85

I noticed the car was gone at midnight. Did you have work at midnight?

No Ma, I got hungry

You got hungry?

Yeah

84

Laura was unique in her ability to pull people into her mood, to make them feel exactly what she was feeling at the time, and to believe that it had been there own doing, so those who came in contact with her were often left wondering what had made them so joyful, so sad, or so lonely. Tonight, Laura was angry.

"Aggie, where did you go last night?"

83

the salt of the day had most certainly dried her mouth

82

A blank page

The grass in the beginning of spring

wonders how tall it will grow

the pencil marks, ink marks, marker marks

begin to cloud the page

I wonder how far it will go

81

Every morning he walked the few steps from his front lawn to the wide expanse of park in front of his house. Long ago he had chosen this house for the park, figuring that he would always have something to watch. You see he was not content unless he had his eyes out, searching for something, then finally sticking to it and holding it close. Even when he dreamed his eyes behaved like this. In the midst of fog or confusing shapes or whirling colors, his eyes would find something and stay there, and when he woke up he would remember just one image down to every minute detail - the folds of greyish pink on the elephant's trunk, the rippled, grained glass of the building he was to fall off of, the sunset glow of the poker he prodded into the fire in a strange house on a strange day.

Every morning he sat on the same bench. It was stone, flecked with shiny pieces that looked like silver.

80

Her mother was a very tired woman. If you looked at her long enough, your eyes would begin to droop and you would feel your mouth stretching out into a vicious long yawn, and your conversations would slow to a crawl. Her mother had gotten married very early, falling hopelessly in lust with a lazy boy who would never amount to much, according to those standards. But her mother was blessed, or cursed, depending on the way you looked at it, with child-love. You see, she had never had her heart broken, so she never absorbed the break and her heart never had the chance to grow back stronger and wiser.

79

Tired was not a feeling any longer. Now, it was a part of them. Scaring away productivity and laughter, it was a longing, all consuming. A longing to shut their eyes for just a moment, a bask in that which was nothing and something all at once, the touch of both worlds, and oh how they wished this space of in between was true and they could be forever caught in its grasp.

78

She swore up and down that it came from the bottom of the ocean. From an unfathomable cave or from the stomach of some creature who could produce perfect rocks, swollen and round, shiny and at the same time pulsating with a sort of glow that spread outward onto her fingertips, onto his face. He believed it came from outerspace. Chip off a meteroite. Belonging to some foreign, unlivable surface.
And so they differed. She thought she could capture the earth, in all its burgeoning, expansive glory. He believed he could capture the sky and the great beyond, and furthermore, he believed he could fit it all in the scaley skin of his palm.

77

and i suppose it was the way she looked at others, in immense rows, like classrooms filled to the top with various feelings

76

they all went together in her head, the murky blues, solemn greens, the browns waiting to be reds...

75

and they held hands together, waiting for doom, waiting for the apple to fall from the tree and smack against the concrete, for the ball to deflate slowly, for the vase to topple over, helped along by a great wind.

74

once upon time. the end.

73

i want to sleep and sleep and sleep until i can't think anymore, can't really breathe anymore, until i wake up and realize i have to think to breathe again and then that breath will feel like my first and it will be such a new, new start.

72

brain's broken

71

when we find something, we begin to think it's ours. the laundry especially.

i wear an appropriated wardrobe always.

the neighbor boy's green shirt. my brother's shorts.

a rained on, soggy, splendid pair of boots that smell all of outside and none of the mold that should have grown and grown on them

70

look at that dear old cowboy sitting there with his guitar. and the rocket ship with the great red engines and butter-shine yellow sides. and the mannequin stuffed to the seams, probably cobwebs by now. and the bike all digested in rust's stomach. and the dress ten seasons too old. and the rhinestones, black like sin.

69

And does music swell or just grow - grow so large that it bursts inside of you and creates an irreversible place where you are forever expanded

68

Every day at 5:00 PM, he brushed the leaves from the bench and sat, sinking into the metal like only old bones can, because they are softer, more fragile, and welcome the unbreakable more than the bone of the young. Every day at 5:00 PM he opened his eyes for the first time that day, really opened them. In the mornings when he drove to work, his eyes were squinty, he believed he was born with two pairs of eyelids, like a reptile, one a filmy, thin lid that protected him from the harshness.

67

Her mother’s voice was strangely low and rumbling, a lowing moose, an insistent washing machine, and it suddenly surrounded her.

“you can smell the chemicals all through the house and the backyard and you know I don’t like you staying up anyways, you need your beauty sleep.”

These things that her mother said. Beauty sleep. Pocketbook. Diddly darn it. Fuddy Duddy. In reference to herself, to others, she made them a part of her thoughts about them, made them believe that they would be beautiful if they slept, made them believe that she was old-fashioned but principled and so they must listen to her, made them believe that profanity should be softened into something ludicrous, something so foolish that it would hurt nobody’s feelings, as tender and slimed as oysters.

“Ma, I need to finish this”

She shut the door. On her mother. Adolescent.

Many insects had perished in this room. Her sloppiness had attributed to three deaths that very night. A paint drip that charted its course from ceiling to floor covered a tiny jumping spider who was attempting to crawl away from the fumes and the light, and her.

66

She was fly in a bottle, she could see the other side, the dirty dark sky, but this glass, the one she kept flying herself against, would never break, bend, or crack for her. And she could see the great golden moon, the moon she would fly to and over if only if only she could make this bottle vibrate and turn over on its side and shatter and somehow she would emerge from the rubble and fly, even with glass sticking in her wings and pinning her down, she would fly higher and higher, and maybe she would fall, or be wounded half way there, but at least she could feel this real thing, this black, and be covered by it and kiss it and this was life this was real life.

65

i wonder what the sunrise looks like

in a post atomic

sky

64

Dreary day. The sun was screaming at her, the clouds were chuckling innocently, hiding behind their fluffed coats. Something grey permeated, despite the bright, despite the birds' melodious chirping. She began to think the grey was on her, covering her like a pair of sunglasses, blocking out the beautiful.

No.

Perhaps the grey was in her, drumming gently at her skull, stretching its arms through her intestines.

63

It was yellow when she was young. Urine, mustard, taxicabs, sunlight when you close your eyes. She was covering up the last of the yellow. She closed her eyes for a few seconds and thought about the yellow. Then she rolled across the last bit.

62

He was sad. The room made him sadder. So he stayed in it. Sometimes people like to get sadder. He passed in that room. Passed, not died because he passed through a fiery hoop, a test, and he went on, to where he belonged. Perhaps some do not belong to this world at all, and the pull to the other ones, or theirs in particular, or the absence of one is so great that it feels like sadness, but it’s really like separation, like when a little kid loses his mother in the supermarket and gets that feeling, emptiness, separation. The details are not important. The aftermath is, because it got her here. His parent’s could not live there anymore. Because he was splattered all over newspapers in that room, and in them the next day, they sold the house to the woman with a twitch (her mother) and the man with the grave, comely face (her father) for too few pennies. Her mother brought a priest in to bless the room. Bless the house. Like after a sneeze, God Bless You. And the boy, who was still inside the room really, laughed and laughed. As if his passing was anything to Bless away. As if his passing could be Blessed away.

61

When Leroy showed up that first day, the kids were so frightened. Leroy entered like a huge gust of wind, and the kids were leaves, all blown into a pile crunched together. And you know how leaves get when they’re together, well they look the same, every last one, and that was like these kids faces, all wide and waiting, like Leroy was going to eat them. I guess he looked like he was going to. Later I would find that Leroy just looks like he wants to eat something all the time – you, your surroundings, cars, buses, animals – some people are just that hungry. It was scary, see having this man, this beast, I don’t even think he was all the way human at this point. I think a point comes when you’ve been away from things too long, and you lose touch with what’s real and what’s fake, and Leroy is outside in broad daylight for the first time in nine years, and he doesn’t belong, no, not at all, but it’s not even that. Talking to fake people, electronic people, people changed by the darkness had changed Leroy too until he was half robot really. I almost expected his voice to be like one of those robots you see on television.

60

Later, Jackie would die in a car accident. Much later. First he would be a collegiate athlete. Win all sorts of awards, shine all sorts of hearts up with the polish he held in his pores, make love to all sorts of people – professors, students, his garbage man, the woman in front of him in the grocery store, his bosses – not in the carnal sense, but the old fashioned one, you know, how in the olden days they could manufacture love out of thin air and spread it all around, all over the place, and tie it to a string and carry it behind them and sell it for absolutely nothing. Well, that’s what Jackie did. And when the accident came, he was thirty-three, like Jesus.