i obsess.

Sore

I’m awake.  I’ve drifted up from the dark pool of sleep, gently becoming knowing and born into this day, my awareness of the preceding day and the things to come sliding onto my head’s table like a fast-food dinner, ready in an instant.  I feel heavy and sore, and, turning, note that my breasts are painful.  I try to not note just how painful, the level, the specific way in which they are painful, because that will lead to assuming I’m pregnant, and then I will want to tell people that I am pregnant, and if I am not pregnant, then it will all go badly.  I turn a different way and adjust my thought pattern accordingly, according to the stripe of light spread against the exact place where the wall and ceiling meet just beyond the curtain, the light not yet yellow, still white in its early existence, it looks like a race track.  Or maybe the arm of a tent pole.  I consider whether the quality of the light means it’s gray this morning or whether it’s just really fucking early.  I hope it’s early, because I have to get up! And get going!  And run!  Because I said I would last night before bed, I promised him and me and the air around us that I would run today, that it needn’t be a big thing, just maybe fifteen or so minutes of rushing along a sidewalk hurtling toward nothing in particular, well, not true, hurtling toward a stronger, physically abler me, the strength I feel in my belly when I am truly at my physical best, the sense of calm strength, that feeling of knowing if someone tried to hurt me they couldn’t, guns and other such weaponry not being a part of that scenario, of course. 

 

Get up! And get your fucking running clothes on!  I heed.  I say it over and over.  Get up get up get up get up get up get up go! Running!  Go running!  Go running go running go running go running go running go running!

 

I’m listening.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m definitely listening.  I’m just a little distracted by the way my body feels fairly nestled in this slightly-cool blanket and sheet scenario, the perfect pitch of temperature and weight and besides I’m just so goddam lazy.  But I’m still listening to that refrain of go! running! shit and I’m pretty sure I’ll do it but I’m really thoroughly enjoying the stream of a sentence pissing down the center of my head, it’s just the right speed to capture it all, I can feel the words being typed out and I’m not missing any of them, I wonder if it’s because I didn’t take any medication last night?, I think, as I sense my partner’s body shift to grab his phone/alarm clock and discover, I know already what he’s aiming at, to discover the time, I throw my legs out of bed as I mutter, it’s six.  I’ve lied, though.  It’s only nearly six, not six actually.  I feel guilt for having misled him but then I get up and quickly run to the bathroom and check my phone for emails and texts and after I’ve peed I feel deflated because I remember I wanted to check to see if I’m pregnant, and all of that golden morning first-pee is gone down the – well, not gone, yet.  Just, I’m not sticking a goddam test in the toilet, right?  So I don’t.  I feel a little grumpy about the whole thing and slap the hair tie around the wooly mess on my head a little roughly, a little mean.  I think my hair grumbles.  It doesn’t really, I just pretend it does, BECAUSE I’M MAD.  Mad=mental, not mad=angry, just so it’s clear.  I like to pretend, and adults aren’t supposed to, and so that makes me seem mad.  To some people.  Though they’d never say so to my face.

 

Usually when I write I consider my audience, and today I say to hell with that.  Today I write in my secret, secret Word document and feel naughty and especially smart for keeping it to myself.  I still consider my audience a little, though, because Word and I both know I’ll be flinging the contents of this bout, this stint, onto the page of my tepid-ass blog before long.  Word.

 

So now I’ve crept back over to the chair where my running clothes are, and I’m still listening to the pleasant word-piss stream coursing past my brain pieces, so now I’ve decided I’ve time to do my fifteen minutes of run and sneak in a bit of writing before I run, OF COURSE I’ve time, I always have time in this stilted place in my head where I like best to dwell.  And the bra, I predict, will pain me a little bit with its snugness, so I ignore the pain and fuss with the shorts that have no obvious front which is fine if there’s a light on but it’s still too dark and I’m certain they’ll be on backwards once I really wake up in an hour, but fuck it, and I stumble into them.  The tank is inside-out and my fingers resist turning it about, they struggle against their master and – damn, was that cramping?  Uterine cramping?  Jesus.  Maybe.  ?  So the tank is on and I’m in the closet hopefully grabbing running socks, mated ones even, but if those goddam socks have had babies in the night so help me GOD I will – ugh.  Nevermind what I’ll do.  I walk gently as I’m capable of doing back to the kitchen where I dig about in the fridge for a piece of fruit and find the peach and nectarine left in the plastic from last weekend’s camping trip, they’re both soaked in peach juice and one side of the peach is deflated and bruised and I imagine the peach in its giant glory and James and the others scampering about on its top, laughing at the cloud men, and then I scrape the side that’s browned and squashed and wounded away with a steak knife.  It looks alright beneath that brown and I sort of think it’ll be okay to eat and for a moment wonder what my husband would say if he even thought I’d attempt eating it and shiver because I know already, he’s disgusted with me for it so there, I just won’t tell him, I’M SO REBELLIOUS, wow, my right boob is itchy in this bra, specifically the nipple, is it sore?  Because if it’s sore, that’s unusual.  My nipples never get sore before my period.  Boobs, yes.  Nipples, no.  So – I should just – I’m not even late for my period yet.  I should just wait.  So I eat the peach and watch the way the gold morning light is staining slant-angled pieces of trees and grass and house-wall and burnishing the tops of the bushes, and the peach is flavored of sweetness and yet there is depth, there is weight in the flavor, there is heft, it has easily to be one of the best things I’ve ever consumed, and I can hardly contain myself.  I devour its flesh and lick my fingers.

 

I shouldn’t write today, I think.  I’ll get distracted.  I won’t go running.

 

But because I love to defy myself, yes, I will, too. 

 

Sore boobs and all.

Personal Space, Public

They sat, she, composed, her book on her knees, his attempts to converse with her quietly, gently rebuffed.  His unease a soft yellow powder wafting around her.  She always knew when people wanted desperately to speak, couldn't contain themselves.  She came from people of a similar bent.

Nevertheless, she firmly maintained a separateness, having earlier in the span of lessons been caught in his conversational grasp like a fish eyes bulging, no breath to maneuver her way free.

They watched the children.  She nodded at her son whose occasional glances toward her she was able, this time, to intercept, and the water went round and round and round all blue and light-filled and the stillness she had super-imposed over her person somewhat realized.

Sounds of childish squalor and water smacked and swaying were neatly contained within the walls of the pool's housing going up, up, up and the scent of pool chemicals redolent throughout.

Open/Shut.

“The important thing to remember is that we don’t need any of this,” she whispered to herself.  Once upon a time, she would possibly have muttered it.  But muttering is for beautiful, slovenly twenty-four year olds.  And muttering would’ve interfered with the silver-thin horn belonging to Coltrane that filled in the edges of her profile as she hunted about for this and that, puttering in the seemingly cavernous house/existence that smelled like dispelled ideas and wet dog.

Hearing the phone ring startled her away from her beginning-musings upon why that stupid incident from beyond the brink of ten years hence ruined her life, or at least ruined her, and she backed away from its shiny-jawed aspect and into the arms of the phone.  “Doll!”  And, “Darling, you know I wouldn’t do you like that.  Our standing weekly phone date stands.  I just – got caught up.  You know.  Shit fucking happens, and all that.”  “Do you realize the earth could catch fire?  My son informed me of that just moments ago.  It boggles the mind, non?”

The conversation played softly, picking up where the horn-music had quit and packed it in through a lovely segue within moments of the call.  It filled in her profile and she imagined the way it would look wrapped about her face, filmy and soft, as she preened, her chin waggling in chattering spasms.  If she could possibly, somehow, this time, in this seeming-intimate moment, explain herself, convince her levels of head that the woman on the other end of the length of rope attaching their twin cans understood her, in the unspoken manner she had taken for granted as a quality she would eventually unearth in loads of people throughout her life, she could quiet the burbling in her chest.  She cut a hunk of cheese to quiet it, instead.  The yelping of child and dog careening about outside in a hair-and-peach-flesh’d frenzy reminded her of such physical things as hunger, anyway.

If you could only imagine, only pierce the surface of the swirling morass of volcanic emotional action within my deepest, most hidden depths, she thought.  I would be at peace.  I could stop being haunted by it.  I just want someone to know, and to reassure me as to its not being consumptive.  Goddam, this room is a fucking dust museum. 

The call ended with a dissatisfying lack of firm clicking noise.  That minute element of closure never comes anymore.  She wanted to call the woman back to tell her that, to point out how their conversations never really ended because of that distinct lack of a finish, that mechanic element that had always so profoundly completed a long-distance conversation as far back and away as she could remember.  Her son would never know that satisfying, heavily completed click.  How it pained her to consider such an existence.  There’ll be other things, she whispered to herself.  He’ll know and be discomfited by the beginning of something and the end of it, too.  Too many things.  And he’ll wonder why it, the thing, is cause for such a deep, dismal unrest, and why it comes to mind at those dark, small hours of thin, watery-gruel (grueling) mornings when the day is a thing to be dreaded and not chirped at and he’ll blame her, and he’ll blame himself, and he’ll blame his father, and he’ll blame his ex-girlfriends and he’ll blame his career or lack of, and he’ll point his mental finger and draw a line around the world and that’ll be that.

It’s okay, though, she breathed softly through her nose.  It’s our version of flying headlong into a street lamp and falling down, down, fluttering with wings askew and limbs bloodied, down and gasping out the knowledge as we begin to alight and the death pall creeps o’er us.

She clasped scarred fingers together, suddenly gladdened by the dust and the dog hair and the cheese and the whirring life of minutiae and mirrors and Sunday mornings all punctuated by the bittersweet knowledge of this eventual - eventuality.

i'd say it's about time to hang it up, if i could be certain it wouldn't make me begin posting furiously in response.

Which simply means I have an uncontrollable urge, on a constant basis, to behave like an adolescent. 

At best.

FUCK, I miss blogging.  I mean, I miss writing.  I don't miss what blogging has kind of become, for me, which is this nightmare of social obligation that I cannot uphold.

I care about the people I have met through interaction created as a result of my writing here, but I do not crave regular social interaction.  I'm not super-good or whatever at that shit.  I kind of hate having to be social.  Mostly, I want to be left alone.  Sometimes, of course, that's absolutely untrue, and I wish ardently to be flitting, mothlike, diaphanous, under a moonlit night, threading through a maddening crowd, smiling, looking fantastic, making the other moonlit creatures laugh at my insightful jokes based on the quantum theory of poo, and wisely gleeful at my sojourn through life as a young, beautiful, diaphanous creature drawn to that one low-hanging light over there in the corner, oh, life, how long and beautiful you will be, how I will remain lovely and fresh and dew-bedecked, how there will always be other young, diaphanous creatures to love and fuck and kiss and spurn and worship and laugh with and oh, how that light beckons, I must just sneak only the merest inch nearer, I must just peer into its wizened depths for but the smallest speck of an instant, so that it may whisper its glowing secrets to me and I will grow only more beautiful and young and life will open and become more wonderful and the sounds will deepen and all the world will spin in a constant WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED WHY DOES IT BURN??? OH GAHHHDD WHAT! WHY! WHO THE FUCK SHOT ME UP WITH THREE AMPULES OF ELECTRICAL METHODONE HOLY FUCKKKK!

Owwie!

That's how it feels, somehow, lately.

Now that I am no longer beautiful, I can say all of these things, because my life is no longer that of the one where what people think matters.

It does not.

And I am glad.  I am glad to know this part, this clarity, this growing clarity that brightens and brightens and stings and burns the retinas, although that could also very well be the pain my eyes give me now in this era of my time from looking too long and too well into the depths of a stupid-ass computer screen, and from other equally eye-beauty-thieving shit.  I mean, don't get me wrong, I could read/ogle glowing screens from here until my personal eternity has quit me, because I am a suckling wretch at the teat of technology, but I will not score any points in the eyeball-beauty arena.  It ain't easy on the eyes, is all I'm saying.

(Okay, that was weird.  I had to spend, just now, easily a good minute trying to relocate my finger-stance on the right side of the keypad because I'm still getting used to this ever-so-slightly-smaller keyboard on the new netbook I work on, and it felt sort of like senility, like I had never seen the keys of a typewriter before, I scrabbled my right fingers over them attempting to place myself, place my extended-digit-self on the pad, and it was like forgotten-yet-known and so - scary.  Should it have been scary?  I. don't. know.  Yes?  Sure.  What's right, what's wrong, when your hand cannot find purchase on the keys of your mind's table?

I'm gonna give myself fucking Alzheimer's at this rate.)

Oh, the scourge of needing to write, and knowing how trivial, in the end, the pursuit.

There is no rhyme, no reason, and I should be loathe to share this nonsense, this drivel, and in point of fact I am, but I am compelled.  I am fire, I am heat, I am this stream of syllable and pronoun, and all while I whisper, faint, at night, late at night, when no one cares to listen, when I am shush and tuneless and all keyed up, and I turn disquieted on the spit in my steadily-deepening bed-coffin, there, in the night, I am burning it into my own little soul that I will never, no, never, write the things that matter, the epics, the torrid novels, the novellas, the pamphlets, there will be no great production, I will not matter, in this historic river I will not be trumpeting from the heights, I will be small and quiet and my voice will crack slowly and break into crumby bits that will not even float downward into the rocky crevasse and remain, stubborn, black, but instead dissolve, a foam of gentling acquiescence slipping out to sea.

I love these late-night rhythms of blur and tangy oblong heady chopped-up soups I whip up out of a child's purple cracked-plastic bucket filled with dark stars and cold, wet sand and dreams eddied into these arms, these fingers-of-brain that tell me stories when I cannot dream, cannot conjure my own dreams, am dreamless as I am currently barren, as I stroke my fingers down the length of the cave's walls and find etchings that remind me of a time so long ago that nothing hurts there, it is all wine-dark and wet and cool and there are gentle whispers of breeze along my forearms and about my neck, eliciting shivers that remind me I would prefer to go inside to the rickety rented house and away from the cold, but not quite yet.  Not yet.  Not when the chill and the stars and wine-darkness can cajole me with their guilty asides.

I long to know what they would tell me, but I am too impatient.  I must run inside!, now, and huddle close in a dog-hair-bedecked blanket, one that does not quite cover me, and I must choose between wrapping it around my neck while my feet dangle, bare, chilled, outside its snug embrace, or giving my feet its shelter and leaving my neck and shoulders naked and forlorn.

The hot cocoa is delicious but it burns my lip and is short-lived in its intoxicating splendor.  Why is nothing what it promises?

Oh, what I wouldn't give for the perfect cup of cocoa.  The one that is bottomless and hot but not stinging.

Fingers-for-brains, what say ye?  To bed, to curl up in crone-shapes and remind me of my pending death (which may be ages from now, but what's in an age, you fucking wretched bits of flesh and bone and sinew and shaped so very like the fingers of my forebears, that you would remind me of my own brief fling with this flesh fresh-that-is-not-fresh-and-grows-less-so-by-each-tick-tick-tick?  Hmmm?  Callous.  You're all callous as fuck)?

Obama's on Leno.  Tivo just winked on, but it can seriously fuck itself.  It cheated me out of a new episode of The Office tonight, and for that I will curse it roundly before allowing it to worm its pathetic way back into my life tomorrow at some stupidly weak point, preferably in the afternoon and we've gone and had some decent form of exercise and I can give myself the admirable excuse of having exercised our bodies adequately in order to feed on tivo's meager offerings for a few slices of hour.  Fucking tivo.  Ugh.  Tivo doesn't even deserve a capital letter at its front, the wretched brain-miser.  I could write things, you know, you beast, if I weren't slaving for you, panting to make my way to you and fall captive to your nightly spells of pithy, neatly encapsulated 22- and 44-minute dreams.

God.  What would Hemingway have to say about tivo.  Would we even know?  Would Hemingway have managed to escape its hungry maw?

I'm fascinated to ponder that.  I have to believe he, as well as my other literary heroes, would have stayed just out of reach of the miserable brain-eating machines.

Better me than them.  I am the martyr.  Yes.  Look to me so that ye may be saved from the existence of watching anything and everything your television shows you so that you do not prescribe thoughtful thinking on your porr, beleaguered brain.

I will bear that crass, er, cross, for you.

(I don't really think it's necessary to say anything.  It's cool.  I got you.  It's all me.  I got this one, baby.  I got this.  That's just how I do.)

all around me.

I live in a place where
my thoughts leap up from the page
tinted in hints, tendrils of physical ellipses

The items collect, the dust is neglected, the detritus rejected
by my hand
that recoils

To whom do I utter the thoughts I now keep
that I guard
untenderly
tended

Would that my courage could find its sticking point
somewhere other than in
my heart
in its finest, most curdlingly fearful, yet pained, locales

Word to the weary and-yet-unwise;
do not put off doing today what you will not yet avoid
in a tomorrow that will come

Like the dog's muzzled nudges,
the curtains pulled asunder
the muttered confusion
that grows into a clarion call of clarity
from the child-into-man

And in the betweens,
sleep
and do not dare peep at the drifts
of clothes
and assorted scattered matter
do not let its existence collect
inside of a viewed tense

Rather,
sleep
with both lids
clamped
until the rigid brows, bowed,
become softened by time,
and relax into their lines of closure
naturally.

dry.

I think about my grandpa a lot, lately, while I paint.  I think about his having been a painter, coming home from work at the end of the day smelling of turpentine and sweat.  I like to imagine, as my brush goes over its canvas of wall and wood, what he used to think about as he crouched and stood on ladders and peered into corners, his steady hand at work on the task.  I like to pretend I can smell him, hear him, hear into his head, to know how he felt about his family, his life.  My father has described how, when he was small, he would beg to go to work with his father, just so that he could be there to pick up small items, run for things grandpa needed, help lay drop cloths, wash brushes.  He said he felt such pride in doing these things for his dad. 

When grandpa came home, down the alley, in his ancient truck with the running boards on the sides, my dad and his siblings would rush toward the vehicle and leap onto the boards, riding back to the house, yelling and screaming, excited as all get out, because Dad was home.  About what he might have saved for them in his tin lunch pail.  Maybe a scrap of sandwich, a piece of cookie, something.  From what my dad says, no matter the item; it was always a treat when it came from grandpa's leftover lunch.

I like to think about these things as I hunker down in the face of the economic storm headed toward us, uncertain of its breadth and its speed, pondering my grandpa, pondering his having faced such a storm with my grandmother and already one son in their care (my dad's oldest brother, his senior by ten or so years). 

I drag the bristles up and down through the paint as it toughens in its hastily-drying state.

And I whistle at the rapidity of things.  Of the mind-skewing surreality of our time.

it sits with you.

A stifling breeze lifted the lace curtain in its wake, and she shivered slightly, though the temperature, a result of high humidity, made the furniture in the room seem almost wavy. Shimmers of dust settling onto the dirt road disintegrated in a sacrificial dance around the clumps and caves along its terrain.

The kitchen door banged behind her on her route toward the clothesline, her meditated attempt to distance herself from the things that came before this moment and the ones that must come after. Gripping a clothespin in her mouth and a steadily-filling basket under her right arm, the stronger arm, she hummed a little, remembering, suddenly, to check the rusted, orange clock on the stove’s ledge so as to gauge when she ought to pick the kids up that afternoon.

Long and rangy and spotted was the grass, a tipped-over bicycle bedecked with streamers taking up one of the better portions of its span. There were old shovels, once bright and holiday-festive, now dingy and pock-marked, and a tire that still had some air in its girth, a good thing for the kids’ detailed, story’d games she would occasionally witness from the gable window as she tucked small dresses and shirts and pants and socks away in their cubbies in the subtly leaning, yet still cozy, chest of drawers in the girls’ room. The one she’d found that day at that strange antique shop near nothing, just a ramshackle road, not unlike the one that ran alongside their house, a road with its own strange, moon-chasm gullies and ravines and choking dust. He’d been so excited, too, because her victorious whooping over the piece of furniture’s price, her unquiet exclamations, had caught him virally, she mused, going down the line of sun-roughened garments.

Fetching the clothespin out of her mouth with her left hand as she continued to clutch the basket, now full of things that smelled of lavender and dried grass and dust, she trailed back past the bike and the toys and the tire, she hitched each leg up, up the back steps, a little tired, a little worn around the beautiful edges of her silent mouth.

It was time to check once more for any indication of a response from the woman she’d emailed earlier, to see if she’d been accepted, whether her work would be, never mind validated, but paid for. The check, its importance like a scale in her mind where nothing else could compare, the balance of everything in their lives stacked, anxious, in clumsy, staggering piles on one side, the flat, tiny paper, with its numbers and scrawls, on the other.

Her thoughts beseeched her insides to not roil as she propped the lid of the battered laptop open, fingers quaking just enough to be visible, to remind her. And she prayed a little, the kind of prayer that never makes itself known in words, only a feeling, guts, and a small stirring, like a finger, one that only exists in the stomach for such moments.

The phone rang, a screeching sound, and she leapt up from her chair to silence it. It would have to wait, he would have to wait. He could wait until the end of time, she’d decided, decided in that instant.

And the email, the email, there it was, as she sat back down in the yellow-flowered chair, her sun-dulled hair grazing its edge, catching a little behind her as she sat, trance-like, staring at the thing, unable to open it.

The phone rang once again, cutting across the room, across her hands and fingers, and she picked it up and threw it. Shuddering at its landing with a cracking noise against the wall.

“While we appreciate your submission, we are unable to…”

The tears boiled just beneath the blue-veined lids of her tired eyes, and she squeezed her fists into the sides of her thighs to avoid touching her face, encouraging the tears’ progress, a pretense that it wasn’t really happening. The stifling winds came, again, dust wafting across the kitchen table, across the laptop’s keys, as she thought of bed, that morning, pretending to be asleep still when he’d summoned her out of it as he was leaving for the day.

If this was the way, she could manage it. And he would have to – she just wouldn’t. Maybe some time later, she might. Maybe she would tell him how he’d – that just because they were married, and with children, multiples, kids who were growing and becoming their futures even as she thought on it, that it wasn’t alright, what he’d done. The lump in her throat grew.

She cast a watery glance at the damned clock on the stove, leaned against the greasy tiles. Her fingers shook, less violently than before, as she shut the lid of the computer and reached for her keys.

and she was.

Tap-tap-tap.  She knocked the brush gently on the edge of the sink after cleaning around its smooth, white circumference.  Glanced alongside the toilet's recess to check the surfaces there, clucking softly to herself at the already-gathering hordes of dog hair, swiping at them haphazardly, preventing herself from looking harder or further for such things.  Just keep moving, she muttered to herself, just don't look too close, just do the job.  Clean-clean-clean, wash the dishes, finish the toilets, sort the clothes, remember to grab his hamper bag, run downstairs at a gallop, jump over the last two steps, land funny on the left foot and remember that time the ankle was ballooned ridiculously out for so long.  Too long.  Old wounds that should've been given proper healing time and attention and weren't, and now though they appear resolved, linger beneath the skin.

No matter.

Dash to the machine, slam the lid with a bang! upward, begin the sorting while humming some old song that used to matter and now there are only lyrical fragments that see-saw in and out of the melody.  She knew she had to get to the store, today, because, calamity!, they were out of milk. 

Recall the forgotten tub-cleaning she'd planned, and rear up from the sorting task like a wild mustang, bearing across a field, low, rushed, at a tear, mane flashing dark and spittle-bedecked, its oats the premise of the tale.  Laughing a little at the incongruity of the analogy.  On her way back up the stairs, a little more cautious this time on account of the ankle, the old balloon still prominent in her head, the balloon a salmon pink, she caught up one of the toys left on the landing, pinching it in her grasp.  It would be joined by other items, she knew, because it was always so. 

At the store, the boy at the check stand reminded her, lightning quick, visceral-gut-punch, of an old beau, a rock-band-academic, a double-major twat, his manner and hair as similar as a photo in her archives she'd suddenly run across.  She avoided eye contact, kept her manner light, pulled her fifteen-year-old pilled fleece coat tight around her, tried to remember that this was not he, that he she held in her imagination for so many years, two years, two years too many.  Just some young checker, some new version of him, and then the irony of this store, the memory of its having been a laundromat in a previous incarnation, that she had gone with him, nay, driven him to this former-laundry-cum-grocery so he could wash his clothes and squeeze her ego into a slightly smaller compression of its former shape, all at once.  It flashed before her, she flashed an impromptu smile and looked straight into this young man's eyes and straightened, slackening her grip on the old coat, his eyes shining back at hers with a recognition that surprised her.  It was imagined, she knew, but somehow, he understood, she guessed, that she was currently in good stead with her self, her building of layers of self, that there was pride to be sussed from between those waxen images laid to rest alongside the old archived snapshots, and cobwebs and slivers of self-hatred.

Her head high and even a little haughty as she heaved her bags of groceries and stumped out from the ex-laundry and into the fresh, wet air of a different Portland than the one it had been when this was a laundry and love was encountered and flipped on its back and gone sour and ebbed into a nothing she no longer knew.

Lugging the groceries toward the crackly-painted bumper of the old van, her head lowered, she remembered who she was.  His mother, his wife, her friend, her daughter, her self.  This self.  This now.  This van and this old coat and these gray hairs and this wet, fresh, chilled air, and these aging limbs and this life.

She climbed into the van.  Started it after pumping the gas several times to get it going.

Motored away, away from the ex-laundry and toward the current house, checking over her shoulder for traffic on Division Street before lumbering into its midst.

the write salve.

Write.  Yes, write, because it soothes, because it acts on the nerves like thick, pink coating.  Think of the morning, caught on the phone for a business matter while traipsing through the carpet store, acknowledging finally the exhausted grandmother, the toddler draped across the entrance to the booth for the employees, squealing, the grandmother's face simultaneously ashen and red.  Scoop up the child, whose arms wind readily around the steady neck of his mother, mouth still chattering a blue streak, sweet face pressed against her clicking cheek.  Relief a flag on the grandmother's profile that wavers as she bends to clear the detritus of the lately-removed toddler. 

The fast food settles badly against the landscape of the mother's stomach, all punched up and bitter, her thoughts circling one another like wet-fanged coyotes as her son wrestles against drowsiness in his small bed.

She remembers the ire raised on her neck at the restaurant when the barely-legal cashier debated her on the merits of a large handbag for all of her things; references his own mother's unnecessarily large bag, mocking her constant search for the wallet in such a reservoir, and her own pretense-at-mildness response along the lines of his mother having probably grown accustomed to such a bag when he himself was small and required her to carry many additional items for his use, for his sake.  Rather than reacting as he should, as she should have liked him to, in a less unabashed manner, he continues to jeer at mothers-who-carry large-bags-unnecessarily, and she pushes it away from herself, in an attempt to not personalize this boy's resentment of his mother for having ever been there with the extra-large store for things he might require.

Her son fell because she tickled him while he ran back and forth along the smooth plastic bench of the restaurant; she had only wished to join in as he and his grandmother played a silly, toddler-appropriate take on a game of tag, but she was, as usual, overwhelming in her sudden involvement; he buckled his knees, an expected, typical reaction, upon feeling her gyrating fingers - so why did she not recognize that he would do the following?: and fell sideways, head smacking against the leg of the table nearby, her arms only barely capturing him before he fell all the way to the floor.  If only she hadn't picked fast food, she thought, and if only she hadn't had to be doing business on the phone while in that store, this would've never happened, she wouldn't have gestured to the grandmother to "head to the nearest _____'s," thinking (mistakenly) there was a play area to be accessed there.  He wasn't injured, or even bruised, really.  Just frightened and clinging.  Her error.  She held him to her and cooed, walking him outside to talk to him away from the watchful eyes and ears of the grandmother who cared almost too much but in ways that unnerved her.

She heard herself bargaining.  Maybe a cookie would make him feel better?  (Because the fast food and accompanying plastic toy that were giving her cause to believe herself among the worst of corporate bed-fellows on earth already weren't enough of a bending-in-the-wrong-direction.)  He just wanted some milk, and she heaved a sigh.  Not necessarily of relief.

His soft squeak of a snore started her from her semi-dreaming state.  He was asleep, finally.  She could creep down the hall and get to work.  There was that phone call to be returned, and some other business that had come up in the meantime, the need to slightly alter a job that had not come out quite as the company she'd produced it for had hoped.  She began, instead, to take down the books and other decorative objects on shelves, stacking them quickly in boxes standing nearby. 

Her thoughts returned to the fight from yesterday, the one that had not yet been resolved.  It stung her.  It was ongoing, this argument, it was the one that had interfered with their old relationship the moment they had become actual parents, not the in-theory kind that had brought about a million easy conversations, about Christmas and the zoo and tickle sessions and playing ball and chasing the dog.  It was like a chain around her head that squeezed harder sometimes than others.

She sat down, quick, in her work chair, to escape the noxious emotion erupting about the endless argument over how to parent their child.  Her guilt, building all morning, settled back in its usual resting place.  The bilious gray clouds pushing against the window felt heavy at her back.

take on me.

i lie here, composedly,
composting,
hands folded, foldingly,
holding knowingly
my imaginary visions
visionary

your life yet a dream of
blue and ether
wispy and thin
the tail of which
i clutch
betwixt clasped fingers

eyes shut almost completely
not quite neatly
a corner
a sliver of light
through which i peep your
life
your phoenix eyes so bright

your mouth filled
with my beaming, gifted
entrails, my
skin, bones, lips, eyes
so close
so related
you taste
my mother's mother
my father's father

drawing breath as you feast
i hasten to please
your burgeoning girth
hovering o'er my
crumbling dearth
grumblingly bestowed
though no less lovingly sown

only my quarter-smile
remains
amidst the once-carefully
formed piles of dust
as your wings gather for final flight
the dust stirs
and you collect my soul in your winged span
you have no alternative
no ulterior motives, mine or yours,
can prevent it from being so

so go
spread yourself out
and finally,
wings entrenched at long last
in the mud,
settle yourself

and be consumed
and be consumed
and be consumed

by love's every form.
(it isn't lonely.  i am there too.)

i no pod.

I enjoy the chump-chump of rubber soles on institutional carpeted halls, of the

squeak of dry skin on a hand rail,

the creak of a leather bag

swinging softly, its dull

thud against a door as it narrowly

skirts through behind its wearer;

I hear the refrain of a once-popular tune playing, tinny, issuing forth from a desktop radio.  It echoes inside my head, and turns into a hum that doesn't quite reach beyond the interior of its fleshy mechanism.

I imagine hearing the song in its entirety, delivered through a set of delicate, doll-like wires and eardrop speakers, tucked discreetly away from public view, being fed by a tiny, modular electronic device, clever, chic, simple, complex.

I recognize the allure of dimming the exterior noise

of quieting the absorption of the outside world;

I see the benefit in shutting out the unwanted, bright, kaleidoscope stimulus of the too much that is exposure to social existence.

I swing my bag, its leathery voice singing in my hand.

I hear the beeps, and dings, the footsteps, the chatter -- the rain, steady and rythmic, all colliding in a din of chorusing, clashing melded melodic medley.

I listen, unimpeded, to this organic soundtrack.

puppy fur.

Nostalgia sits heavy with you today, as you watch the rain blur and soften the view from the front and rear windows of the house.  The various shades of gray differ only slightly from one another, while the trees' limbs seem to feel the weight of your blurry emotional scale, their tips slanted downward, and tiny beads of water, scattered across their outer edges, gleam softly in the dim morning light. 

You are sure, in your caffeine-induced, pulse-racing clamor of quiet, that your thoughts cannot unravel themselves to any great end, that they can only graze against one another like a series of brightly-colored bumper cars one finds in a shop situated in a seashore town, where the tinkly music, splattering outside of the building's entrance lures you near and you see the shiny, primary-hued, cartoon-shaped cars ranged along the smooth floor that is a clinical, nondescript blue.  You imagine, briefly, squeezing into one of the cars, and the memory of childhood, gum stuck to the seat, slightly rusted edges, smell of antiseptic and cotton candy and stale popcorn send a shudder right through you.  You tear yourself away from the small vehicle, avoiding the attached pole that always frightened you as a kid, and wander down the sidewalk and into the shop that vends a thousand varieties of salt water taffy, a strange but delightful concoction.  It makes the tears creep into your throat, but you sternly fend them off, allowing the pink-and-white-striped candies, so enticing in their waxen wrappers, to sing sweetly of the fulsomeness of memory, of the lovely, dim shapes that make up the past in friendly, soft ways. 

You recognize the nostalgia being steered down the path of least resistance, of comfortable, easy, warm-blanket-and-hot-chocolate-and-crackling-pine-logs coziness, and though you attempt to see through the hazy charade, you feel the gray outside the window, and allow yourself to seep into the cozy reminiscence. 

There is no nicer place.

because i need to stop tearing my hair out over the subject of my last post.

The bus stop was a little dirty, and she didn't really want to sit on the narrow bench tucked into its angular bosom. He obviously didn't mind that it looked as though someone had rubbed an old banana peel all over it and then, for good measure, a bologna sandwich, because he simply plopped down without a glance.  There were bits of gum and wrappers and cigarette butts and broken bottle pieces strewn under and around the bench, and the wall was encrusted with random (and somewhat bawdy) literature, poetry, and phone numbers.  She ignored his beckoning to join him on the seat, and instead stood rigidly away from any of the surfaces in the small space.

Taking the program from her handbag, she perused it absently, while sliding her pale fingers over the embossed, gilded lettering.

"It's quite nice paper, isn't it?"  She said.  He looked at her for a moment, his hand shading his wine-green eyes from the late afternoon sun that tracked through the center of the small glass structure.

"Why do you always sound like you're British or something after one of these things?"  He kept his hand in place over half-closed eyes as he spoke, lower back slumped away from the wall, long legs crossed at the ankles.

"I don't.  do I?"  Crinkling her nose, she looked over her summer-bare shoulder at his easy pose, her dark hair shimmering in the warm, yellowed light.

"Well, I wouldn't say it if you didn't, would I?"  He cocked his head slightly and smiled at her, flexing his fingers and stretching them over his head, the wine-green eyes laughing as he did.

"What kind of question is that?  Never mind -- I don't really care.  I'm going to adroitly ignore it by changing the subject.  What did you think of the speech, if you can call it that, that Robert gave?"  She said.

"He's kind of a pompous ass, isn't he?"  She interrupted his yawned query with a tinkling laugh that rang out sweetly over the area where they waited, then dipped and meandered on its path into an adjoining grassy meadow.

"Isn't it pathetic?  I  couldn't believe he managed to snag the opportunity.  The best part is that it was obvious, total revenge - you know, they used to date back in the day."  She followed this with more tinkling laughter that drifted off like soft pink smoke.

"I don't think I really knew that.  He's such a bore.  Say, come over here for an instant, will you?"  He said.  He intoned his words in a low British staccato.

"Why should I?  Besides, why do you get to use to the accent and I don't?"  She said, raising an eyebrow.  He reached up quickly, much more quickly than she could have believed he was capable of, and grabbed her hand, tumbling her into his lap, only to receive a sharp slap under his eye before she managed to upright herself, pulling hastily at the delicate straps that clung like wisps to her golden shoulders.

"Just who do you think you are?  Maybe if you'd had the chutzpah to call for a cab . . . "  She trailed off, looking away over to the meadow, her steel-gray eyes distant, hands wrapped around her bag.

"Oh.  Right.  Sorry 'bout that, highness."  His tone was light, and had acquired a cockney lilt; his body had resumed its languid shape, as though he had never moved from the spot.  They turned away from one another, slightly.  A high-pitched whine sounded to indicate that their bus was arriving.  She ran a hand over her lithe torso, brought it to the uppermost portion of the rear of her head for a quick pat, then proceeded to pick an invisible piece of fuzz from her waist.  He watched passively as the lumbering vehicle pulled up next to the stop.  She glanced at him once more, over her shoulder, as the door jerked open, then reached primly into her handbag and extracted several coins.

"One ticket for the city, please."  She said, smiling politely at the driver.  He deserted his sleepy pose and, leaping off the bench, ran forward, speaking as he did.

"Wait - you said you'd lend me the fare!"  His face twisted a little.  She simply grinned at him.

"Nooo - no, I don't remember saying that.  I do remember saying that I could give you a hand getting home.  And here it is - 'bye!"  She winked slyly, waving, then pulled herself up the steep stairs of the bus, disappearing into its black depths.

He sank back, allowing the machine's door to creak shut, and watched with his hand once more raised to his eyes as the grimy vehicle lumbered noisily off along the highway, spewing a thick, gray trail in its wake.  He ran a paw through his boyish mop, then, shoving his hands in his pockets, began to amble in the same direction, detouring only slightly through the grassy meadow, because he thought he might still catch a scrap of her pink powder laugh.

morning antagonist.

Pour the coffee. 

Add cream, fast as you can, and

watch as it creates an instant mushroom-cloud effect in the

drink's midnight center; a plume of whitish smoke that

greedily envelopes the former dank liquid.

Add a hasty stream of sugar, an off-white

waterfall of grains that tumble in and

stir, stir like mad with your spoon, toss it into the sink before

he can notice the shiny bowl of the implement and beg, pulling roughly on your leg hair,

your ears too finely tuned to the whine he floats up toward your aching head, your shoulders bent forward in a premature aging curl, gulping the too-hot coffee and scalding the rear half of your craggy tongue

the same tongue that you hold, painfully, in order to prevent it from lashing about,

aiding you in a combat

you wish to refrain

from participating in.

You tell your tongue to remain in its stead, instead, you go toe-to-toe

with the morning beast

with the tormenting voice

that lives in the mourning space of your head,

you tell it to quell it to shut the fuck up so as to navigate the waters of the early day without involving a row.

It is a difficult place, this morning space, it is cluttered and the cobwebs are miles long and wide and deep, they are the hammocks that swing, the only objects that remain unfettered in the space so jam-packed DAMMIT the jam just dripped on your foot and you look about,

praying for a clean cloth to still inhabit the countertop.

twinkle, twinkle, little snarl.

Sometimes, I'll be showering, or making the bed, or doing the bottomless pile of laundry and dishes, and I'll be thinking about some post that one of the bloggers I enjoy reading wrote "the other day" (as I am wont to refer to happenings from any point in the past six months), and I'm musing over its brilliance, and adding my own thoughts to it as I hum something to amuse my son as he bangs kitchen utensils together near my feet, but when I reach the laptop when evening has arrived and I'm free to be me for a spare hour, I can't remember what post/blogger I was musing over.  And I scroll through my blogroll, and I think, shit!  Which - who -- shit!

And, yes, I am aware that I could be, instead of posting this whinendium of my bloggy difficulties, adding blogs to my bloglines account, that sits lonely and alone, day after day, with nary a tumbleweed to amuse its pages, but when?  And besides, gah.  I'd rather be reading blogs, or posting.  Mostly, though, reading.  Never mind commenting.  I just don't seem to have anything fabulous to add to the conversation, lately, which is not to say I'm looking for tea and sympathy (unless there's cake or little, divine sandwiches with the crusts cut off served with the tea, in which case, bring that shite ON), I'm not.  I just want everyone who bothers to come around to this place and deliver the occasional heart-warming thought-bubble to me to be aware of the Mt. Everest-sized mound of gratitude I possess for each of you.  Every last spanking one of you.

*beams, with fingers threaded over heart*

This is also to say that I will, at some point, remember to post about things like my parents, who purchased a lifetime supply of crazy from Amway in the seventies and now they're always trying to get me to buy a relative amount (get it? relative?  sorry.), and I just don't wanna.  But they keep on pushin', 'cause they're pushers for the lord.  (Should that be capitalized?  Well, I'm not gonna.  Mehhh, I say.  Mehhh.)  And I'll also tell you all about my glorious, star-studded list of various fields of employment in which I have tra-la-la'd, and loitered and picked daisies and sometimes just spat a loogie onto before skipping off to find greener pastures, with fewer smelly cow pies.

Doesn't all of that sound divine?  And seductive?  Oh, yes.  To be sure. 

Until then, I'll leave you with a story I wrote a few years ago, and I'll try really hard to comment on the conversation it brings about, if it does (I'm still surprised when my words elicit a reaction of any kind).  I need to say something about commenting on comments RIGHT THIS MINUTE, before I forget *again*.  I know it's sort of a good-etiquette thing to comment on comments, but I kind of hate doing it.  I always feel like I'm just going to sound really stupid, responding to responses to my thoughts, and I get all nervous and shit, and can't bring myself to get the comment-on-the-comments written.  I love everything you all say, and I always *want* to respond, but - oh.  Shit.  This, THIS is why I don't.  Because my tongue runs around in circles until it's all spittle-y and tired and the result makes no sense.  I shall shut up about it, forthwith.

Here's the story.  It's kinda dumb, if you ask me, but I still kind of like it.  So you probably just shouldn't ask me, since I'm more than a little Sybil-ish about the whole thing.

Shut!  Up!  Debbie!

Okay.  Have a nice evening, everyone, and a Monday that doesn't bring on a case of the Mondays.

xo

p.s. I hope that somehow, typepad is having a forgetful day, and fails to realize that it usually sends in the anti-formatting gestapo, and, in anomalous fashion, somehow allows the Word format to work perfectly after I cut/paste the piece, even though I know that I'm asking for the moon.  May I have it, typepad, please? 

***********

Vegas.

She fingered the chips on the table and glanced over at him.  His shirt, so crisply white a few hours ago, now looked dingy under the garish lights of the cavernous room.  A cocktail waitress over her shoulder leaned in and mouthed, "Drink?"  She shook her head, a small gesture.  He nodded and muttered when his turn came.  She watched his body as it rotated back to focus on the game.  It was taut and squared, despite the exhaustion that seeped from his pores in wispy trails.  She swung around and stood up, walking away before he could catch her eye.

The kaleidoscopic swirls of color in the carpet were mimicking confetti being constantly tossed and littered everywhere.  The party that all the other people in the room were on must have deemed the carnival atmosphere necessary.  She trailed across the floor and imagined tossing pieces of carpet confetti in the air, watching as it came down on people's heads.  She wondered whether they would notice that it was rougher than normal paper confetti, that it was actually pieces of carpet, with the scratchy underside still attached to the loops of fibers, or if the revelers were all too drunk to care.  She pictured them each waking up the next day with carpet burns on various portions of their bodies - but no, carpet burns are from when you're playing with your brother and you're seven and he wrestles you to the ground and puts you in a headlock and pulls your hair and you're downstairs in the rumpus room on the shag rug and you twist and struggle to get free but as you do you scrape your elbow heavily on the rug and sustain the itchy sore that is the true definition of a carpet burn.  Ahhh yes.  That's right, she realized, and scrapped the thought of carpet confetti.

She moved past row after row of machines that bleeped and woozled and tweeted at her to come, to feed them with her silver pieces, and she began to notice the ones that had clown faces scattered amongst the cartoons in the jackpot games.  Clowns.  Whoever thought that clowns are remotely amusing, she wondered, bitter.  She let the primary colors spread themselves across her brain; red, blue, yellow, green.  Drifting in a room filled with primary colors.  Spinning around with red balls and green flags and blue curtains and yellow snakes and cobwebs cobwebs cobwebs red green blue black spinning ensnaring her in their ever-tightening shawl spun for her sake.  She tried to run but the colors were bleeding bleeding from the walls green blue yellow orange brown and falling and she was suddenly very dizzy and then someone was placing something moist on her forehead and shaking her shoulders and saying faintly recognizable phrases what?  What do you want?  Do you -- have you got him?  Is he here?  Because if you don't, please don't bother with this shaking business.  Just leave me be, here in this web of rainbow blood just go away, as she batted at them with her useless, fluttering fingers and empty mouth.  And then he was there, picking her up, so gently, so very gently, and she was resisting, she struggled, like a little moth caught by the cat, her screams thin as he carried her away from the room where the confetti made all the others smile and the colors bleed and the machines continued with their sing-song bleeps of invitation while, with her face pale, she held her fists to her ears, as he carried her away.

scattered pictures.

I was reminded of something recently, while watching Al Pacino, who, in character, drinks a whiskey in the 1989 film, Sea of Love; subsequently calling his ex-wife, drunk, to tell her he suspects he has diabetes.  He captures, quite subtly, the pathos, the utter aloneness, of the character, in the moment when he takes the glass and, hunched over, sucks the liquid very gently into his mouth.  Almost as though he’s making love to it (the glass, maybe, but more likely, its contents).  I was reminded of my, at one time, adoration of those very simple moments, simple but so-so-momentous, during the acting process.  It made me catch my breath with the intensity of the memory, followed by the knife-in-the-gut immediacy of disappointment.  Disappointment that I no longer have the opportunity to experience that lovely, liquid sensation.  Not the liquid whiskey – I’ll probably take another stab at sensing that – rather, the sensation of playing at being someone else; of disappearing into the problems and hysterias and neuroses of someone other than me.

****************

The checker, probably the assistant manager, with his perma-press, pilling, white-ish, short-sleeve shirt, at the grocery store, nervous as hell because it was so busy, glancing at me with a quivery furrow between his eyebrows and an even more quavering, throat-clearing chatter.  He reminded me of my experience as a grocery store clerk.  He made me think of the novice period, when I would see several people in my line and the lump in my throat would grow into a golf ball that I couldn’t possibly swallow anything past, and the rivers of sweat would rush down through the valley between my shoulder blades and my hands would suddenly become foreign objects that, damp and awkward, did everything but what I willed them to do.  How the people in the line would stare, they’d hem and haw, clear their throats, look at their watches, peering around to see if there was a checker less tortoise-like than me.

And he reminded me of the later period, where I was skilled in my role as clerk, that I would lean against the counter and swoooosh the groceries with upc codes across the laser eye, that I was proud of my rating as one of the top five fastest checkers in the store, that I could ring groceries up like the wind, a gale force that my arms and shoulders and hands manipulated in their deftness.  I knew every code in the produce book, even the most obscure items, all of the asian vegetables and seasonal fruits.  I was someone to be reckoned with; a clerking black belt.  People who were lucky enough to select my line were blessed with my awesome abilities as their checker.  They could, ignorant though they were, rest assured that I would not ring something up in error; and if, by chance, I managed to scan a package twice, my finely-tuned ear picked up the second quick beep, whereupon I would immediately void the accidental scan.  The ancient ladies who watched the display counter like fragile, bent birds with squinting, yet perfectly-sighted beady eyes, were never able to catch me at having overcharged them.  My till, always within five pennies of perfection, even on days when I rang close to ten thousand dollars in groceries.  My pride regarding my abilities was such that I felt nothing but utter boredom in the position, after a certain point.  The days that we experienced an onslaught of customers were slightly more interesting, but the skin on my palms remained chalklike in the assuredness of my competence, my mastery of the task.  The feeling of nonchalance that pervaded my body, when I could see the line stretch snakelike down an aisle, was almost sensuous, almost erotic, it was so well-defined.  It was a muscle that I could flex at will.  I could drop into a sort of trance as my hands glided effortlessly from one item to the next, as I visualized flipping the numbers around in my head when providing change, so as to do it without thinking.  I relished the busy times, I so adored reveling in my cashiering prowess.

I wanted to whisper to the assistant manager that he needn’t be nervous, because if he simply took charge of his form, of the exterior revelation of his excitement over the length of the line, that everyone watching the water bead on his nose and upper lip would cease to feel ill at ease; that, were he to convey a relaxed manner in his task, the customers would pick up on that communication of faith in his abilities, and the potential for disgruntled attitudes would disappear completely.  I wanted to tell him so many things, but I realized that it was beyond my reach, his enthusiastic behavior.  I couldn’t possibly convey my knowledge of how to handle something that he, in fact, didn’t necessarily want to handle any other way.  I tried, though, despite knowing the uselessness of my words, to assuage his panic.  “I’m not in any rush, man,” I mouthed, keeping my tone light, buoyant.  He glanced at me again, smiled anxiously, nodded, looked quickly over his shoulder at the line, and re-focused on the trembling hands that were his awkward tools.

holidays on i$e.

I took a break from le cirque du blog today.  Sort of a forced break, really.  I had a lot of doin's with my money-making ventures, and I'm trying to prepare for a sort of emotional tsunami that I know is impossible to be ready for, but I'm girding up my loins, nonetheless.  Whatever.  It left me with no time to peruse all the fancy, new window-displays of posts on any of the awesome-licious blogs out there that I normally eat up with a spoon.  Sad.

So.  No time = me pulling a post out of my arse.  Which would be painful if I were speaking literally, since the fissure that dare not speak its name has re-erupted.

I penned this not-quite-a-story several years ago, pre-baby, pre-wedding, pre-mortgage, pre-engagement, -- pre-life-with-responsibility.  It pops into my head somewhat often of late, just because I find it so fucking laughable (and when I say "laughable," what I really mean is that I bury my face in a kitchen towel so as to prevent others from hearing my mentally unstable sobs).  To think that I ever had the intention of living my life without a kid -- ahhh.  Ha ha.  But - the evidence is there.  In the not-a-story.

Anyway, here's a toast to my silly, old, carefree self.  (Drinks entire beer at once, then looks around, surprised by all the looks of shock on everyone else's face.  Blushes.)  Um, cheers?

(Oh, and btw, I left the old thing in all its musty, unedited glory.  Try not to grimace in horror as you discover weird-ocities amidst the dust.  I'll be here, chewing my nails fiercely, as I try not to let the bejeebus be bothered outta me.  Well, I'll be that and a little (a lot) drunk and also exhausted from chasing the kid around all day and working like a madperson during his naps.  xoxo.)

***********************

A Well-Heeled Error in Judgement.

Immediately after slipping accidentally from the ledge, the shock of it led her to wonder whether she’d remembered to lock the kitchen door. They’d had a conversation about the puppy not being old enough yet to guard the house if someone tried to come in, and she struggled with the feeling that it wasn’t important enough to make herself remember every morning. Which she fought against because she knew how high on the priority list it was for him. That thought felt wrong, somehow. She should be thinking about something else, shouldn’t she? Her life flashing before her eyes, or whatever it was people were always telling you they saw during a life-threatening experience. Was that right? What was she supposed to be thinking? She felt ashamed for never seeming to think or feel what was the correct way to think or feel. It occurred to her that she’d never find out if she would’ve done the right or wrong things as a mother. And that if -- no, make that when -- people pointed out her errors, she wouldn’t have stood up to them the way new mothers were supposed to, confident in their comportment toward their offspring. That was such a tedious thought. Not that she couldn’t make them stop saying those things, or tell them they were wrong. She could do that. But whether she could prevent their voices from penetrating into her brain, from slowly melting her resolve; that was what filled her with a dull horror. She believed firmly that she couldn’t keep the voices from providing her with the eventual conviction that she was wrong. So they won. And she staunchly refused to award them their trophy, the tangible form of which was a baby.

How could she possibly have had time to go through all of those thoughts inside of a milli-second? She still had so far to fall before she struck the earth, cold and unforgiving, her body bending in unnatural ways that would shut down her central nervous system and burst tiny capillaries and large arteries and fill her lungs with fluid and pop bones through soft tissue in altogether inappropriate directions, leaving her turgid and distended. She almost saw herself already lying there in a misshapen heap of jacket and denim and sinew and partially exposed brain. It didn’t bother her. The wind whipping in screams around her face felt better than anything she had experienced before, even while it felt so ghastly. It was the entire spectrum of feeling. So maybe that is what they meant about life flashing before your eyes, all of your senses alert at once, the combination of which under normal circumstances is impossible to achieve. Well, next to impossible, because otherwise anyone who’d experienced it wouldn’t have survived, right? Again, she wondered, why wasn’t she thinking about the correct things? How could she be posing such inane questions at that crucial moment? Anyone else would’ve been in the proper solemn frame of mind. Somnambulant. Solemnatory. Was that even a word? Case in point! (Point in case!?) Oh, why couldn’t she get it right? Her last chance at it, at proving to herself that she was capable of the appropriate attitude, and she was doing word play. Too bad her friend who shared her love of such things couldn’t hear these thoughts; he would’ve appreciated them, possibly to the point of getting it, her alien take on her headlong tumble into the physical void. Funnier if she replaced ‘void’ with ‘avoid’. Unfortunate, though. Too late for that switch. No avoiding the present fall. Fall. Oh, she’d been so excited to start wearing sweaters! She gave up trying to control her errant mental scramble. It was at least amusing. She was happiest when she was laughing, so even though she hadn’t breath to laugh, she could do it in her head at the last. She thought of the joker in Batman, his plastic laugh toy chuckling skin-crawlingly after his downward career from the spire of that dark church in Gotham. The most perfect rendition of Batman. Tim Burton a genius. She’d never meet him. D*mn. Nor would she meet Kevin Spacey, and then she couldn’t remember who else she cared to meet. She would’ve liked to see her brother again. Although he wouldn’t have known her, so it made no difference, really. What else? What else?! She was running out of time, she was out of time! She had to think! She had to keep thinking. If she kept thinking, she could prolong her deathmatch with gravity. Celebrity deathmatch. Oh, why had she wasted so much time on MTV? Kicking herself for not finishing The Pickwick Papers or The Brothers Karamozov. No full sentences now. Could be full of fancy literary tidbits rather than stupid contemporary trite crap. Feeling angry. Cheated. Then embarrassed. Whose fault if not hers? The time had belonged to her. She had chosen to wile it away with her friend, Mr. Remote Control. And candles. Vanilla. Cucumber. No babies. Too many people already on the planet. And soon one less. Ha! That was a good one. Cucumber-melon. Melons.  Split wide open with juice and flesh spread all over. Overripe. Bad smell. She hated overripe melons. She hated herself. She loved herself. She felt all of the love and all of the hate surge through like electric currents. The chuckling toy whirring in her head, slowly dissipating, the electric current zapping and then just a faint smoke evaporating into the air. The woman in heels who ran over and stood near her thought she saw the smoke as it drifted off.