be a holy man now, in the mountain or somewhere,” my mother said. “Nobody has heard from him since.”

“He’s on the mountain,” my father said.

“That’s the sad thing,” my mother said. “Nobody has heard from him.”
“He doesn’t teach.”

“It’s a shame.”

“He was a teacher, at your age.”

“A holy man.”

“Nobody’s heard from him since.”

“Not for three decades,” my mother said. “That’s the sad thing.”

_

Oliver Mestitz is a writer and musician and also he invented a board game. He is the fifth tallest person I know.

Varicose Bye

I know my brother, quaint in a thousand rooms, accomplishing suicide, spread across his sheets like a venereal question, wounds aglitter. The note reads: “The grooves in my arm are a private bathroom for the girl who didn’t love me. A millisecond deepening time I haven’t slit adds cuticle degrees away from having touched her by fountains swelling up this artery like a house I can suddenly pay for where it’s just me and her licking the placebo out of our friendship in gravy solipsism until we have coins instead of hair shining with the infinite ventriloquism of a corpse in rigor mortis which is paused orgasm having needed that smell and carrying it with me now so envy the mess. I wish the things she liked to pet were a slide show of my life. I rented a storefront and called it I Miss Her and discussed her for a living with people unfortunate enough to walk in. All the failures in the world are being housed where fingers can’t reach, in the virgin space of galaxy, what what’s left of my forearm stretches toward. I feel better plains of static protect her from all the diseases we could have shared.” Into the sink where his gears unwound, I wad fistfuls of pubic sad. We mimic varicose goodbyes cocked through stupid attitudes of displacement. I stuff our Red Flyer wagon with his bloat. We tugged it around years ago before our genitals developed and we had to stop looking each other in the eye. My clownish hourglass lush for the daily attack and so increasingly white clouds come following in tawdry impersonation of each movement. I’m modelling for genocide, step by step, leaning my double digit weight down the stairs, his corpse banging after, bed sheets following. I rub my wet on his body to make fun of how much progress he thinks he made. I am one muscle draped in tiny creams. My wrists are strong enough to break a house whenever I feel wronged. I ride him, sitting on his face, and blow a bubble. He’s turning back into the egg that laid him. I’d like to make the babies die right out of his scrotum with a firm tickle. I touch the collocating bruises. He needs to be placed on a trampoline. We bounce like rap stars. We have a diet of jumps and flips quite ballerina. There’s no stutter in my glide. There’s no um in his rupture. His rigor mortis looks beautiful on a trampoline. I yank open our mouths and pray for nothing less than a new version of rain. I shower gold effluent on his spun ill hop. I have a worn diaper for eyes. My brother, capable of being hugged, multiple viscosities of loss channel his going. I scream and someone in the next house over screams and someone in the next house.

Bung Pellet Boo

We suck coke from her nose. Jerk our mash on splayed lesser kills to partition the cumshot banging out louder minutes. Her slime dries, coated fish paste swab. Bucking landfill, her face a dungmask, her body lengthens, militias’ blacker sperm bubbly there, an antique dip, dick swirl the germ, stretch the costume looser each ride. Her joints blown, ass like a tadpole incisor stuck clutching, quaking dirt, such fetid gloss of air brought stable. What’s accumulated in the tissue? A whole electrostatic mill barfing hairy nuggets nationwide. We swear allegiances by rot this diesel. Paint loins white in cancer swoon. We’re getting dated in her bowels. A canopy coagulating turd milked gypsy, dome flavoured. We sip the flab, sword fighting, roosting cold in her tire rambunctious spaces falling ouch again. Let the owls poke in. Wire her thighs shut with trail slither from dreaming. Hula-hoop in the shack around our swelter like amassed britches, Holy Lord. Face turned skid mark, we break her dairy inside. Foot powered Sybian machine stirs her, pole-knocked, flopping fresh directions, teeth split base to skull. Just our pus, suspenders, infections, baseball up her throat, maestros of clack, pin war zones to her honey spun ceiling to eye sans pupil remodelling prayers her mouth barely can relinquish with helping hands. Another bothers her with origins we long forgot, stabbing portal across her ribs and wine delivers to chase communion. Another bicycles her chunk rising semblance of infant slaked. The skin a leather placement bitten extra wearily as shrunk days fight by. Her gash balloons accommodating mass till us-shaped bubbles stack the room. The fire her dog spasms. Our minds getting fatter the shorter she spends whole.

Wifey

I bring Jessie to my sister, who speaks enema, dark stuck on her like a giant flea. They clit bounce, three-way. Chant involving super market. “No more girls,” she cries. “I’m a girl.” I corner her toilet with a magnifying glass.

“Let me in, little baby, your dirt is getting supple.”

“I’ll buy your way out of dreaming. If you leave.”

I disembowel her mattress. She’s huffing spray, has turned two men black as the pillow she hides them under. I sob abdomen to abdomen. “Leave me damage.” We tap our lily infections together. She’s toying. Slender alien feet kick. I tug the floor to excavate skin she might drop. I fit her throat by portioning. She rubs my come into her eyes on purpose. Perhaps to see a son we couldn’t make and burn him there within the seeing.

I push all night between her ribs. I feel cervix walls battering food. I’m thrusting out her age. Perky in staid seizure. Coming I grind my teeth so enamel bits salt her. “We’ll each peddle the other’s surgery.” I turn her over, mash her hair with gum. Rip for keeps. We’re slowly starving ourselves of any human practice and getting right. I tease a gas pump between her tits. Spray us both gently as we fuck. She bites the windowsill. Bugs slide under her teeth to watch.

My boss examines a compound fracture, elongating space shaded below the exit. “I feel like a big socket sometimes,” the woman moans. I’m ordered to crisscross my vertebrae with constipation. “Amen!” we both erupt for no reason. “You have a smudgy way of burping sound.” My boss mashes a receipt into her cleavage. “Damn that cunt got anfractuosities. Small skin loop labia look like some charcoal-grey seventy year saddle gall. Whoa better get a shotgun barrel in there. Recall the placenta as it follows behind?” Laughing, “spun, posed and fucked maybe another sister?” We high five until we’re almost bloody. “Please live with me. I haven’t stopped bleeding since I met you,” she bleeds. We rape her against a door until the door is all she has. We scrub her children ready.

My sister plays Atari in the attic. With some parent dying behind. I buy her anything that shines. I fall into her, hugging, but she blocks. I lean to slap her Protestant. She snakes vomit down my collar. I chase, semi-hard, straddling her sweat against the ceiling, when she faints, slapping out a shit paste shaped oblong as her ass cheeks clench.

“You’re getting secular beneath rape. You look too good to be someone else’s family. Our mother wasn’t shot enough. And I am the cunt your speech was built around. Your baby ditch weekend was never a clue. Is your skin graft still on? Are you a boy yet?”

Outside I hide from her, cut both wrists against the sidewalk, big cream tears. Everywhere people reading bibles, bumping into each other, exchanging bibles. I smear my tattoos different. Get cramps, skin a crayon-like diss. Tubby white boy deep-throats candy. Tadpole still warped in a drippy condom, butt folds like different crimes. He’s carried urinal ice cubes in his mouth since rejection. I do a series of cartwheels I’m not brave enough to end. I comb the gutter with dull noise. Skip a couple pregnancies on women almost sixty. Wrinkled wasp nest stomachs cutting blouses. The bar is empty. The bartender on the floor says: “Booty cut from time leaks aperture, friend. Booty mere tumult. Family stuck together cause they pelt.” I feel perceived, tip accordingly. I walk back home to tame my fade. Faking myself a greater mammal, faking the human process daily.

There’s a kind of gnawing sky I squat to leave. I yank a clotted rat of my sister’s bangs from the bathtub, smiling where I taped my mirror to swallow. Through the window a militia I shat near carries her. Longer the more veins I notice missing. They step vertically unchallenged up vinyl. Whipped clear on her approaching light. Her body viced between guns. I stick a flashlight in till her babies die. The river now because I hold it. I narrow my arteries on the play her scalp gives. Love her countlessly worse.

Slow Porno

We chomp the shank like slow porno. Sticks that prop us always forward stand thirsty like chosen butter. Everything between her our throats palsy. We get down on all fours and become a dog chewing another dog. Veins clap and rupture, dismantled by gulping, adangle through breaded flame. The well-kissed, now unburied, rise, welcome tangy, porous in the chemistry between arteries, cuddling her shrunk graft, bone to miniature versions of her spilling. In the black square left after we fuck smoke. She wears the forest on her vomit like a stole. We burst her ulcer through our piss, form bellyshit idols, loving the smear below till graveyards stick out. The cardboard slot in back our heads continues being ground. We twist a maggot dance. Upright on the Sybian, bow wow torn and running wider like a furry mechanism. Rammed luscious with human sputter, grand walks design our wetted rug. The motor whirs louder the more weight impaled, like taxidermy dancing a revolt. Black cock head churns zeros under meat, skin tented ooh la la, innards a fast gravy flipping circles to tongue. We knife from split to smile. Another, on the ground, break dancing below the gush, pilfers the two-foot vulva. We sing an entry song going headfirst up the mask of it. Standing inside the partway wonder, we sing the reborn pussy muffle and punch our dogmother face. Of clit and cavities we sing, of barking mold, galloping blindly into trees, this natty hybrid. We cry god if god suits us.

Poon Grizzle

Here within the ending landscape a universe has shaved itsel The scrawl partook of trees only a distant voice left drying in tune. Grass hammered to pipes shuffling newborn suture of dirt and sky, knitted iridescence. We chant our crackhooey bent into each other like sister saints. A leg splits loose of its holster, arms pasta brown, lips ingurgitate. Red by shades we chalk her blood, tips familiar. Thrusting outward, we elevate her air below openings. The acid of her stomach bangs disappeared foil where once we required vision. Her dead neck going yes and yes. The come shudder of curtains slamming silences together. The wind moves sound inside her. The horizon at our eyelids squirming hints. Row of fractured ribs we play as forest. Vultures pecking her cunt to strings reversing nudged music ejaculate through the sheet. She pets herself bald. She pets herself alive with promises. In the untold space, askew of quiet, her dog’s suicide on steroids chimes beef, like us, we threw him in the puppet web and sister frothed by, crank-assed, charming as a band aid, a swallow glowing in our prey. We ride her present from the blind spot within what we, coupled, spongy, know.

-

Sean Kilpatrick, born 1983, Detroit, published in Evergreen Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Fence, LIT, No Colony, 30 under 30, Tarpaulin Sky, Libra/Libera, New York Tyrant, Caketrain, Jacket, attends EMU, facial hair enthusiast.

Luke Pickett (illustrator) was born in Melbourne. He attended RMIT’s visual art program to study painting and drawing which destroyed the romantic illusions of making fine art as a career, and led to an undying, everlasting love of comics. His first full-length comic was recently released by Milkshadow Books. He lives in Toronto.

A husband and wife and their adolescent son are having dinner at home, and the husband is complaining about his job at the law firm where he handles complex civil litigation involving private property rights, telling her a very long and involved story about the novel he is writing. The novel concerns a newly retired litigation attorney who wears Loro Piana cashmere sweaters and sunglasses on the golf course, and by a stroke of good fortune happens to be dating his ex-wife’s half-Italian niece, Gabriella, who’s twenty-three and lives in a West Village duplex.

“Not to be confused, of course, with your niece Gabriella who lives in the West Village,” the husband says.

Meanwhile the wife is thinking about a vacation at the Falls Resort at Manuel Antonio in Costa Rica that would serve as a second honeymoon that’s long overdue. A second honeymoon, however, that would include taking their son with them, because she’s that protective of a mother, a woman accused of being “overly affectionate” and “too coddling”. The Falls Resort at Manuel Antonio in Costa Rica is a perfect family vacation spot, her Pilates instructor told her. You can walk through the gardens and see seven different types of hummingbirds, also parrots, small lizards, and toucans. She loves the idea, even the name itself: the Falls Resort at Manuel Antonio in Costa Rica, such a beautiful place. She imagines herself relaxing, sipping mimosas under palm trees by a waterfall, doing Yoga outside at six in the morning, sitting in a whirlpool in a room with ceilings custom hand-made of laurel and almond wood. How cute, she thinks. The brochure describes the guest houses overlooking the jungle corridor and creeks as having “Eco-friendly designs, solar power, and a zero impact waste management system.”

While the wife is having this dialog in her mind, their son, who was recently hospitalised at St. Anthony’s and labelled “emotionally troubled” after a suicidal incident that involved swallowing several tablets of Benadryl and then chasing them with Woodford Reserve 90-proof bourbon, has begun to cry right there at the table. Out of nowhere, he is crying. The son is a straight A student, nicely groomed, an altar boy at church, one of the top students in his class at St. Mark’s Academy. After his release from the hospital, the son and his father developed a close bond. Most nights the wife could hear their laughter downstairs in the basement, where they watched syndicated episodes of Cheers! and Night Court. But now, at the table, the husband stops talking and looks at his son with a look the wife thinks is insincere and condescending and mean.

“Cheer up,” the husband says. Meanwhile the son is covering his face with his hands and making sniffling noises. The wife is stunned at what’s happening. She has always considered her husband, like herself, a person of great feeling and conscience. Someone who doesn’t react but instead exercises patience and active sympathy. So she reaches across the table to comfort her son.

“This is your fault,” she says to her husband.

The son laughs.

Her husband leans back in his chair and pretends to strangle himself.

-

Brandon Hobson is the author of The Levitationist (Ravenna Press). His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in NOON, New York Tyrant, Trnsfr, Gigantic, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a PhD at Oklahoma State University.

with illustrations by Leigh Rigozzi.

In February 2011 I performed a lunchtime gig at Monash University, Clayton Campus in Victoria. It was my one day off during a two week Adelaide Fringe run. I had to get up at 4am to catch the flight over. I was in a fruity mood.

I arrived to find a DJ playing that ‘Barbara Streisand’ song at full volume. How audacious are DJs to think their violent beats are welcome at 10:30am on a Wednesday? I don’t care if you have been booked by the organisers. Either play some Neil Young or forfeit your set out of goodwill. Dance music has its territory – nightclubs, raves, commercial radio, must it encroach on the traditional timeslot of the acoustic muso as well?

Happiness is scoffing a nutrient water ten minutes before you go onstage for a gig you know for a scientific fact isn’t going to be remotely inspiring. Additional happiness is having used the same kind of bottle to wee into backstage at your Fringe venue the night before because the toilet was down two flights of stairs and life is too short to perform with any kind of wee in you. Nutrient water bottles are handy as they have a wide mouth. Ladies.

My solo gig started out routinely. I left my sunglasses on, as an international sign of ‘I do not care. Do not mess with me. I will crush you with my professionalism’ as oft-modelled by E from Eels at his rockier shows. There ain’t much banter, it’s a four to the floor setlist burner.

I can’t believe how much universities have sold out. Not only are they condensing their art faculties and burning off specialty subjects, but they are gaily renting out prime clubs and societies real estate to any evil multi-national who’ll plonk five figures in their off-shore account. Today I was lucky enough to have the Lipton Ice Tea cult, dressed in aggressive lime green, passionately defending their patch of Astroturf across from me. Their capitalist compound was a cross between a miniature golf course and child’s playhouse. The lynchpin was a green tunnel you could crawl through. After enquiring of the fun-factor I was matter-of-factly informed “the tunnel doesn’t go anywhere.”

I was amused by the human screen saver of sporadic traffic walking back and forth on the concourse. Entertainment came from commentating mid-song on the gaudily dressed youths sporting balloon hats, cow print onesies, orange superhero capes and an Argentinean flag. After spying a procession of students pushing food trolleys I declared “you know all these people are stealing stuff – there’s no barbecue, it’s just that easy to wheel stuff out of here. Look, there goes a bloke with a television, stolen straight out of a classroom.”

Things turned mock-ugly during Northcote. A Korean photographer in an orange vest crouched down and I exploded like a gas barbecue.

“Nah man you can’t take my photo, that was in my contract, seriously, put that away!” I snarled in hipster accent. He glanced at his camera and put it back to his eye.

“What are you doing, seriously dude you take that photo and you’re in breach of contract. I’m very specific about this.” I was Chris Lilley doing Anton Newcombe. A beefier Asian dude pulled up and got out his smart phone. I gave him the same tirade, receiving the finger as he walked off. I threatened to throw a cart of glasses at him, being pushed by the nearest lunch lady.

“He’ll have to get it off me first!” she told no-one in particular. I simmered down and returned to the song. A verse later sneaky orange vest was sitting back with his crew drawing the camera up to his face. I threw down my pick in disgust.

“Just because you’re in the distance doesn’t mean I can’t see you. I’m not blind. What do you think I’m like eighty years old with cataracts?”

Part of doing a lame-douche character is coming up with lame-douche taunts.

The thing about performing at these Uni O-week things is that in the same breath that you’re introduced by the MC, he’s also telling people to get over to the Uni Bar for the breakdancing competition in ten minutes. It’s a great leveller. At no other time are you more reminded of the fact that all you are is an entertainer, providing a service like everyone else; from the union staff serving sausages to the skiing club president drinking shots off a ski.

During a quieter song I was annoyed by the Popcorn People next door. They were promoting something – a Chlamydia swab app? – with free popcorn in a cone. I knew I couldn’t compete with that. It doesn’t take a sociologist to calculate the aggregate net worth of a free cone of popped corn versus a word-heavy novelty b-side no-one asked for. Even if I played Northcote on loop and put out a bowl of Clinkers I’d still be breaking even. When the Popcorners started playing ‘Barbara Streisand’ over their tinny speakers I ripped out my guitar lead and marched over for a considered yet friendly neighbourhood chat.

“Can you guys turn that off? I’m trying to entertain!” Said the pale yet muscular sad/angry busker clown with clip on sunglasses and undone fly.

The Lipton Ice Tea brigade watched it all through nineteen year old irony-free eyes. As soon as I’d finished my set, three girls got up to do a Sparkle Motion-esque counter attack. I wanted to set fire to myself, but instead took a free Schick razor from a stand and put it in the bin on the way to the toilet.

Later I played a second set with my band The Awkwardstra. We approached the stage to sound check but were blocked by the All-Female All-Japanese self-defence society putting the demon in demonstration. Happiness is being trapped side-stage looking out over a crowd 800% bigger than the one you just had watching two girls scream like tennis players and roundhouse kick each other in the noonday sun. I considered hijacking the event, stripping down to my boxers, karate chopping my guitar in half and screaming “It’s good for my self esteem” before hiding in the Lipton tunnel until the Vice Chancellor dragged me out by the fringe.

As the crowd dispersed we started our folk-rock show. The dynamic between performer and audience was not dissimilar to that of religious nuts on street corners and Friday night shoppers. Still scorned by the Lipton Girls’ degrading display, I turned to Nature Boy and whispered “tell them The Bedroom Philosopher is going to do a presentation for Birds Eye Chips.” I stood on the concourse and after receiving Nature’s introduction, lifted my shirt up and waddled from side to side in a sexually childlike way while reciting a sordid poem.

“Ooh birds eye in my grill / ooh I want more I know I will.”

The doe eyed students seemed far more understanding of my marketing parody than any material I’d presented thus far. The mentioning of a consumable was an audio pacifier for the Gen-I media-mites, happy to save time by not questioning the things that made them and the world surface happy. It’s wise to criticise those below us. They are our replacements.

Song song. Band Band. Underrated genius. Underrated genius. In a desperate attempt to connect with the possibly good looking clump of girls wearing promotional aprons and Viking hats in the gazeboed horizon I tried an acoustic version of ‘Barbara Streisand’ but felt the cool blade of Mad Dog holding a free Schick razor to my throat. Gordo doused him with a Lipton Iced Tea and we regained our composure.

During New Media, the Skiing Society made their third noisy entrance to the concourse for the day, displaying a row of shots on a ski and proudly declaring it a “Shotski.” I instantly despised everything about this, and told them as much.

“Nah man,” they protested, “we’re doing this for you.” I could see the underlings had brought the exotic liquors and paddling stick as a sacrifice, but could not condone the flamboyant idolisation of these damaging drugs in a day that had already been suffocated by corporate greed and intellectual apathy.

“Oh yeah,” I bellowed, removing my guitar. “Let’s celebrate the miracle drug of alcohol that’s been linked to over 50, 000 deaths in this country each year and kills more people than cigarettes and drug use combined. It’s all fun and games now but where are you in twenty years when you’ve lost your wife and kids, sitting bloated and pock-marked in the corner of your one bedroom flat crying into your warm can of Tooheys Red at ten in the morning?”

A smattering of applause (my band mates trying to get the attention of the mental health officer) fuelled me on and I took refuge on the drum kit, playing a We Will Rock You beat on kick and snare while ranting about the fact my Uncle Nigel died from alcoholism in his forties.

AHORA QUE ES ENTRETENIMIENTO!

We finished our set as the supercheese MC shimmied on stage. The 40 weak crowd clapped with the intensity of 50. “How about an encore from The Bedroom Philosopher!” He enthused. I checked my watch, flipped my dark glasses down and strolled to the mic.

“The Bedroom Philosophers are not contractually obliged to perform any more entertainment.” As we packed up, Nature Boy told me he’d heard a couple of students walk past, watch us for a bit, say “I really like this guy” and keep walking.

After selling no merch, I found a Mentos lolly on the ground, padded over to the Lipton compound and crawled into the tunnel entrance. I could see what they meant. The tunnel didn’t go all the way, it was sealed off after half a metre. The idea of a tunnel. I came out and sat next to a rock on the corner of the lawn. The surface looked scuffed and shiny. It was plastic. Over the speakers came the smooth compressed thump of ‘Barbara Streisand.’ The bulk of this song is a Boney-M sample from the 70’s, the beat too slow and thin to have impact today. On the ground was a smattering of trodden popcorn. The ultimate puff food. Next to it, a puddle of Liptons – tea made more consumable with the extraction of heat. A girl handed me a Schick razor, a device intended to gentrify the human form; airbrush it from its course, savage features.

Taken from The Bedroom Philosopher Diaries, in selected stores through A Small Press and available at Justin’s website. It will be launched in Melbourne at Trades Hall, Feb 17, bookings here.

From our December 2012 issue.

The exact difference between Get Him Eat Him’s first album and our second album can be traced to a hotel room in Los Angeles, California. There, during a rare moment of solitude halfway through our first national tour, I had my first brush with writing music to fulfill my own emotional needs. Homesick and exhausted, I conjured a song to keep me company; I picked up a guitar, started strumming an open G chord, and formed my mouth to make the exact sounds and notes that somehow seemed most comforting to me. It was the first time I had ever experienced my own music as if it were someone else’s, the first time I had ever written something and not thought, “This is good,” but rather, “I like this.”

I’ve sometimes wondered if all musicians are doomed to forever recreate the music they loved most as children and teenagers. When I started Get Him Eat Him in my sophomore year of college, I envisioned a relentlessly high-energy post-punk band in the vein of Brainiac or the Dismemberment Plan. But when I opened my mouth in Los Angeles, the sounds that came out were more like the Sebadoh and Promise Ring records I adored as a teenager, or the folk music I once played with my father (from whom I was estranged at the time). Suddenly, the gap between the music I felt compelled to write and the music I thought it would be cool to write became annoyingly huge and obvious.

In retrospect, that gap was always annoyingly huge and obvious. Get Him Eat Him’s debut album Geography Cones is several ballparks away from the grandiose spaz-rock epic I thought we were making at the time. As I suspect is often the case, our first record was a bizarro misimagining of the music we wanted to make, our second record a grudging acceptance of the music we had actually been making all along. The anxiety of coming to that acceptance is all over Arms Down, in both its content and its execution. The album’s opening line is, “It’s a familiar sound,” a hilariously ineffectual nod to my fear that our stripped-down sound would be considered unoriginal or derivative. (The album’s closing line is “I want you to stop me,” which, frankly just seemed like a great closing line.)

When we went in to make Arms Down, I still hoped to assuage this anxiety by exploding my very personal writing into huge, ornate recordings overflowing with sonic baubles and trinkets. We recorded a lot of tracks for the record. Horn tracks, synth tracks, noise tracks, noisier noise tracks. When we went in to mix the record with Chad Clark, he took one listen to this overstuffed grab bag and told us very matter-of-factly, “You didn’t make the record you thought you made.” When I balked at Chad’s swift and thorough dismissal of my grandiose vision, he looked me straight in the eyes and said, “this album is going to be around after you’re dead. Be smart.”

…Which is kind of a totally ridiculous thing to say. Our goal wasn’t to create a timeless gift to the world; we wanted to make a cool record that people would like. But, in that irresistible way that some people have of being both completely honest and completely manipulative, Chad got us thinking big. “Indie rock” is riddled with calculating self-effacement and short-term strategizing, but Chad made us think like Serious Goddamn Artists. Miraculously, he got we five overeager twentysomethings to be totally okay with abandoning our own ideas if they didn’t serve the greater good.

Many of the tracks we omitted were the very ones that had once made our sound seem unique and exciting: the monophonic synthesizers, the pointy guitars, the harmonized vocoders. In turn, we made room for the gestures that most deeply engaged with the blood and guts of our songs: the shuffling drumbeat in “Get Down,” the “Just What I Needed”-style rhythmic shift in “Present Tenses,” the sly melodic climbs in “2×2.” These were products of the closest collaboration between the five of us, little flourishes and conversations that emerged organically from playing together. “The Coronation Show,” the song I had begun to write in that Los Angeles hotel room nearly two years prior, had long stopped making sense to me as I struggled to make it “more interesting.” Once I stopped trying to make an altogether different record, I could finally hear the song again.

At my most unsympathetically self-serious, I like to think that we chose “the path of good” over “the path of evil.” But in truth, these decisions are rarely so clear-cut, and never so consciously made. Musicians generally crave both the validation of praise and the satisfaction of self-expression, even though the pursuit of one often comes at the expense of the other. The most well-received songs on Arms Down were the ones that I had the least invested in personally, the ones that were the most contrived and detached. Ironically, they’re also the closest we ever came to realizing my very first notion of what Get Him Eat Him should be, owing largely to the energy we were able to project after playing together for several years.

And therein lies my very favorite thing about this record; for all the angst, uncertainty and doubt that marked its creation, Arms Down came out sounding like an honest-to-goodness album by an honest-to-goodness band. I can imagine somebody hearing in Arms Down some of the things that I’ve heard in the albums I’ve loved over the years. I’m proud that we made an album you might need to listen to three or four times for it to really sink in. I’m proud that we let the songs speak for themselves, even when we weren’t entirely sure what they were trying to say. I’m proud that, four years later, I can listen to Arms Down and still think, “I like this.”

There are aspects of my experience in Louisville that I will never understand.  Deep down I suspect that you may have more answers about this than I do.  I can never shake my belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined . . . As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me. 

— Iris Chang

I

My working conditions improved quick until I was soon manager and one day surrounded by pyramids.  A different voice, a kind one, said to me:  You know your home is Pleiades.  I learned the language fast, but I’ve had better.  Yes, the two customers.  I had to learn how to speak to both, but it helps to know English so I can help at least someone.  The band clamped around my neck after the second hour.  How to say weather?  It reminds me of Phoenix without my ventilator.  I want the heat the more I work the long burials.  I want it close to me.  I’m always wet, so hot.  Hot sweating or I just wet myself.

II

The first thing I wind up telling people I meet is why I love my moms so much.  One of them, I think she was female, approached me and said:  There’s no need to be afraid; just come with me.  This mom, above all else, taught me integrity—doing the right thing even when no one is around though someone always is.  What I learned from her the most is how I am a fulfillment of prophecy.  I also learned that my moms should never be hurt by anyone.  I was there when my father tried to shoot her.  I think one of the requirements was that I be there.  How could I tell her no when that’s what my father shouted?  When she asked me to, I followed her into a room and shut the door behind us.  As soon as it shut, she was gone, and three smaller females looked at me—calling me Mommy.  No lie, but what I take from that situation is that I know my moms went through many hardships and persecutions and, well, I know deep down that my own relationships can be different.  I think the way I act takes a lot of practice, but I didn’t sleep for nearly a year.

III

My mother tells me: Your life is just like your childhood stories of perfect life.  I feel like I read you.  I’m sorry.  I’m not good with lying.  I could not write this life. In this life, I took trip to oval quarry.  I had just turned forty and wanted to show my wife I still had youth left.  I wore suede shirt and pants—what I came to think of as my uniform—and there he was, tall and cold and staring.  I dropped my pickax when his body rotated to match direction of his head.  And I dreamt about, um, geometric proof; I do it.  Please, I do it.  But instead I talked to him.  I was forced to.  I changed my tone but nothing.  Nothing.  Then he stopped as if he heard directions at somewhere else.  He fell to knees.  He was, his thigh and upper body didn’t move.  A golden ratio away by car and my faithful wife nowhere.  Sometimes I wake up and see dark air sitting on to me.  Most times I’m nice because I heard that irritates them, no, confuses them, but sometimes I get angry and abuse it.  I know this is a bad way to speak, but I’m doing it on purpose.  But the time it walked backwards, its body away on some travel, I loved it as much as I love my wife.

IV

I miss fingerprinting done with actual ink even though I never experienced the process myself.  At the police station, the cop told me where to stand and for how long.  I knew his arms were the result of what happens when a scouring pad is left in a shower stall.  I wasn’t surprised at all when he used the foot pedal to get the full spread of my print on the computer screen.  Out of habit, I almost turned the page when he nodded with his hands full.  I felt like I was having piano lessons again because I couldn’t resist when the cop removed my glasses and started to shave the hair surrounding my ears.  The hair of the doll next to me vanished in strips too, and when wires protruded from her head, I knew the same thing was happening to me.  He asked me who should receive the prints.  I said: Release them to me, but I walked outside with smooth palms void of prints, and the first thing I could think to do was hide them in the snow.  But I didn’t because there wasn’t any.  I watched a string-on-a-dollar-trick one time and never forgot what happened at the end.  There wasn’t any snow.

 V

My higher-ups go on and on about how tired I look—at the most inopportune times too just to weaken my resolve.  My only real friend is the overweight bloke who hasn’t left the office yet, so he doesn’t know all the pain he’s in for.  Who’s your mate then?  Geoff asks me daily.  The way he interrupted our boss, just to ask what the word segment means, broke my heart.  He tries so hard.  The night they injected me with the new cocktail, I screamed, Yes, yes, bloody brilliant yes, because I’m trying to corrupt their data.  In actuality, the crocodile bent my fingers back as he raped me, and I thought I saw a universe drift away by photocopier.  I wouldn’t let myself be a part of it, though.  I told my boss I felt a distinct tingling in my fingers and nothing else.  During Geoff’s session, he held nothing back.  He told us the secretaries nick all the light bulbs at night and hide them away straight up their twadges without cracking any.  He said the silver beings dart around lighting up the place, and that’s what the sun would look like if we could slow it down beyond the moment of stopping.  When he stupidly eats his afters at lunch, smiling and slapping my back, I do something like break the top off the salt and eat bits of broken glass.  The higher-ups never miss a chance to straighten my bloody tie and tussle my hair, but by god, I never give that lot anything they can use.

VI

The people from my city are the ones who come to your city and say:  Well, back in my city, we do this.  We just want to say the name of our city, but I can’t say it now.  Architects design our houses so that every room has a clear view of the street.  Our literature and commercials encourage us to watch the street so we can change what happens there.  We can’t be exactly sure what we change, though.   I’m not perfect because I looked away one time and a truck crashed, spilling all kinds of meat.  When I looked back, I knew many wolves were fighting over it all, but I only saw a man with no chin or eyebrows.  He had sharp rods for hands.  He asked me from there, all the way to my house, if I would like to be without hunger for six days.  I said yes and ate his wheat.  Before I could even wonder if I was changing him somehow, I saw hundreds and hundreds of his people coming from all angles, mostly angles that frightened me.  Of course, their eyes watered and the buildings all changed to look like Epcot Theme Park.  A little while later, some of them wanted to take over and judge my life.  The cops came and said to them all:  This doesn’t concern any of you.  Then the street was silent and empty, and the only view I had was of my car, upside down, stuck on two sharp poles in front of my house.  After that the dogs would just shake and hide.  I could never give them the right biscuit again.

VII

Diana arrived covered in a shawl with a pill box hat on top, shuffling and hunched.  One night as I was flipping through the television channels, Diana pointed at the wrestlers bouncing off the ropes and said: Those people look just like my people.  At times like these, she smelled like kerosene.  Another day she told me she looks weaker than she should because she had to regenerate her own spine.  I think she just replaced it with parts she needed less.  We were the most intimate when I lay on the ground and she pushed over the bookshelf in my direction.  She was able to lie down next to me before it hit us.  I wanted to see more and more of what she was capable of, but I worried I was using her somehow.  I had roommates before, but they mainly showed me things about myself I didn’t like.  With Diana, all I could think about was Cassiopeia.

VIII

IX

My grandpa always told me to shut up like the time we roasted marshmallows.  I asked him why two moths in the grass had been stuck together for so long, and he slapped me.  As a test, I went to my uncle and asked the same thing.  He was in town visiting.  All he said was:  I don’t even have to visit your grandfather because I just got a good taste of him.  None of this really matters now because they’re both dead.  Ever since, I do things on my own.  At the puppet show, I gave the puppet my last cookie, and in the process, I leaned over and saw what I saw.  I was shocked, but afterwards I lied and told my friends that the puppet was, in fact, real and that no man was behind the curtain.  I rubbed their backs and acted as if I was wearing a monocle to gain their confidence.  It was similar to a ritual where some people just wear the robes and rings while the others conjure their master-entities underground.  And to think, just days before, I knew the only way I could draw all over my shirt was if it and the marker were both green.  At that time I had no idea that in a previous life I had unsealed a demonic interdimensional gateway in the California desert with L. Ron Hubbard.  But now as I remember how I wanted the man behind the curtain to make me his equal and to love me like an imprisoned serial killer loves his pen pal wife, I know it has to be true.

X

On vacation at Montauk, any time I had to leave an attraction I would cry.  The worst was when I refused to tie my helium dolphin balloon to my wrist and it blew away.  I just wanted to have the responsibility of an adult.  The beach became a zoo when I started ramming my head into the knee of the man wearing a tuxedo.  All he could say was touché.  I took a picture of him with my Mickey Mouse Polaroid camera and gave him the photo without even looking at it.  He and his wife waited for the picture to develop, and then she said: It’s none other than Satan.  Her husband started brushing off his left shoulder like there was something on it.  A crowd formed of people using their Frisbees to block the sun and eat chicken.  I can’t stop shooting heroin, he screamed.  In the distance a girl was getting her picture taken with a parrot on her arm, and she wasn’t me.  With you, it’s always something, I told the man.  I heard this from somewhere, and whenever I say it, people laugh, so I keep going with it.  I ran towards the parrot and my uncle took a picture of me with both of my feet in the air.  We couldn’t believe it.  My arm sagged under the parrot when an old bum came to drag away a dead, bloated dog with red eyes, a beak, and pinchers.  I want to jump towards the atom blast if I’m going to be forced to fall back anyway, he said.  For the record, I almost drowned when I called the clouds Snow White, and I refused to change my shirt for the entire trip.  My uncle told me not to tell my parents.

XI

XII

I have a story of Easter and Julio.  A man carries a slaughtered pig on his shoulders past Julio who’s tied to a tree in the middle of the road. Mae holds her ears and notices more closely that Julio is sick and that all the most beautiful animals are French-Canadian.  Someone slings meat into Julio’s mouth from a stick.  She wonders how Julio feels with all the teenagers running past checking their glucose levels with their cell phones.  There’s a movie Mae would like to make when model helicopters and airplanes fly backwards above him.  It’s all about how Julio won’t wear clothes anymore, so she hopes he never gets old.  Mae feels warm and tired when they measure Julio’s chest circumference.  No one trusts him since he was found on a truck that possesses the technology to sense every human who rides illegally.  He only did it to prove he is a part of humanity too.  Julio and Mae used to be able to talk about the best way to kill moss on bricks like they were equals.  Now he just tells her to watch out for Zizaubio and the Seven Sisters.  He says that if she calls them, she’ll go into a trance and feel the white light who is Zizaubio.  The Seven Sisters will be on thrones steeped in him.  They’ll say: We’re glad you came to Sars Ammith.  She’ll say: What is this?  This doesn’t match up with my ideas of Pleiades.  They’ll disappear, and all she’ll see is black for an answer.  She knows Julio is right, but she still doesn’t like being told what to do.  My story of Easter and Julio means I always want Julio to be in the world in April.

XIII

The teachers were better than some I’ve had.  I can’t think of any complaints.  They were better because each one managed to speak with only one voice at a time so I could keep up with what was happening.  I never wanted to miss the display screen in front.  When I was submerged in the liquids of varying temperatures, sometimes I’d see people I know on the display screen.  One day I saw my mom staring into a mirror with her back to me.  When she turned around, she had a mannequin face.  She asked me: What do you think? She had just put on make-up.  I told her I thought she looked like a scary mannequin because she thinks about herself too much.  I felt like she was surprised I said that to her, but I could tell she was thinking about it to see if it was true.  Outside of school I saw a movie preview and when a logo flashed, my ocular bones became more prominent, and they’re like that even to this day.  When a triangle appeared under my left armpit, I told Mom it looked like the same one floating above me in Katmandu after I was submerged in the liquid.  Much later at my regular school, my teacher asked us to think of three things we would do in order to escape a burning building.  Three of us, including me, wrote: Just die.  I think I remember being arranged around a tree with them one night.

XIV

Everyone always asks me:  Dave, why are you so sexist?  I’m not sure I can answer that without telling this story.  One day I sat in my chair and visualized myself walking around to see myself from behind, and it finally happened.  Pop.  But before that I found out that many inhabitants of other planets watch a horror movie called: We Know the Beasts Are Human.  Because I could see myself outside of myself in this way, I could see the blue skull-face lady too.  She said her car is constructed out of pairs of dice. This way, the car will descend down and down, she said.  And then I was in her fuzzy dice car going down, down.  Her outfit changed to a fuzzy rearview mirror dice suit.  What were you before? You haven’t always been this, I said.  That really got to her because she sent me back to a previous life when I was at the sauna with my father.  The entourage was getting more water and Dad had a heart attack.  Messengers were sent back to the city to inform them of his death.  I sent a psychic message to my sister to tell her the good news, and then Dad stirred.  He had only passed out.  Do it, she said as a concubine massaged her breast.  I killed Father by holding his head as hard as I could with his nose and mouth and leg from behind.  I caught all of his spasms.  When I ran home, I put a cobra symbol between my sister’s eyes and my own eyes so that my copulation could ring fifty-two times.  When the earthquake hit the palace, how could we not feel as if we were in a leather dice cup getting our comeuppance?  After the vision, the blue skull-face lady twisted her foot into the ground like she had just had her final say and then disappeared.  She did it inanely just like a woman would.

XV   

I would say the quality of my love life changes with each new day.  Sometimes I just have private dance lessons, but on my way home one night, I ran into a group of people wearing white suits and wispy purple handkerchiefs around their necks, playing guitar and pointing to a house up the hill.  I didn’t resist their pull because they looked like stewardesses, even the males.  I saw their tray of iced coffee and took a cup, and just because of that, they felt like I couldn’t say no to anything else.  I was sick of walking around worrying about plate tectonics, so I agreed to go with them.  When we got to the house, their skin got paler as they disrobed, and they rubbed ginger water all over each other’s bodies.  They held glasses of milk in front of wooden owl statues and clapped and got into tire swings when the milk appeared to be absorbed into the statues.  I didn’t pour it out, but it’s gone, one man said.  The walls were covered with collages made from photographs of our town and paintings of cataclysmic asteroids.  My house was in the aerial photo, and I liked seeing it like that.  My sweater had a dangling piece of yarn on the sleeve.  I wanted to fuck everyone I saw.

XVI

XVII

I was completely truthful on the job application and got the job anyway.  The question was: What’s the best thing about heroin that people get too self-righteous about to consider?  I knew the answer immediately.  I wrote: Making the decision to need something more than anything for the sole purpose of actually having the means to get it.  The first thing my employers did when they came to my house was put my wife in the Freeze.  She became invisible and couldn’t move or speak, but I knew she was thinking about how we cracked open a double-yolk egg after her father’s funeral.  Right away my employers gave me LSD and asked me questions.  Where are you?  they asked.  I’m beyond time, I screamed, I’m beyond time.  They kept telling me that there is no such thing, but they wanted to know more.  They assembled the coils, and I ended up in the cabin of a Navy ship.  They said my name is John even though I knew it’s not.  When I came back to myself in my room, I was covered in green salt and fused into the floor.  With my head still in the room, I watched two men place their hands on my wife.  They instantly looked like they were drawn by children under the age of three, and my wife became reanimated.  Ever since then, she can only speak in terms of Satan.  Sometimes I try to pick up my coffee mug at breakfast, and my hand goes right through it.  My wife replies with something like: Thank you, Satan.  We make a point to go to Montauk every year because the satellite images of the hyperspace cloud above the facilities remind me of home.

XVIII

The only reason why I slapped Billy after he asked me why the moths in the grass had been stuck together for so long was because the question reminded me of when my wife got pregnant during the Depression.  She had no choice but to go up that hill like all the other wives.  She came back down, and I hated her more than anything for what she had to do.  I hated her so much that I killed any cat who tried to eat birds in the yard.  I used my grandfather’s Harper’s Ferry Horse Pistol because I felt like enemies were riding the cats.  I pictured my wife riding the cats. When my wife and I went down to Mexico, we fucked as much as possible in between my job as an exterminator.  It came to the point where I hated to think that anyone else but me could be fucking.  We had ten kids down there, and five went missing.  We all lay on the dirt floor waiting for the phone call.  I had my cache of weapons, and I would shoot any cockroach that came near the babies—especially the ones I caught reproducing.  I’d get the phone call, and then I’d wake up by the market with a bag full of human legs.  Or I’d get a phone call and then wake up below young men who were chained to walls and always screaming Dios.  Even after just waking up, that’s exactly what I felt like.  Now I cut everything up and put it back together like I did in Mexico.  I cut up my wife’s birth certificate and an essay on the perversity of Disney World, put the pieces in a box, and pulled out: Never been born.  Billy laughed like I did, but he didn’t know why.  I laughed because ever since my wife did what she did, that’s how I tried to make her feel.

XIX

The first time I saw Rossul, he was walking down the staircase at the public library, and I happened to look up.  I felt like he had just emerged from a meat locker.  I wanted to add a fur hood to his pea coat and watch him cross the street from my car.  He introduced himself by saying that he loves the dark circles under his eyes even though his mom wants him to wear foundation to cover them.  When he comes over, I pretend he isn’t there, but I read poetry by Pindar to raise up the deities for the athletic festival we will make.  He likes to hear stories about my life too.  Early on in our contact, I told him that I was visited by Iris, the angelic rainbow messenger goddess, in a dream around the time of my first period.  Many years after the vision, when I was ready to undergo the initiation, my mother and aunt prepared a bath for me with special oils and then wrapped me in a black robe covered with pentagrams, moons, stars, and suns.  At that point in the story, I could tell that Rossul became aroused, and he made no effort to hide it.  I continued to tell him that I held the goddess crystal in my hands and met a guide who led me to a room.  I waited there, and a figure I didn’t know, but whom I later realized was Rossul, languidly walked down a staircase as if he were using his body for the first time and handed me a scroll that said: How could any future marriage compare?  Rossul and I quickly became lovers after I informed him of our karmic destiny together.  One evening he told me that he did some research on Iris and found out that she is a sister of the Harpies.  He asked me: Doesn’t that make her a monster too?  I slapped him, but then I put a laurel wreath on his head to try and take it back.  I love him so much that when I bring out the life-size human dolls and we stab them every which way we can, I can’t believe that we really belong to each other.            

XX

It’s hard for me not to feel responsible for the way Tom turned out.  Every boyfriend I brought home made fun of the fact that Tom liked to play with horse figurines.  He latched on to the toys even more because he hated those men.  When he’d go to his dad’s house, his step-mom got sick of hearing about horse stables, and a horse’s lifespan, and horse grooming.  Tom claims she locked him in a room and made him listen to the baby monitor receiver that was paired with the transmitter in her mother’s bedroom.  All the grandmother did all day long was say: I’m doing the Masonic pose.  I’m standing with my body erect, and my feet form the angle of an oblong square, so kill me now. She was paralyzed, so Tom told me he stood in the way she described for as long as he could to speed up the process of her death.  During puberty, I was concerned that Tom still kept his horse figurines around.  He wrapped each one in a silk cloth and kept them in an old backgammon case that he carried everywhere like a briefcase.  One day when I was gathering up his bed sheets for the laundry, I found one covered in lubricant.  I didn’t know how to handle any of this, so I bought him a subscription to Playboy.  When he got older, he incessantly talked about an infinite line of horses running through an infinite desert and all the froth that they would excrete from their mouths when they were on the verge of dying from thirst.  He imagined it as an irrigation system that could create lush vegetation he would like to live in forever.  I’ve decided to let this all out in the open now because I finally told Reverend Colby I would sometimes see blue centaurs out of the corner of my eye when I lived with Tom.  Reverend Colby said it’s wrapped up in an evil, and he wants to help.

XXI

When I worked at the pyramids, I never became a manager, which is good because I wanted some time to think on my own.  It was hard since we were in direct alignment with the leaders who sent me messages through the pyramids.  Even when they were speaking to the other workers, there was always a veiled message that was meant to unnerve me and denounce my manhood.  They always mentioned how because of them, all five of my children were born without their second and third fingers.  The other workers got caught up in this campaign against me and spoke an enchantment until their eyes turned completely black.  Then they dangled me by ropes above the cherubim power generator.  I pretended to hate it, but I hoped they would drop me, and sometimes this hope would be the best part of my day.  One time I got too close and had visions of soldiers being slaughtered in war.  They wore the insignia of my leaders so my leaders could ejaculate at the moment of the soldiers’ deaths.  When we capped the pyramids with gold, I would often wretch, and the bile would land in what I knew was the same formation of volcanoes on Mars, the three middle stars of Orion, and the pyramids we were building.  Sometimes when we floated the stones, I wanted to crush everything and everyone in view so that we could start the world again the right way, but my leaders were always there, their voices reverberating as if to say: That already happened many times, and we were always there to start again.  No matter what they said, I could tell they were frustrated they couldn’t get me to turn my eyes black like so many of the others.  I touch my eyes every now and then just to make sure I’m still me.

XXII

Sam went missing for about a year, and when he came back I knew he wasn’t the same person anymore.  At first he was very polite, but soon he lost all of the social skills his mom and I worked so hard to instill in to him.  When we had a welcome back block party about a week after his return, he interrupted everyone’s conversations and shouted:  Lee Harvey Oswald only learned Russian from a book and a record, but the man who was shot by Jack Ruby had a Russian Baltic accent and loved to discuss Russian literature. He was also much shorter than the Oswald who barely knew Russian.  Then he wrote something in the air with his finger.  After that incident we kept a closer eye on Sam for his protection.  One night when his brother was sleeping, we caught Sam whispering into his ear.  The next morning when we asked George about it, he said he was fully awake and that Sam had fallen slowly through the floor into his room one frame at a time.  At work I started volunteering for as many out of state trips as I could after Sam looked at me with a scrunched up left eye and said:  I’m Mommy too.  Do you want to try and shoot me?  Every time my wife or I asked him where he had been for the past year, he would tap his head and then write something else in the sky with his finger.  We videotaped him doing it once, but each time we watched the footage, we woke up in a different part of the house and couldn’t remember anything we watched.  We gave up on that, but I know my wife tapes pictures of Sam onto milk cartons at the grocery store.  Her mom says it’s because she’s a Libra and longs for balance in her life, but I can’t bring myself to believe in any of that Sylvia Brown stuff, no matter what kind of pain I go through.

XXIII

Percy’s simply first rate. We’ve been chums longer than I can possibly remember, and he’s always acted in my best interests, even when he wraps my bandages in a way that will never stay bound.  I think all his low spells and grumpy faces are down to the lack of a ladyfriend in his life.  Poor Percy isn’t fortunate enough to have a woman to love, not like yours truly.  Hana always accompanies me on trips in the transport vehicles and rubs my belly and laughs when my head won’t stop thrashing around. Perhaps I rabbit on about Hana a bit too much, though.  Percy and I were having such a splendid time of sorting white gold dust into lines with razor blades, and then, at the slightest mention of Hana, Percy’s mood went all to pot. I know Percy is often with her during break times, so I find it rather odd he doesn’t like her more, what with all the time they spend together. One time I was walking past the office canteen when I happened upon the two of them, her giving him a demonstration on cadavers like he was some sort of prized medical student. How lucky he must have felt! She slit their throats and then cut and pulled out the tongues through the holes she had made. She placed the tongues in some of her mouths, started chewing, and told him that this is what they did to traitors. I can’t pretend to understand all of what happened, but I knew I wanted her fake eyelashes to brush against my face and for her to incubate her eggs inside me for once. She even notices when my injection sites need ointment, bless her, and I haven’t told anyone this before, so whisper it, but I pick at the wounds so they’ll get infected and she’ll have to do something about it. Thank heavens for Hana and thank heavens for Percy when I’m back at the daily grind of being injected and telling my bosses about the fluorescent snakes being sold at the market.  It may sound rather mad, but it always feels like I get struck by lightning if I don’t at least bring something to barter.

XXIV

I met Slava when I visited the USSR in late ‘89.  He caught my eye because I thought he looked like the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin.  When I watched him eat his fish soup from afar, I couldn’t help but think of the fish coming back to life in his stomach, joining with bits of carrots and potatoes and whirring as if it had a motor.  Our first night together, I put my head on his stomach and dreamed I was in Jonah’s belly eating potatoes and carrots that grew on the stomach lining.  I think this is why I fell in love with Slava—because he seemed like the only person who could keep a fish like that in his stomach and be an even happier person because of it.  He was always doing things like beating his chest and opening the freezer to breathe in as much cold air as he could to make himself laugh.  But he had passion too.  I would find him lying on the living room floor at 3:33 AM studying sacred geometry, freemasonry, ancient mythology, and the Bible and clawing at his stomach while wearing a women’s wig.  The story I always tell people is that when I visited his mother for the first time, I stole the dress she used to make him wear as an infant and tacked it on the wall by our bed.  I just wanted to feel closer to him. The night before he went missing, he sweated against me all night while moving his head as far as he could in every direction.  He spoke in his sleep about Dogon, and Sirus, and the fish people returning to Earth in spaceships and how he could only fool them with his disguise for so long.  When I asked him about it the next day, all he said was:  I don’t want to learn how to do metal work. Sometimes I hear a voice call out to me saying: Put on your dog star head.  This makes me laugh, and I don’t know why, but it makes me miss Slava even more.  If I had the strength, I’d sever my hand to show it how serious I am, but instead I often find myself with my mouth open, leaning on the open freezer like a cane.  At those moments, nothing is funnier.

XXV  

After working at the police station all day, it feels good to come home to my family and not think about what goes on at work for a while.  We just got a new HDTV, and while I like it, I keep a modified dust cover over it for the most part.  My oldest son can’t even stand it when his friends with HDTVs don’t watch the right HDTV channel.  He hates how the image gets distorted and stretched out without it.  So when we watch TV through a couple of holes I cut into the fabric, my son gets huffy and slams things down passive-aggressively, but all I have to do is stare at him without blinking for a couple of minutes and he goes away.  I just feel like I’m watched enough at work.  I don’t want to openly invite it with heat-sensing imaging surveillance.  I try to do a better job with my youngest son, but one time he nearly pulled off the ID tag that’s attached to my chest near my heart.  My bosses change it every month because on the thirty-two day mark, lethal toxins would be released into my body if it’s not replaced.  Of course, ripping it off would produce the same effects.  The tag helps me to keep dedicated to my job and not to reveal things I shouldn’t reveal.  So when my youngest son nearly killed me, I slapped him out of reflex.  I cried in my bedroom and drank whisky all afternoon because I felt so bad about it.  My kids think I’m a monster, but I do everything for a reason they can never know.  Once a night I wake up and can’t remember at all how I wound up with my kids.  I never married, I know that.  Then I remember, but the memory seems glossy like a magazine ad, which makes me happy to leave and go to work the next day.  I had to take a psychological profile one time, and I wrote that I feel like Pavlov’s dog but without the luxury of eating or hearing bells.  No one ever told me what this means, but sometimes I think they did.  I can’t say anything about it either way.

XXVI

I have a feeling I liked being around Diana even more than my daughter, Alexis, did.  I thought Diana’s hands looked beautiful like a male homosexual piano player’s hands.  I was always sending her new scarves, back-braces, mirrored sunglasses, and varicose vein socks even when she had a full supply.  I loved the slow and deliberate way she stirred her food and revolved healing orbs around my head.  Sometimes the orbs would drop and she’d say: They were working the whole time because of you, and then you thought about binding and gagging your enemies and controlling their intake of food.  I tried to improve myself, but when we were alone, I begged her to walk through a wall for me like I caught her doing once, but she just looked at me intensely like the caricature artist in New York City who studied me for a portrait he didn’t know how to draw.  The next morning, I woke up next to a painting of myself pregnant with Alexis.  My body was see-through and both of Alexis’ tiny hands were poking out of my belly, grasping at empty space.  After that, I spent more time thinking about Alexis and all the things she was capable of.  I even went down to Tepoztlán and smuggled up five liters of pulque, the alcoholic drink created by the god, Ometochtli-Tepoxtécatl.  I thought it might awaken something in her.  I think Diana disapproved, but I was trying my best.  Now that Diana left, all I have is Alexis, and to show her how much I love her and believe in her, I started asking her to do all the things I used to ask of Diana, and I haven’t become frustrated at all by her failures.  I know Diana came here for a reason, and I think it has everything to do with all the strange and wonderful things I was meant to see.  Now it’s Alexis’ turn to show me.

XXVII

I first started going to the meetings because I agreed that heaven must be a pyramid inside the moon.  I liked the sense of community too.  We call our house the Megiddo House because Megiddo is a hill in Israel where many battles were fought and Armageddon means Hill of Megiddo.  One day I had just taken a shower, so I knew I was outside.  We had a great celebration there.  One woman had heart palpitations, and with each palpitation, the campfire flickered green, and we all danced and clapped.  During the course of my growth, many inanimate objects did things most people wouldn’t believe.  I loved it the most when the coat rack sat across from me, crossed its legs, leaned towards me, and just listened for a change.  I love my family, never being alone, and singing in the public fountain with a plugged-in boom box.  People shout and tell me not to drop it, but I tell them:  No, I have something to tell you.  Don’t you want to have sex at the Megiddo House to accelerate Armageddon and also have sex at the moment Armageddon happens?  It just makes good sense.

XXVIII

XXIX

I try to keep an eye on the house down the street, but I can’t watch too closely because there’s always a face looking out from the top story window beneath a heliographic star.  I think that’s Adelle up there, but I can’t be sure it’s always her.  I never catch her eating, but sometimes I see her brushing her hair.  She never takes her eyes away from what’s going on outside her house, which is usually nothing, except for one time.  I was driving down the street, and when I got directly in front of Adelle’s house, a tree bent down, playfully almost, and asked me if I wanted to be without hunger for six days.  I was actually in the middle of a fast with some women from church, so I was very tempted.  I know I should have been scared of the tree’s sharp rods for hands, but his offer seemed simple, and pure, and not backed by any malice.  I said yes, got out of the car, and ate his wheat.  I looked down the road and the trees all started bowing to me, one after the other, dancing almost.  One went so far as to suggest that I build my own astral temple.  Once it was constructed they all promised they would visit me.  I was flattered by the attention, of course, but I was thinking about my husband the entire time.  When I happened to look up at Adelle’s window, she was dancing like the trees, and her eyes had no irises or pupils.  I noticed many anomalies all around her.  The strangest thing is that I haven’t eaten another bite of food since I ate the wheat.  I just haven’t needed it.  Sometimes I worry that the trees modified time so that six days are lasting an eternity, but I try not to let it keep me from helping others and shining the good light.  That’s all I can do really.

XXX

Now things have gone too far.  Once I was young, I didn’t know words for me, but now I can speak and I will.  It doesn’t seem to matter that I cared of a deer at all.  I was at work and I started seeing colors’ travel crazy.  I felt sick.  A ball of skin moved up my back.  I thought my chair was unfit for me, but it fitted.  I think the harm thing is coming, so I shiver, but I get tremble! I thought the ghost would be sleeping too because it’s daytime, but I was wrong.  How could I do bookkeeping?  My boss looked like he was a turtle poised for a better phone, and I couldn’t follow his words.  Nothing was right.  I begged my boss a break.  Now I have no job.  I don’t like water in my watch.  I don’t like ripped cushions.  I don’t like flying dreamings, but look at my house.  Sure, I have a deer, but my carpet takes me a prisoner.  Deer, I love you, but now I just get in the way of my home.

XXXI

XXXII

After the radically capsizing situation I was mixed up with concerning great brother Julio, I tried to become a beatific rainbow person of the challenge.  Being the principal of a school, I knew I had a solemn yarn capacity to reach a wide group of people for their enlisting and betterment.  I knew this.  I knew what an illuminated hair between my eyebrows could do for my life situation and the eyebrows of others.  Yesterday I brought in all the teachers so they could chant around my desk.  It was not a chant of hateful indulging cheek pits.  I told them to look at my hand reaching for the bejeweling fortification for all generations.  It’s starting.  I told them to honor my expanding eye of the wind deity crust.  Do it as you see.  I told them my voice is a chalice of teacups reassembled for the weaponization of space and protection. Yes, yes.  I told them to adhere to my lungful feast all at once.  I did.  I told them to eat of my food so they would be forever dependent on microchip-tracking their children and dogs that I tolerated enough for them to keep.  It’s stronger now. I told them to sit up straight in my lotus blood of intermarriage for soul possession by the snakes.  Take over forever.  I told them to look at their metal embryonic sacks and see if they could do better.  Kill, kill.  I told them Rising Sun, do what thou wilt forever and break the fools at your altars. Grow, grow.  So when the community gets riled up to their boiling pan about the separation of church and state and bring up Julio, which I’ve paid for by genuinely crying about it in front of everyone’s faces, I’m bewildered.  I’m working harder than anyone for a New World, Hope, and Change that I won’t explain or fully define until it’s too late.  But I promise, when it happens, and it will, everyone will be equally responsible.  But for now, stand in the Work of the Ages.  Cover its leaf with your genitals and eyes that still don’t see.

-

Annie Christain is an English PhD graduate from the University of South Dakota.  Her poems have been published in Seneca Review, Arabesques Review, The American Drivel Review, and Beeswax Magazine, among others. She is a three-year recipient of the University of South Dakota’s Gladys Hasse Poetry Award, and she received the 2007 and 2008 Jerry Bradley Award for Creative Writing at the Southwest Texas Popular Culture Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the New York Institute of Technology in Nanjing, China.

Rawaan Alkhatib is a writer and artist from Dubai. A recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. More work can be found here.