Showing posts with label Curio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Curio. Show all posts
The Hills at Wallston Park
Patrick could never take bottled water seriously. Bethel and Shaney loved the junk, but he could never get his head around spending money on it. It didn't mean that he was unhappy to have the 24 ounces in his hand. The bottle was at the point where the thinness of the Earth conscious product packaging crinkled every time he brought it up to his lips. He rubbed the sweating label against his forehead and blonde eyebrows and closed brown eyes. There was something satisfying knowing they would both be waking up soon and see the note he left by the key dish and would, in all likelihood, proceed directly to the mini-fridge in Carson's bedroom to help themselves. He would be beyond upset if he knew they were attacking his fridge instead of Pat's. "Be back soon. Do not touch my stuff. -Pat" Carson was a push over, because he had to be. It's what happened when you lived on someone else's dime. Beth and Shane knew it. They knew him for so many years before Pat ever met him. They knew him like the rope jumping number games of fifth grade math. Pat still did the long division by hand, but eventually he got answers down on paper the same as them. It took a while longer, but he figured it out all the same.
Tub Song
The odd thing about bathtubs in small apartments is that they are never deep enough to fold a body into and still be able to bury that body in pipe tanned water. Chris tried anyway. He curled himself into an ampersand of naked limb and raw bone, the water from the tap churning against his feet. The ampersand of being coiled harder, a cross section of a torsion bar pressing back the weight of carriage against the gaps in a road hidden well enough to take the most seasoned local driver by surprise. His head touched the pistachio green paste colored fiberglass at the tub's opposite end while the water, as hot as it could come, rippled inside his left nostril and lapped at his right. Both eyes stood open. One beneath the waves. One above. He could taste the salt of his day worn skin through the socket. The spikes and tines of the tang pricked the soft tissue behind his tongue like toothpicks to yellow cake. He made no effort to breath, allowing the natural drive for self preservation to tick his neck a few degrees this way to suck air, air still chunky with the scents of summer park greens and rain soaked tennis shoe soles left to dry, into his lungs. With one eye he watched the steam lap at the bathroom mirror. With the other eye he watched his breath bubble through and stick to the fiberglass of the tub wall in tiny, forgetful, silvered mercury spheres.
The trickle and blubber of water into water was joined by the thrush and hiss of water through a downspout. Skin drawn as tight as it can go over muscle dimples easily. Body builders take diuretics before competitions to produce the effect of forgetting to drink. Forgetting to eat. He opened his mouth and drank some of the hot water. The taste was not unbearable. He heard from someone at his job, someone who was more accustomed to rations and starvation and kneeling in sandy holes than splitting coffees at fast food joints in the titular hours of the morning after a night's eight hours, that if you drink hot water it can trick the stomach into believing it is full of chewed food. "How do you trick a mind into believing it is empty of chewed thought," he asked him that day. Chase laughed and shook his head. There was no joke. The gap glared like a newspaper swatted hound. In that gap there was too deep a glimpse at a thing they both knew existed. A thing they both wondered at in the small hungry hours of fingering dollar bills and counting days until the next pay cycle. He wanted to ask Chase if he ever killed anyone over there. "What was it like?"
Chris swallowed again. "An Easter egg. I am an Easter egg in a pool of dye and I am not dying," he considered. Hugging his knees to his chest, he realized, was not necessary. The slender width of the tub could hold his knees to his chin on it's own. He let go and, careful not to swish the half hot, half tub filling, water to the floor he wrestled his left arm from beneath his body weight and allowed it to rest in the few inches of space between his thighs and his stomach, like a cracked bone in a cheap blue sling. "What do you do with an Easter egg that will not take it's dye," he wondered, toes touching each other in conference. "You could eat it," he answered. "Boil it, maybe." His mind began to count the number of people that would be able to answer the question, the number of people he knew that would be willing to answer the question. "You would have to break it open of course, to see if the dye took on the inside." He considered for several seconds the principles of osmosis, deciding several neck twisted breaths later that high school was not worth revisiting for any length of time. There was no single piece of information locked up in those years worth searching for. His stomach tightened. Pressed his hips and his knees against the plastic tub wall and forced his spine against the opposite.
Chris listened to the drum roll of his vertebrae against the flex of plastic. The slow roll of knuckling pops knocked through the water to his submerged ear like fingers tapping against the thick clear plastic of a receptionist's desk. The knocks sounded like the weak fist of an aged man pounding against his own door in a blizzard. Locked out of his own home by his oversight. Frozen to death because he left without his keys. Never leave home without your keys the lolling, muted, dots of sound whispered to his left brain. His right heard nothing save the dribble tickle of air bubbles through water. He blinked, unsure for a moment that the pair of soft crushy spheres in his head were his own. They were. "I can't remember the last time I sat in the sea."
He shifted, a chain dangled bench on a summer night's planked porch touched by a breeze of thought. The water waved it's agreement. "I know you," the water said. "Where have you been?" Chris did not answer. He did not know how to answer. The water waved like a stranger to another stranger, half recognition, half courtesy, half hoping to be right, half too embarrassed to be wrong. The faucet was red in the face already. With splayed toes Chris reached the water softened palm of his foot to the heat of the hot water knob and cranked it gently until the burble and glass chute of falling water to water was superseded by the shush of falling water to crusted drain pipe. The tub was as full as it would ever be, and hot water came with a price tag only manageable when managed. And besides, the tongues of heat swathed everywhere along his still exposed skin where the tongues of water did not. "I am a continent," he thought, "kissing these waves of sea water. A continent rapping it's time gnawed knuckles against the heart of the Earth. Waiting for you," he blinked his water eye, "I have always been here."
"I know you."
"Can you feel me? Can you touch me," he thought"
"The way I used to?" The hiss quieted. The water was settling, cooling, to the ring of shedding that ran like a seam of skin along a scrotum. The steam on the bathroom mirror began to bead like sweat on the tip of a nose. Chris tucked his arm downward and in between his thighs. "Are you dying on the inside?"
"I don't know," he whispered and swallowed again. He tried to break himself open before. Once. Twice if his memory could serve him well enough to know a thing with certainty. He came apart then. Came apart like the pages in a book too old to be read, pages too furnace crisped to turn without flaking away like the ashes of a dream in the seconds after eyes snapped out from behind lids like roiling laughter from behind clenched teeth. He peeled then. A flower cut and destined for the press of paper weights for preservation and posterity, but left too long on a sun room's shelf and fractured between gripping fingers into a confetti of lost property and faded rainbow sliver dust. There was nothing left to know in the heap of scraps then. Nothing to study. To confirm or deny. His skin was beginning to prickle.
Pruning, Chris read somewhere, was actually sweat trapped beneath a layer of dead skin. Trapped beneath a layer of matter that used to function and whose only purpose, since ceasing to, was to protect the skin that still did. If you scratched at it hard enough, it could come off. If you had the fingernails for it. Geologist fingers. He squeezed his left forearm between his half submerged legs. It was still his arm there, still his hand and veins, still his limbs. "Are you going to fall asleep in me," the water asked?
"Like I used to," he moved in his cradle, the chunky air beginning to fall in brine brush strokes of chill and darkness. A streak of lightning touched the water and the light switch and sprinted away through the obscuring dappled film of the bathroom window. The afternoon hours were spent and dancing in evening streets, waiting for a bath of their own. He turned, a landmass farther from the sun, unbroken by the human touch of neither hand nor passage of foot. He kissed the waves. "I can try."
The trickle and blubber of water into water was joined by the thrush and hiss of water through a downspout. Skin drawn as tight as it can go over muscle dimples easily. Body builders take diuretics before competitions to produce the effect of forgetting to drink. Forgetting to eat. He opened his mouth and drank some of the hot water. The taste was not unbearable. He heard from someone at his job, someone who was more accustomed to rations and starvation and kneeling in sandy holes than splitting coffees at fast food joints in the titular hours of the morning after a night's eight hours, that if you drink hot water it can trick the stomach into believing it is full of chewed food. "How do you trick a mind into believing it is empty of chewed thought," he asked him that day. Chase laughed and shook his head. There was no joke. The gap glared like a newspaper swatted hound. In that gap there was too deep a glimpse at a thing they both knew existed. A thing they both wondered at in the small hungry hours of fingering dollar bills and counting days until the next pay cycle. He wanted to ask Chase if he ever killed anyone over there. "What was it like?"
Chris swallowed again. "An Easter egg. I am an Easter egg in a pool of dye and I am not dying," he considered. Hugging his knees to his chest, he realized, was not necessary. The slender width of the tub could hold his knees to his chin on it's own. He let go and, careful not to swish the half hot, half tub filling, water to the floor he wrestled his left arm from beneath his body weight and allowed it to rest in the few inches of space between his thighs and his stomach, like a cracked bone in a cheap blue sling. "What do you do with an Easter egg that will not take it's dye," he wondered, toes touching each other in conference. "You could eat it," he answered. "Boil it, maybe." His mind began to count the number of people that would be able to answer the question, the number of people he knew that would be willing to answer the question. "You would have to break it open of course, to see if the dye took on the inside." He considered for several seconds the principles of osmosis, deciding several neck twisted breaths later that high school was not worth revisiting for any length of time. There was no single piece of information locked up in those years worth searching for. His stomach tightened. Pressed his hips and his knees against the plastic tub wall and forced his spine against the opposite.
Chris listened to the drum roll of his vertebrae against the flex of plastic. The slow roll of knuckling pops knocked through the water to his submerged ear like fingers tapping against the thick clear plastic of a receptionist's desk. The knocks sounded like the weak fist of an aged man pounding against his own door in a blizzard. Locked out of his own home by his oversight. Frozen to death because he left without his keys. Never leave home without your keys the lolling, muted, dots of sound whispered to his left brain. His right heard nothing save the dribble tickle of air bubbles through water. He blinked, unsure for a moment that the pair of soft crushy spheres in his head were his own. They were. "I can't remember the last time I sat in the sea."
He shifted, a chain dangled bench on a summer night's planked porch touched by a breeze of thought. The water waved it's agreement. "I know you," the water said. "Where have you been?" Chris did not answer. He did not know how to answer. The water waved like a stranger to another stranger, half recognition, half courtesy, half hoping to be right, half too embarrassed to be wrong. The faucet was red in the face already. With splayed toes Chris reached the water softened palm of his foot to the heat of the hot water knob and cranked it gently until the burble and glass chute of falling water to water was superseded by the shush of falling water to crusted drain pipe. The tub was as full as it would ever be, and hot water came with a price tag only manageable when managed. And besides, the tongues of heat swathed everywhere along his still exposed skin where the tongues of water did not. "I am a continent," he thought, "kissing these waves of sea water. A continent rapping it's time gnawed knuckles against the heart of the Earth. Waiting for you," he blinked his water eye, "I have always been here."
"I know you."
"Can you feel me? Can you touch me," he thought"
"The way I used to?" The hiss quieted. The water was settling, cooling, to the ring of shedding that ran like a seam of skin along a scrotum. The steam on the bathroom mirror began to bead like sweat on the tip of a nose. Chris tucked his arm downward and in between his thighs. "Are you dying on the inside?"
"I don't know," he whispered and swallowed again. He tried to break himself open before. Once. Twice if his memory could serve him well enough to know a thing with certainty. He came apart then. Came apart like the pages in a book too old to be read, pages too furnace crisped to turn without flaking away like the ashes of a dream in the seconds after eyes snapped out from behind lids like roiling laughter from behind clenched teeth. He peeled then. A flower cut and destined for the press of paper weights for preservation and posterity, but left too long on a sun room's shelf and fractured between gripping fingers into a confetti of lost property and faded rainbow sliver dust. There was nothing left to know in the heap of scraps then. Nothing to study. To confirm or deny. His skin was beginning to prickle.
Pruning, Chris read somewhere, was actually sweat trapped beneath a layer of dead skin. Trapped beneath a layer of matter that used to function and whose only purpose, since ceasing to, was to protect the skin that still did. If you scratched at it hard enough, it could come off. If you had the fingernails for it. Geologist fingers. He squeezed his left forearm between his half submerged legs. It was still his arm there, still his hand and veins, still his limbs. "Are you going to fall asleep in me," the water asked?
"Like I used to," he moved in his cradle, the chunky air beginning to fall in brine brush strokes of chill and darkness. A streak of lightning touched the water and the light switch and sprinted away through the obscuring dappled film of the bathroom window. The afternoon hours were spent and dancing in evening streets, waiting for a bath of their own. He turned, a landmass farther from the sun, unbroken by the human touch of neither hand nor passage of foot. He kissed the waves. "I can try."
See, Feel, Find Me
***Can we transact." Steven planted the jar, full of glistening dark love firmly in the dirt beside the coffee can mini-hotplate contraption. The smell would have been as fresh as a half buried corpse were it not for the severe overtones of amonia, scorched colon and vaporized bile. "I'm just saying can we please transact. Or," Ron Wynn did not like how Steven's gaze made the skin on his chest attempt to claw away and hide at the small of his back, "you know. Or not. It's up to you." A small storm radio kicked on loud enough to rouse a "fuck, god damn" from Ron's already weak gut, then just as quickly as it started it cut off as the camper ripped the square battery out of it and chucked it across the way with a splash into the duct.***
Someone Raises the Wolves
***"I'll tell you something, sir. That property probably isn't worth more than the deed it's printed. Not in Devonshire. Second, there is nothing out here but loose dirt and dogs so if you do find yourself owning something that is not one or the other, I suggest you let the Chesapeake lay her claim, cause she is going to claim these parts eventually." The truck hurdled earth mound and fallen branch alike in comparative silence for the next few miles. "Just, my suggestion is all," the cabbie qualified with a stiff tip of his woven straw hat. He leaned his head out of the window, ignorant of the thick clouds of mayflys and gnats that hovered in pockets thick enough to cut with a blade to spit his cheek full of chewing tobacco into the low brush. "See if you feel like honoring rain checks after a 43 year long whipping," he laughed as he handled the pickup with his left hand and placed more tobacco in his bottom lip with his right.***
344 Boxer Ct
***"Pinky swear?"
"I don't see it!"***
"Pinky swear," Will performed a like gesture and they shook on it. Winton wiped his palms together a few times. He vanished from the shoulders down as he picked his way through the thatched blades in the beating heat. Nearby, a fat flightless insect began its mid-afternoon song as though it were trying to imitate the sound of a stick dragging across the open mouths of an endless line of metal cans, several frantic yards at a time. "I think I last saw it near the middle of the yard," Will shouted, his thoughts racing back to several nights ago. Winton trundled on hand and knee for several more feet before sitting up.
Dream Scar
***Her hair was still wet from her morning shower and hung in thin and clumpy blond strands. Steve could not see her face clearly, but she knew without a word from his mouth that the bags under her eyes were only deeper and darker than they were two nights ago. She gathered the green and pink printed and tasseled blanket tighter around her shoulders, curling her thin toes into the nearly pastel gray and sandy tan of the pebbly earth beneath her. The ground was cold and feeling her blood chilling in the soles of her feet before it rushed back to her heart and head was a delicious relief. The shower water was never cold enough inside the cottage. "Hey," she paused to gather her vocal cords more tightly under control, "did you think about what we talked about last night? At all?" She did not look back at him.
The heat of the enormous fireplace, a fireplace large enough to roast an animal that could feed a large family, billowed out of the front door and wrapped around the twin piers of his plaid pajama panted, legs before spilling a short way across the ground and vanishing. He thumbed the thick band as he answered, "I did." He sipped again.***
The heat of the enormous fireplace, a fireplace large enough to roast an animal that could feed a large family, billowed out of the front door and wrapped around the twin piers of his plaid pajama panted, legs before spilling a short way across the ground and vanishing. He thumbed the thick band as he answered, "I did." He sipped again.***
Richmond County Fair
***"No, not here to visit. Not visiting at all." The pallor of the man's skin was not the white of poor health, nor the pink of wellness, but more and more as I stared, transfixed, it took on the gray of mausoleum walls and head stones. His eyes focused sharply on my own, one definitely yellow and the other white with cataract. "Not visiting at all."***
The Dreaming Door
***"Alright, boys in back, ladies in the cab," Brad smiled, tossing his keys into the air and snatching them back mid flight. "That was not as easy as I'd hoped, but some help is better than no help, " he thought to himself. He turned and strode to his pick up, unlocking the passenger side door before walking around the front of the car, waving to Mack who gave him a nod between glances at his functioning black and white television, and unlocked the driver side. He opened the door and flinched back. Rodney was already seated in the middle seat. "Kid, you are something else," he shook his head and began to climb aboard once again. Will's bicycle came to halt against the plastic rear window of the cab with a crack loud enough to make him jump a half inch out of his skin. "Come on, Will," he muttered, taking a breath, "she isn't new, but she's worth more than you," he sighed. Everybody was in. He turned the engine, reversed, and headed for his horse pens...***
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