I’m out delivering a lunch order at a funeral home and I’m surprised to see my cousin standing in the lobby wearing a suit. It’s a charcoal grey. His tie is pink and this frustrates me. Timmy is always inappropriate with choice of clothing.
“Timmy, what’re you doing here? Who died?”
“You did, Chuck. Chucky’s dead. You died.”
Ice slips down my spine. I’m unclear of the circumstance but I know the feeling. I’ve lost. Pressure thick and ragged pushes into my rib cage and I know it’s over. Defeated, I let fall the spinach salad in the white paper bag and allow my cousin to lead me to my viewing.
“There, there Chucky baby, it’s okay. We all knew you were going to die eventually. Happens to the best of us. Don’t get any fucking dead person stink on my new suit, shithead.”
He guides me, hand pressed against shoulder to the acceptably crowded room. The line’s not out the door or anything but I’m satisfied with the amount of mourners. It’s the demeanor of some of them that throws me off, some tapping their feet and sighing with the howdarehekeepmewaiting and thisiscompletelyunacceptable and it makes me uncomfortable to know that they’re all staring although not looking at me at all. I try to speak a solemn apology but instead I belch dust and cobwebs and small pebbles of dried blood.
Tim lends me a hand climbing into the stained casket using just the passable amount of effort possible, appearing as if he were truly helping. When I’m in he closes the lower half before moving to the top. He sees the confusion in my eyes as he closes it and he leans in close enough so that the wretched curls of stale cigar smoke stain my dead skin.
“It was a bad accident Chucky. You’re all fucked up and you’re dead. That the way things is sometimes.”
He laughs at this and I realize how drunk he must be, although when I lift my hand to my face I realize he’s telling the truth. I’m all fucked up. My left cheek hangs loose like the tongue of an old work boot. My nose has disappeared, nothing but two holes placed precariously between my mouth and eyes. My eyes are gone too and when I run my hands over the stitch marks that crisscross my lids squeezing them tightly shut I realize I can’t see anything anymore and haven’t seen a thing since I got here. It doesn’t really matter in the end because the casket’s closed now. People laugh heartily outside, but whisper in between each chortle like they’re talking about me, making nice when I’m around and talking shit when my eyes and ears are closed and I’m in a casket and a horrible accident fucked up my face and I’m dead.
I run my tongue around my mouth and then I start to chew down when I notice something’s lodged in there. It’s spinach. I can’t tell if it’s the spinach or my blood that makes my mouth feel coated in mercury. I’m dead and fucked up and it’s all an accident. Poor old Chucky. Poor poor dead chuckdeadydead chuckychuck.
The casket melts into the dry floral scentend air and now they’re forced to breathe me in and I’m everywhere at once and it seems I get the last laugh in the end, hahaha you assholes, because now they have to breathe in ol’ Chucky because there was an accident and I got all fucked up and now I’m dead.
Bar on a Thursday
The sign above the urinal advertises a Journey cover band featuring the former lead singer of a different Journey cover band and I begin to think too heavily about the market for Journey cover bands in this country. An imitation of a parody boggles me and I have to struggle to keep from accidentally pissing down my pant leg. Is there a market for cover bands of cover bands? Does the Journey cover band featured here next week perform covers of that first Journey cover band’s songs? How many miles does a man have to walk to consider a journey accomplished? Has anyone truly stopped believing? Finishing and zipping provides me no answers, just more questions and the dampness that only freshly dribbled-in boxers can bring. Shit. Or piss, rather.
Highway Song
The white lane lines are perforation marks and I fold the highway under my car as I drive along. It’s selfish of me, but I can’t find the time to care. I don’t want them to follow, any of them, the shadows that swallow thoughts in gaping maws and pack themselves close and tight into blistered swollen lungs. I ease back in my seat with my knees arched high against the steering wheel, letting cruise control push the night air away from my car. I’ve driven on 81 plenty of times in the early morning but it’s never seemed so dark. The four o’clock sky threatens to blend with the earth until all is one leaving the solid to evaporate away beneath my spinning wheels. I can almost feel my rear wheels and the back of my car tracing upwards in a circle, letting my car flip end over end , pulled through the dark on needle thin fishing lines from heaven’s reel. I have to concentrate to keep the sensation of weightlessness down.
There’s no one else out here with me except for the occasional 18 wheeler and even they don’t keep me company for long. Whenever I see one on the horizon I slide across lanes and slip past them like hot butter against the roadway. A few miles out from Cortland I see two of them mingle words with one another through the flashing of lights. I hear their voices cut against the silence of night in soft whispers of metal crushing against metal. They are polite, but their tones are unnerving.
I’m not sure what makes the thoughts bubble up, but I can’t help but see my car careening through the guardrails at every bend I close in on. I wonder which way gravity will sway me and I wonder how mangled my body will be in the wreck. I can hear the sirens calling in the distance to respond to my broken body buried within the husk of my shriveled car. I can taste the blood on my tongue and I can feel the bits of glass freckle my skin. I don’t think I’m crying out in pain, but maybe I am and just can’t notice it over the squeal of a fresh car wreck.
Talking drones from my radio, talky talk, syllable tongues rising through inflections of gibberish and gobbledygook. I try to pay attention but the words compact once they touch my ears and no matter how loud I raise the volume everything’s too quiet. It’s all too, too quiet. I want to roll down my windows and spit drooling shouts out of them. I want to dig my fingernails into the chalkboard of night.
I’m tired and all I want is sleep. I wish I could take back my handiwork on the highway, smooth out the crinkles and unfold the perforations. I want to peel back the black tar like a stamp and tuck myself in underneath it. I want my dreams to melt out from my ears and become the stars in the sky and then I want those stars to fall on all the cities of the world so that they all know what dirty rain feels like on clean skin.
After a while the city rears itself onto the horizon with a withered yawn. From afar the streetlights shine like tiny suns. It warms me until I see the red towers stretching up. My stomach turns. I’m filled to my throat with sick. I can’t escape the towers no matter where I go. They wait for me at home, they followed me away to college, and now they stand tall and flip me off, flashing fingernails at the tip of each steel finger. They transmit to me the hurt that sits beneath the skin and muscle and bone of my forehead. I can’t escape the signals they send. The next two miles stretch on for days in the slender frames of seconds.
When I finally pull off the exit I see two people walking backwards up the sidewalk, trying to trick me. I don’t fall for it. I keep driving.
I pull up to the old yellow house as the sky begins to defrost into blue. I lock my car doors from inside because pressing the remote gives a short horn blast. I don’t want to disturb the crescent moon and send him careening back angrily from the corners of the horizon, quieting the change in colors until it eases back to black. I don’t want the night to be never-ending.
I’ve arrived a few minutes before the sun. I go in the house and leave him outside, hiding shy behind the mountaintops, mulling over his trip and the reasons why he made it until he finally musters the courage to break from his pacing and creep along across the sky slowly, over time casting himself further and wider onto the trees and lawns and houses and streets and sweat and blood and bone.
George Bailey Lassoes the Moon
I’m waiting for the moon to fall
On a frosted glass winter night,
When invisible clouds shudder off snow –
Dandruff from God’s shoulder.
She is the largest white flake in the sky,
Taking the longest journey down to my waiting mouth,
Tongue unfurled from gaping jaw like streamer paper;
A dull pink finish line for a celestial body and its eventual descent.
The cold air encapsulates each breath in dead space,
A fraction of life lingering for someone else to find.
A murder settles in the distance with a steadied beating of wings,
A canopy of black feathers that hovers inches above white earth,
A piece of the night that came alive
And settled upon nocturnal snowfall
To mock my days and weeks of waiting
For one silver fleck.
My head becomes a new center of gravity
That draws the orb through invisible tracks in the air.
My fingers still reek of teriyaki marinade even though I’ve washed them three times, rubbing them violently under warm water until pink. Suddenly I’m frightened that someone will come and take them from me when I’m sleeping, remove them while I’m miles away and bring them home to the family as a meal, the freshest catch of the week. They’ll grill each one until they’re thoroughly cooked through and they’ll be served for dinner to the Peterson family, husband Rich, wife Jean, twin daughters Shelly and Stephanie, son Richard Jr. They’ll each get two, an even division, although Richard Jr. usually doesn’t finish his portion and slides the leftovers under the table for Chicago, their German Shepard, who’ll happily eat whatever the boy will give him. Perhaps my fingers will be served with a side of cauliflower or broccoli, some macaroni and cheese, followed by Jean Peterson’s famous Dutch apple pie for desert. They’ll eat with smiles and ask one another about their day, how school is going, when Richard Peterson Sr.’s next promotion is due, who’s turn it is to feed Chicago. The Peterson family will eat and later go to sleep in a quiet house, feeling warm, safe, and full.
Meanwhile I’ll sit empty handed and wonder why I didn’t prepare hamburgers instead. I will no longer be able to write. My only voice in this world gone, I’ll sit in silence and feel sorry for taking advantage of the ten truest friends I ever had.
The knife sunk in.There was a howl that filled the crowded bar, pushed out the walls and ceiling as if there wasn’t enough space to contain it. Ellie pulled the knife out.
Drip drip drip
Her husband’s brown jacket was soaked red under his right shoulder blade. As a reflex she wondered briefly if she’d be able to remove the stain by pre-treating it.
The knife sunk in again. Ellie didn’t push as hard because her first plunge taught her that flesh and muscle were softer, more pliable than they had always appeared as if the weight of a day’s stress bore no physical effects after all. Another scream arose in the now silent room. Everyone around Ellie slowly became aware of the situation, turning with drinks in hand to witness the origin of the shrieks. Ellie’s husband began reaching back to deter his attacker, but she stood at a distance to avoid his grasp. She pulled the knife out again, this time from a spot a few inches left of her previous mark.
Drip drip drip
A trail of blood came back with the blade, scattering small red flecks across the front of her pants suit. Seconds, hours, months, years leaked from her husband’s back and collected in a shimmering pool beneath the stool where he sat.
The knife sunk in a final time. Ellie felt disembodied hands pull her away as a gurgle lurched forward from her husband’s mouth. A lung had been grazed, punctured. The knife stood buried to the handle in his back.
Drip drip drip
He slouched forward onto the bar feeling suddenly tired. His head rested against the waxy wood while his eyes gazed dumbly at the highlights from yesterday’s game while it screamed scores and statistics as if to compete with the sudden shock of silence.
Hours earlier, his fist slid across her face. He had gotten angry as he was known to. She cried out, a deep despairing wail, as she watched him grab his expensive leather coat. The door swallowed him whole as he crossed the threshold until the only evidence of his presence was the crumpled form in the bedroom. Ellie’s bottom lip was split and the blood met with her wayward tears. They mingled together all the way down to her chin, where it hung for a few seconds before falling onto the hardwood floor.
Drip drip drip
At a Party, Across a Crowded Room
All it takes is the turn of her head to let me know what she’s up to, clear blue eyes stabbing a line through the packed room until the modern-day Moses begins her strut in my direction, her lips betraying not an inkling of her true intention as her not-tall not-short well-shaped legs swallow sections of the floor in large greedy gulps and her body moves as if hovering toward the place where I stand and her hair shines with a confidence that could surely best the morning sun with scattershot yellow hues that tumble over her shoulder in a way that makes my heart hiccup and I’m sure she has a perfect ass by the way the guys she leaves in her wake stare down at it dumbfounded but that doesn’t matter to me because right now she’s carving crystalline initials of her name into my skull and as she gets close enough I figure that this must be the way angels smell, like morning clouds etched across a clear blue sky in the spring and her mouth opens when she pauses in front of me with her teeth carefully plotted in her perfect pink gums, shining like diamonds or pearls or whichever is brighter and the music seems to dim into silence as the harp that is her voice starts up and I could swear that I’ve been standing here for ten years when she finally looks into my imperfect eyes and says softly, beautifully,
