36

His skin was the belly of a chip bag, greasy, and shiny, crinkly in places. If you licked it you could taste the grease, the salt that spread over him, and I was reminded of those deer you see at salt licks, opening their mouth’s slowly and sticking their tongues out, softly letting the crystals dissolve on their tongues. You know deer need salt to survive. You know we need salt to survive.

35

Time is a tombstone and you are the dead

Dread is a lover and you are the lead

34

like the backward end of a bruise, it hung on me, sapping the strength from me, unnoticable except when pressed

33

Once upon a time I couldn’t wait until this was over.

32

When this is over, when everything is said and done and finished, tied up in brown paper parcels with white-corded string, well then you will have time for regret. Then you can look back sorrowfully. Now.

Now, you must drive on, crack your whip, tuck your sleeping children into their beds, tell your wife it’s Now or Never, and maybe Never sounds like a better proposition in the long run, but Now is here, Now is glaring at you straight in the pupil, loud and long and ugly and about to run away.

31

When humans talk they dance like mirrors, reflecting, absorbing. Swallowing each other with intensity of purpose. After awhile, after thousands have twinkled into you, you forget that you can see all the way into them. You begin instead to look at your reflection in them.

Kids with Autism hate looking at your face. Even I hate looking at your face.

30

She imagined walking before the firing squad, her juicy satin pumps pulling her towards them, her red lined mouth, her red smudged teeth, set like a lady’s in an expression of composure - demure. She imagined a huge gust of wind blowing away her hood, her face stretching towards the sun, her dress, a lace frock flowing in the breeze, a magnificent tent. She imagined they were taken by her beauty. She imagined she called to them, Siren-like, one shrieking note, and it turned their hearts liquid, and their heads became balls of lust and their fingers betrayed them and they turned their guns to each other and the triggers quickened and stilled and they all lay before her in a miserable heap.

She imagined she was dragged, a laughing child from the yard and returned to her cell where she was not allowed to change, but remained in her lace for days until it became rank and scratched at her furiously. She imagined they brought her out finally and told her she would receive an injection, be strapped onto a gurney, and oh! she would kick madly until her pump flew across the room and into the tender eye of one of her Watchers, and she would shudder dramatically and finally lay still.

She imagined she was taken from the gurney and carried away, and in the hallway she leapt from the doctor’s arms, ran shrieking through death row, towards the sweet moving air. She imagined they caught her, dragged her back to her cell still dressed in her bedraggled lace, one pump remaining on her blistered foot. She imagined she stayed there for two hours while they faxed an emergency request across the border to Alabama where they hustled and rustled and sent the Spark of Death in a brown van, one-hour-and-twenty-minutes, faster than the devil.

She imagined the straps and wires, how she looked, a trussed whorey scarecrow. She cried this time, big sopping tears from her belly, and they made their way through a hole in the plastic covering the wiring and she exploded, blasting a hole in the roof and killing all five people in the room with her.

In 24 hours the fax would come back, stamped black. Denied. Hope was forgive and forget. Forgive her. The Governor. For.

Pinching pieces off of the Governor’s son with a blunt axe. In 1978.

When she was 15. After he had raped her.

And then came the trial. Forget, Governor. How you hired men to say she was a prostitute. How you called her an unforgivable slut, a callous demon. Forget, Governor. Forgive, Governor.