I always thought I was a science project. Maybe all girls are. Today I listen too hard and become a sound reflector, sound detective. I click my converse and my head splits like Zeus. Through my skull my alloy daughter emerges. She is like me but picks up gossip frequencies. Particular metal. Flagellum and scape. Dipoles and cables. A sci-fi fascinator for prom. Now more radio than girl. I lean, press, pick up the waves of other girls. Someone said the trees were moving, but it was the world. Silence does not exist here on the moon, in this girls bathroom. Talk, talk, talk. Some of it alien. Who is wearing a bra that doesn’t need one? I search for my name in the washroom static: somebody fell down the stairs at a party, somebody had sex, somebody is too messed up to go back to class, someone is climbing out the window, someone’s period, someone studied and failed, someone talked too much shit. My name isn’t on the air today. I will be patient and ritualistic. I will take tests instead of falling out of the nest. One day soon I will be on the girl radio and they’ll send my name up like a rescue flare asking me how I got out.
In town there were a series of murders. Each attack occurred beneath the almond tree spiking through the pavement in the center of Second Ave. No one seemed to care. Everyone walked the sidewalks as if nothing strange had happened. They chatted about the weather and watched the mailman wander the knotted maze of the streets. They met up for brunch and dinner and played games with their children and dogs in the park. My wife and I were terrified. We drove to the supermarket using an alternate route each day. We avoided our friends on the weekends in fear of their possible secret lives of violence. We breathed the flakes of obsidian in the air and vomited blood into the downstairs toilet each night. It was a strange year. In December, the wagonwheel of reeking bodies disappeared underneath a jagged tarp of glistening snow. The engines of our cars screamed upon starting. Our neon lips shimmered within the milky glow of the chilled sunlight.
After Olivia tore out of the parking lot, Hyundai stuffed with all the nice shit from their place, Josh mixed batter and slammed it into a bruised Teflon pan. He’d survived on easy food before, when other exes ruined his life. Josh flipped the pancake, watched it coil into a lopsided heap. Earlier, Olivia changed the title of their shared playlist from Babe to You’re a literal adult child, deleted everything except one Taylor Swift breakup song. Josh rammed his spatula under the wreckage, realizing how bad this would be. The pancake grinned from the plate, torn and ugly, but never judging.
We presumed the forbidden knowledge would be some eldritch thing. The death-in-thought, a word for God. A space at the universal end we could not reach. An unthinkable color. A demon in our brother.Horror of all horrors, it is none of these. The secret that obliterates the mind, the antidivinity, it is not great, it is not God, it is not ultimate.Instead, swiping up the cosmic edge, I find:A momma making breakfast. Using more eggs than I would’ve thought, apron on, divulging drama from the clothing store and I do not want to know—An athlete dancing. Sultry eyes for all who sees he sways and lets a rhythm catch him wild by the neck, tear my eyes away—A farmer mourning loss of calf. Seven hundred miles away and I can see his whiskers wet with loss, the space between proclaims heat-death—A toddler learning how to eat. How could I see it, know her name, not picture mandalic lives for her, some pruned by Murphy’s shears—Soothsayer claiming madness for the world. Espousing foolish notions that the secret is a word, a craft, a harbinger, a ghostly God whose visage is a killswitch, voice atomic bomb, a basilisk thought-virus unending and unstoppable, an elder mind we would commune with, be demanded by, and kneel to as we cry—No.There is a plum cut this evening, sweet trickle on the counter for a child I’ll never meet, and I do not want to know that.There is a meal, device, a ritual taken in my backyard by neighbors opening their folds to me look away, look away, look away—There is a quiet dance we’re sharing that once belonged to the space beneath our eyes.I have seen it. I have found the killing thought.
Temperature dropping like a dive off a cliff. My lungs full of winter air, clear and sharp as ice. After the airplane and its stale box of other people’s exhalations, each breath is like mainlining oxygen. When I rub my lips together their skin is as dry as the snow beneath my boots. The salt of this morning still furs my tongue. My hands tremble brittle in my coat pockets, and my fingers rub the edge of a ticket, a mint, an obsolete coin. In only a few moments I will put my memories behind me and walk into the taiga. Try to forget your face and its smiling cruelty, the soft malice that always comes with power. Try to forget how you uploaded your consciousness into the cloud and cheated death, how you turned the ouroboros from a snake to a mute circle, a faceless loop: a splotch of ringworm, a spreading bulls-eye rash, a scrawled zero. Try not to wonder, a hundred years after I am dead, how much of this forest too will be gone.The wall of trees yawns before me. No fresh green breast here, no—here is a frozen emerald heart, holding within it no ability to nurture but only to embalm, to write my body like a stone carving, immersing it gemlike in years of snow. I step forward and the trees swallow me. They are tall and green and endless, speaking of everything I have forgotten how to say to you.
Wake
Morning: the sun smears blood across the sky. My mother’s body is as white and long-stemmed as a lily, a flower in its velvet casing. I’m drenched in black like I’m trying to melt into the shadows around the walls. Like I’m trying to camouflage myself from every distant relative—their exhalations sour with coffee, their smiles oily with false sympathy. I think of the last time I saw my mother smile: at the sea, the last place we traveled together. Inside my head I say Mother. The word flutters, dark and silent, on my tongue. I remember the green endlessness of the ocean, how we lay back on the sand and let the sun bleach the water from our bodies. Brine and salt in my mouth. The waves rising, cresting, falling. Time a noose around our necks.
Even My Fantasies Are Chronically Ill
Ringing in my ears like the seconds after an explosion, except it’s constant and unending, shrill as silver, and there was no explosion. Only days, soft and slow. I try to stand and my body fails me. A collection of diagnoses accumulates like a layer of filth on my skin: mast cell activation, dysmenorrhea, chronic urticaria. I try to stand and my body fails me. Craniocervical instability, hyperacusis, photophobia. My windows are shuttered; the layer on my skin is permanent. Postural orthostatic tachycardia, myalgic encephalomyelitis. The words of my diagnoses grow longer and longer until they might not even be real anymore, just syllables contorting themselves into agonized, impossibly labyrinthine shapes. My body keeps failing me forever, an endless loop of standing up and crashing back down again. My legs grow thin and brittle like matchwood. The ringing in my ears now more like a screaming. Lying in the soundless dark, I picture everyone who’s ever doubted me crowded around my bedside. I imagine them emptied of all the Have you tried and I don’t think and Are you sure, their throats cleared of all words, their esophaguses silent and moist. I imagine seeds sinking into the damp flesh there, weeds sprouting from their mouths, finally blooming into bright fistfuls of flowers: a perfect copy of the garden outside my window, the garden I can no longer see.
BUTTHOLE PROBLEMSWhat’s it, what’s it, I can hear you saying, what’s even a butthole problem, or what’s a butthole other than being a problem in itself, of itself, that sounds to me like a butthole problem, butthole, a butthole that rashes like hell after a hot date, that itches like a motherfucker after a night well spent at Taco Bell’s, unlike some other buttholes that smell like proper buttholes, buttholes that smell like years of regret and day-old butter, buttholes that gossip about other buttholes in family functions, about Steve Bannon, about Santa Claus, buttholes that dream of traveling far away and broadening their buttholes, buttholes that wish they could trade their buttholes for other things—a roof, some money, fair sex—buttholes that burn with regret in the mornings, buttholes that should deal with external threats, like inflation, like novel viruses, like lubricants and penetration, buttholes that go on around other buttholes like can we make this happen, how can we make this happen, buttholes that bear smaller buttholes inside them like a Russian doll of buttholes, buttholes that could turn cancerous—if not malodorous—if left unattended, buttholes that could move from one butthole of a place to another, like from Texas to another part of Texas, or straight from Texas to hell, a hell that’s not particularly literal or metaphorical, not even allegorical, a hell where demons could famously roast your butthole on a spit, a hell that could make you feel at home and wish you didn’t even have a butthole in the first place, that you didn’t have a life after all, that you didn’t come into this world, into this body, most certainly not this body attached to this particular butthole you were born with, have to carry with, live with, laugh with, die with, halfwit.A DROWNINGEach of us was supposed to either push the turtles over the pier or jump into the water ourselves.Jimmy said, “How many turtles?” and we had to explain to him that one would do. Though I could tell he wasn’t fully convinced, he took the news in good faith. He checked us out one by one, then gently grabbed a turtle from its shell in his last act of mercy. His arms quivered in hesitation before he tossed the turtle into the lake like a skipping stone.“How’s this exactly a punishment?” he turned to ask upon the unclimactic silence. It was a fair question. Though the gist of the game wasn’t about punishment, there was something about meeting up this late, far from our homes, that lent the whole ordeal an unmistakable element of sin. If my sister were still here, she would tell us all about her own wrongdoings, about how testy the waters could be when provoked at just the wrong time.But she could no longer talk, no longer breathe.“It’s where they come out from.” It was Cornball who finally broke the silence, who then picked up the remaining turtle and catapulted it into the water with a kind of intensity that made me assume he had some unfinished business with the turtle kind, or that he was resolving some unfinished business he had with someone else with turtles.We all stood in a delicate silence before someone said we should go back. The crickets filled the air with chirrups, another mark of the South. When we arrived at the car we found the main road deserted, which made me feel as if everyone was dead and we were stuck in some kind of limbo. I could almost hear my sister calling me a dickhead from beyond.COVENANTFor Pim’s seventh birthday we pin her to the ground and shout “Eat shit, you human” by her side, Cane’s homemade Xenomorph costume torn from the thighs, revealing the sponges he filled his crotch with to make it bulge, all while clawing at Pim’s ketchup-stained chest with his needle-like tinfoil fingers, watching Pim’s head jerk to left and right as if slapped by a pair of phantom hands, shouting “Stop,” strictly in character from the start, Pim is our Ripley for the day though she looks nowhere near Sigourney Weaver, she’s half-German and standing at 4-foot-5 but she’s the birthday girl anyway so we keep our mouths shut and try to have fun, except for her brother Percy who stands all brickfaced on the porch like Michael-frikkin-Meyers when he was supposed to play Ripley’s crewmate, but it’s no surprise, he’s known to be a softie like his dad who’s now babysitting Pim’s newborn sister in the rocking chair, smiling and winking at us every few minutes like that one weird uncle in every family——and Pim suddenly elbow-strikes Cane’s jaw and somersaults to say, “Hope you like soup, motherfucker,” grinning at us all Ripley-Ripley, showering us with what remained of her piss in her nerf gun, we Xenomorphs glancing at each other as if we’re truly done, Cane starting to wail through his broken teeth, his head peeping out of his tinfoil Xenomorph costume like a chick in a hatching egg, and that’s when Percy shows a sign of life and starts to run toward us like a good crewmate, screaming out obscenities and cries of revenge, his habit of eating beef jerky for the past three months nonstop finally showing through his self-confidence, and Cane turns to me like a rabbit caught in the headlights and says, through his swollen gums, “Wow.”
Wouldn’t it be good if I could for a moment close my eyes and find myself in a new scenery where nature plots towards a personal renaissance, a scenery in which I would be able to switch off this painful backlog of asymmetry in my life; lack of funds and lack of kindness, and lack of this and lack of that, lack of that mesmerizing color of the sky like in a Vermeer painting, or any sky of any painting or any sky on earth under which I can walk free from tormenting clouds of thought that make me a prisoner and a punisher pressing me to provide solutions that I don’t have. I can only be responsible for my own actions; but then again, that is the problem. Actions can have devastating, dramatic repercussions even with best intentions, even with love and because of love. Gallantry buried with bare hands, puzzle pieces that won’t fit anymore in a puzzle that was once immaculate.Wouldn’t it be good if for a moment I could be a seed buried into new soil where the grass is freshly cut, and the water masks the green with delight and lucidity or perhaps I could be given a new chance and become a little cloud over your tears or a birdhouse for the little warrior that is you who got its wings halved in its attempt to fly through ferocious winds.
I saw a sign for stump removal and found myself wishing I had a stump that needed removing.Or, more exactly, I wished that should I ever have a stump that needed removing I’d see a sign like that one. Or, put yet another way, I wished that in my life I could see the things I need to see right when I need to see them. Not before, and not after.
“Sometimes dads fight,” Dad says. “It’s just a thing we have to do sometimes.” That’s how Dad explained it to me the first time, and he hasn’t bothered explaining it in any greater depth since. Every spring my dad starts preparing to fight again. He spends long hours in the garage with his misshapen Everlast heavy bag he bought from DICK’S Sporting Goods many years ago. “It does the trick,” he says, bareknuckling it with even more gusto. He’s fighting the same fight he’s been fighting since I was born, something about some kind of disagreement that nobody really remembers the details of, but my dad has never forgotten, and is not willing to let go. It’s not totally clear who he thinks he’s fighting, either. He only ever referred to them as his “adversaries,” adding that they “need to be taught a lesson,” and “soon we’ll all know who’s the better man.” Then beginning on June 21st at dusk, he sets off to go fight. He might not be home till morning, he tells us. He might be a little bruised when he gets back, but he insists I’m not to worry about him too much. This is all simply what he must do.Mom has said it’s best to let him have this. “Try not to make a big deal out of it,” she has said. “It’ll only fuel his will to fight all the more if you do.” But it’s not as though Dad can be stopped even if we all wanted to stop him. He becomes a living rampage. I just go about hugging him every night, the same as always, wishing him luck. I always remind him I’ll be there to dab his wounds in the morning.
Dallas Jones tweeted. The fear washed my wrinkles in goosebumps. I Know What You Did Last Summer now as predictable as rain. I am my brother maxing out his credit card. American Psycho is being remade. I am my father wondering about the vote. Idiocracy now a prophetic tale. I am my mother cleaning dishes for different reasons. Lord of the Rings lives on forever. I am the door to other lives. I scrolled.
