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Not That Far |
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I hated the background music. I tried to console myself. I lay down on the floor with my head on my forearms. I hate this music, I thought. Steel drums mixed in with the singing. The place between the foreground and the background is where I always lose it. I lose the ladle into the boiling pot of soup. I have to get another ladle. I only have two, and one is plastic. When I get home, A. is in the back yard. There was a disaster, he says. He shows me where the bees stung him. He is still showing me when it is dark and there is nowhere left. I can't decide whether I'll leave early and come home in time to go to bed with you, or whether I'll forget about it and drink a lot, I say + What could happen is what happens. He drinks a lot and I come home and he tries to go to bed with me after I've gone to bed. I had been dreaming about a bird landing over and over on a ranch. + There is a place south of here called Humptulips. + A lot of times it happens that if something bad happens to me, I want to know if something bad happened to him at the same time that something bad was happening to me. But he never knows what time it is. I have to tell him later. Later, I seem to be always saying. I call him. Are you coming home? What time is it, he wants to know. I read him the red numbers. Each number is made of line segments. Some numbers are only two line segments; some are as many as six line segments. The clock lights up some line segments, doesn't light up others. I remember us running along and the ground ending abruptly. We had to leap to the next part. I went first. The next time this happens, I remember thinking, he'll go. We'll go on like that, running along and leaping across the empty places, taking turns, until one of us can't go and has to rest somewhere with quiet music and urns. Zero takes the most line segments of any single number. It takes a lot to show nothing. I am not saving anything for later. Nothing -- I have nothing for later. This is it, all I have I'm using right here. If I run out and there is no more for later, I'm sorry. I used to worry about not having enough for later. There are some worms in a plastic container in the fridge. + There was an empty box in the alley. I put a large rock in it. Someone wrote THANKS on the outside of the box. I am always forgetting A.'s birthday. + The last light just went out of the sky and into the neighbor's house, the one with all the crap piled in the windows. There is a tight spot gathering in my stomach. Formerly, it was a thought. + If the window is open at night, sometimes a bee will fly to his side in bed. His side is the side with the floral pattern. + Most of the Asian pears are spotted like some disease. The Bartletts look healthy. Sometimes when I see my neighbors I wonder how I ended up living next to these people. There doesn't appear to be anything wrong with them. I'll go ahead and hear what they're saying. The sky looks crossed with eaves. Mornings seem grisly though nothing happens except I eat a pear. + Some days I want to go around saying sorry. Ass, I say. + He had what was called a baptism rash. It was really dry that day. There was a burn ban. I haven't gone back since my clothing caught fire on the fence and I swore off being exposed. He used to call me "kin." He reached in through my back door for a knife. There are scars in my ears. The doctor asks if I like to listen. + My friend had a blanket that she called foreskin. I'm wrapped up in foreskin, she would say when we talked at night on the phone. That was when talking on the phone was really exciting. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do but to put my upper body in my closet and my legs, I don't remember what I did with my legs. + A man's whole life has been caught on camera. I'm sorry, he's been caught saying over and over. A hand draws an X across paper. PAID, it writes in the center. + Displacement begins with a dream of falling, I read somewhere. There is a sunken spot in our yard. I place a rock in it so I won't keep falling. + My mother said her nurse this morning asked her if she's been coughing. She said yes, maybe it's allergies. Maybe it's congenital heart failure, the nurse said. + It comes all at once, I guess, when you order from them. They saw themselves sitting in the car, and their next memory is that they were sitting in the car. [1] + Things keep taking me hostage. The weather. The plastic patio chairs. For my birthday, my friend sends me the foreskin blanket. Not the entire blanket, but a piece of it, maybe a half. This is for everything, says the note in the bottom of the box that once contained Pink Lady. She thinks she's getting married. + He asked about plot. I learned to pilot a small craft. I'm going to give you a map. It should be impossible to use the map for getting anywhere. + It goes on and on. And when it's finished, a penny drops out of the bottom with your name engraved on it. That's all you get, and if you don't like it, you can talk to a man named Melt White. [2] + There was a time of day on that street when the treetops were grafted on upside down. Kids would be playing in weird shadows with puppets of each other. Cars would go up and down, up and down. The stop sign acted like gravity. |
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