So, how had it started?
They thought they’d economize by sharing the same bed and then the pieces just formed themselves when they watched the children in their neighbor’s yard, fascinated that life just remained so thin. Their faces, godlike, trying.
Hmm, she said, staring at the tiny hairs floating off the surface of his spoiled-milk skin.
Would you mind, she starts, if there was this giant explosion in the sky, right? And all the stars would just come crashing down on us, on our hats, on the sidewalks, on faces, and we’d just stand there in amazement, because, come on really, what do you do when the stars fall out of the sky?
Her fleshy cartoon eyes blinked.
The sky was falling she said, it would consume the surface of the earth like a blanket gently covering a bed. It will rest here, like plastic, like water, like dust, coating the skyline and maybe then we will look like souvenirs. I thought about it once, she said, thought about it twice, and then three times and now I can’t stop thinking about it. In fact, it’s already begun to consume me more than I know. It’s like a rash we’ll all share.
The fan left the room spinning even after she left, got up off the chair, taking her scent with her, walking out of the kitchen into the front yard.
He saw her through the window mouthing words that read look, see for yourself, as she pointed to the sky.
Indeed, it was raining. Raining, hailing, snowing, the colors nowhere to be found.
She’s left a trail of coffee stains, and cigarette ash, and sometimes just touches off her fingers, the pairing of circles resonant of hundred year old oaks. Her age was written on the tips of her fingers. What a beautiful idea, destroyed. I touched her fingers often in the mornings, when her age felt fresh, puffed up from the rising heat.
I spent years trying to figure out why she dangled her feet off the edge of our roof, why the walls have been painted different colors, and why the coffee is never hot.
I spent years trying to figure out how she’d gone.
I dreamt: She was naked, for naked’s sake. Her quivering breasts, rouged flawless. A birthmark the shape of a wing, looks, in the light, as though it were crawling down towards her stomach, a nave. She shakes. I feel myself, realize the nakedness, and though fully clothed, watch her move swiftly, comfortably, luxuriously in the enclaves of her own olive skin.
I find myself.
In her hips I see my own hips, narrower, still the same legs attached by thick intricate bone. The smiles of her butt cheeks, a V in between the start of something.
She is free, and not in the knowing of me watching her, but with her eyes closed, content. I coax myself.
The first time, she is wearing tight leather pants that hang off her protruding hipbones, and an old t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, the exposed remainders of black thread itching at some nerve like fired electricity. I am standing in the hallway of a building, a worn out Persian carpet covering the floors, the lights dim, four of them for all the doors I see. Someone is with me leaning on her still closed door. We knock and someone is ranting frustrated with necessity for something to say, after a long time of not saying.
There is a story.
Somewhere.
In between the lines.
Here and there.
If you really want it, that is.
If you want to hear things like ‘there is a man’ and ‘there is a woman’ and ‘how real is this?’
If you want concrete details, you can hear cities being named, New York, L.A, Wyoming.
Wyoming?
Sure why not? If cities need to be, then I’ll give them to you.
You want identities? Fine.
I could say ‘they are lovers”, I could say ‘they are friends”, I could say ‘they just happened to find themselves in the same place at the same time’, but you wouldn’t believe that, would you?
So, something failed, and something got higher.
They knock again and she is looking at her feet. Yes, she probably has clothes on, what kind of silly question is that? She can’t be naked the entire time because someone might have a problem. Certainly not me.
But it’s your story anyway.
Besides, I don’t care about her clothes. Clothes we hide in, like accordion skirts, and a used pair of church shoes, a shirt, buttons, and sleeves. These clothes can’t speak.
She looks and feels hopeless. Distant sounds of a television show, the timed laughter exploding at random intervals between periods of speech we cannot make out.
She looks at him, he looks at her, maybe they don’t even see each other. A closed door, the boundary, in the doorway to which it is hinged.
It is late. She is unsure of herself.
Who is she?
Who am I?
There is no more time, yet it is late.
Wait.
There’s a minute. A push, a pull, a loss of balance, a fall.
Who are they? What happened?
The door opens and the television fills the corridor like thick cigarette smoke, leaking through the cracks, braiding between our feet like spirits spreading themselves thin.
No, this is not a scary story. Besides, I never said I would tell a story. She stands at the doorway, the archway, the highway, balancing on one foot.
Want more description?
Fine, there are combat boots, black, dirty, bought somewhere that is not here with a currency that doesn’t exist.
There are triangles formed by legs, the modern art of the body, the post modernism of post modern.
Beer, fingers, mouth.
Rolling Rock beer.
Greasy fingers.
Succulent mouth.
Too much. Glossy mouth.
Too clean. Her mouth. Alone, beside itself.
Just the mouth.
There is no more she, just a mouth.
The mouth is the protagonist and there’s a green beer cap between the upper and bottom teeth. Movement. And then it’s gone, it’s now on the floor, at the foot of my ugly, ugly Church shoes.
She says hey in a smooth, breathy, moan. But she’s just saying hi.
The he is back now, alert, in the bathroom, making phone calls, asking questions, moving things, sitting on furniture, reading catalogues, forgetting things, remembering letters, feeling something, far.
A yes. A rasp. Bet you haven’t heard that before.
Shuffling. All of them, together now, whichever way you’d like.
Do you miss the sensual part?
It’s dark and I don’t understand.
Fine, let us go.
She stands in the middle of a living room a kitchen and a bedroom at the same time and in the corner there is a mattress with gray slept-in sheets, and a pillow at the foot of the bed and in another corner a large sofa chair in the shape of a giant red mouth, lips, and you sit on the tongue looking as though you were being swallowed and near that is a couch paned along the wall with room for 1 or 2 or 3 if you sit side by side, the fabric used and ragged, ripped pieces sweeping along the wooden floor, a large coffee table with no free surface, nothing visible, labels, names, labels, names, shapes, sizes, colors, sizes, colors, shapes, and it smells like eucalyptus in here.
How’s that for imagery?
He turns towards her, she turns towards him, there’s probably movement but it doesn’t matter.
Sit wherever you can.
Beer?
She has hair like worn out denim.
You don’t drink?
It tastes funny.
A refrigerator opens and closes, opens and closes, he sits close.
To her?
Close.
She feels like they are at a cocktail party and she is a waitress and never-mind, this metaphor isn’t working for you.
Time to insert the lights, the northern lights, the potent northern lights. Drugs? Yes. Drugs. They make the story better. So she is sitting, hunched, working on the northern lights, the pieces sticking to her greasy fingers, her fingers sticky, not greasy, sticky. The stems, the leaves, the seeds, the tools she uses.
Well you have an imagination, don’t you? Think, think for yourself. She turns a palm sized fragrant green bush into olive gold dust, shredded, minced, dust-like, I want to lick it, to blow it away, to let it fill the room, like sunlight, like a flood, like the black filling the white.
She mutters, because that’s what she does, that’s how she does things, in a mutter. She mutters softly because she does things softly, because she is soft, like a pillow, an angel made of cotton that flies into the clouds and falls onto the earth like snow.
What?
She muttered softly and the syllables were delayed in reaching my ears.
More things happen. He speaks. She speaks. No one speaks.
No one has to speak.
The paper doesn’t say anything, the clothes don’t say anything, the people don’t say anything. Are you starting to get the point?
I understand if you stop, reading.
Or you stop reading.
Or you, stop reading.
It will change anyway. It’s already changing.
She takes a hit behind the lit match, a fire she can’t possess. Yes, that says a lot. About her, about the fire, the fire in her heart, in her loins, in her hand, it’s just a match people and she is just taking a hit. She takes a long hit. The smoke coming in and the smoke coming out, one by one, she inhales and then exhales, she takes pride in the movement, the actual rhythm of the in and the out, the smoke coming from her, through her, she is changing it, it is changing her. She is the smoke.
What are we talking about anyway?
She holds it like people hold cigarettes in the twenties. Maybe she belongs there. Maybe I put her in the wrong decade. Maybe she is not even alive yet, half formed, just a walking talking mouth that inhales and exhales but doesn’t have anything to say or doesn’t know how to say anything, or maybe there are just too many words.
She is nursing the smoke.
She wants music. She wants music to tell me about these dreams and suddenly, unprecedented, out of nowhere, for shock value, a symphony of notes explodes inside her.
She feels like she is drifting in and out of the room, in and out of the music, in and out of her mind.
She is on and then off the paper.
(In dreams I walk with you. In dreams I talk to you.
In dreams you're mine. All of the time we're together
In dreams, In dreams.)
In the morning, in bed, I watch her get dressed rolling her black stockings up her smooth thighs, calmly combing her rainbow hair, yet she feels like she should be getting rid of something.
(But just before the dawn, I awake and find you gone.)
Maybe it should have been: I go, you stay, wait.
(It's too bad that all these things, Can only happen in my dreams
Only in dreams In beautiful dreams.)
She speaks like spring has come to cover her, like cardinals sing, and I feel not all the fervor in the world has gone out, just the lit match, just the smoke.
I am wistful, or at least I was, before the dream cracked like glass shattering into millions of little pieces, the illusion of her, of me, of life, finally lost, in this moment.
Still, somewhere, even if only in dreams I could find it hiding behind corners, or in sinking cups, or in the rising steam from coffee.
If only in some moment.
