whiplash quick

black on snow. the kids parked in the old chevy behind the school past the field, playing with guns and plotting intelligent.

"let's kill time," they agreed, and strapped explosives to their midriffs. pushed to detonate. held hands and heard the ticking countdown, realized "oh shit" too late. her eyes widened and he shook his head in disbelief before all three were gone.

november 5, 2010

+ something zoe said this morning that i never want to forget. we were discussing dreams, i was reminding her of the one i had last winter when she was so very sick and i slept on the couch to listen for her fever calls. she was incredibly weak, first being downed with the flu and then even further struck down by bronchitis. she refused to eat anything, even cherry jello. then she refused water, crying with no tears, dehydrated, eyes raccooned with purple. her fevers laid in wait for liquid tylenol to run its course before they came back sneering, a hot monster whose occupation is eternally listed as "stealing your children at night". it was the most frightened i've ever been in my entire life.

my dream while i was lightly sleeping was this: i pulled up a video on the internet to show the kids. it had children in it, but not the kind of children someone could have intentionally made a video of. this boy and girl were victims of some victorian disease, all black and white like an old photograph, watching us from the other side of the screen. the boy's solemn little face got closer and closer. "oh," i said in surprise. his eyes were ghost eyes, milky and almost opalescent. he stared at us and we stared back. the kids began to protest with no words, too scared to think of anything to say, so it came out a whine. "i'm so sorry," i said to my daughters. "i didn't mean for you to see this." "this is not what i was trying to show you." i wanted to protect them from that face, the face of plagues and decades of premature child deaths, lives robbed because back then there was no medicine that could keep them here, beat the monsters away. i had the feeling so many mothers have surely felt, that primal instinct to protect children from sickness and death. "this isn't what i meant to show you at all."

the dream changed then, and i was travelling through an empty city, regular in all ways except the queer silence and lack of people on the street. nothing, nothing, and then flowers would fall from the sky, or rather, fake flowers, but only one single flower at a time, drifting frail and quiet and ominous. at first i thought the flowers were real, but upon inspection they were artificial, a mockery. this meant one of the fakes was coming. the people who, though dead, could pass for the living. a warning. sometimes i could fight my way through them, but when more than one flower would fall i would hide and wait for them to walk draggingly by in their crowd. when i struck one of them their facade would crack, branch like lightning and there was only rot beneath.

on a side note, at this time i was (as well as dealing with sickness) dealing with my own fakes. shells of people masquerading as people with depth. mannequins. plastic people. disappointments. all of them girls, who were sickeningly sweet to your face but full of nastiness and jealousy inside.

also, flowers for me will always be equated with death after i chose star lilies for my grandmother's funeral bouquet. that cloying smell mixed with the smell of rapid and dark bodily decay in a country funeral home with an abundance of (forced sympathy, plastic wood casket, artificial light, regurgitated gospel) fabrications. the scent of flowers became fake itself, a cover-up for ancient organisms to do their secret work under.

back to this morning, i reminded zoe of that dream and she instantly remembered what i was talking about. "your dreams are so cleverly constructed," she said. what a way with words, has she.

fever dreams

She dialed his extension, and after a long pause his voice surfaced, slurred but intelligent. An outgoing message, grainy and pre-recorded god knew how long ago. Instead of voice mail, it warbled like an old tape-run answering machine. An ancient one. "I would like to... tell you the story.... of a rabbit. The hare." Her eyebrows furrowed quizzically. She had expected a curt message of one whose profession is much to busy for fairy tales. "Once upon a time," he began, and paused, the line being overwhelmed by the hiss of silence, dead air. His voice again, the voice that could be his father, or his father's father, perhaps telling a bedtime story. The story of Brer Rabbit? She had just been calling in response to his letter about her medical records. She wonders if she got the wrong line. Yes, maybe this was his father. He is a third generation attorney after all, and every man before him shared his same name. Perhaps she did not listen to all of the options on the menu. But this third generation lawyer is the only one still in practice. She thinks maybe it is his father or grandfather because this man sounds old and learned, his voice gravelly and amused. The voice of a storyteller. He finally continued, "She tells me-- she tells me there is not enough time to--" *beeeeeep* The tone signifying her turn to talk rung loud in her ear.

She leaves her message and puts the phone back in its cradle. She sits and thinks of him wearing one of his expensive suits, shiny and grey and starched. Better looking than any suit she has ever seen on the rack (where do rich men shop for suits anyway?) at any store she has ever been to (do they buy their own suits or does someone do that for them?) She thinks of his trim physique, his confident stride, his odd way of speaking in riddles (what are you up to today? working hard? I am working hard too.) She remembers his offices, the staff courteous but for the most part coolly professional. His expensive cologne, newspaper clippings of his family's forays in government framed in the hallway. The rambling two story Victorian that had been converted into his office on the very edge of downtown. The creak of the staircase when the secretary ascended. The antique cognac decanter, the wingback chairs. Taxidermy. A cobra fighting a mongoose.

Had he too much brandy before recording that message, or was he just intelligent enough to know that no one wants to fight someone who is possibly off their rocker? A fable used as a threat. She suddenly had a whole new respect for him.

But in the afternoon she feels feverish. She has received several hang up phone calls throughout the day. One from a man who starts off "Hello," an introduction not a question. She feels her forehead under her palm, hot, waits for him to go on. She did not recognize the area code. "Hello," he begins again, just as she opens her mouth to speak. "Have you time for a tale of the rabbit?"

winter witchings

we watch dark from behind your window, a pane of ice
(be still)
our long hands reach for your love light
(be still)
warm red heart, your mouth is a tart
you're forgetting our language
we left it on your lips
your breath becomes white fog flowers
peering out trying
to discern shapes from a forever expanse
of snow

the nethercats

more dreams of telepathic black cats. we move in stride. she is always beside me and below me, like the real meaning of the passage you read wrapped in a pair of inky parentheses. a footnote for the real seekers. subtle, otherworldly, and succinct.

in real life, i see them out of the corners of my eyes, the nethercats. they sleep under my car, no matter how many times i change vehicles or move homes. i find pawprints left like love letters on my windshield, see their mirrored eyes curious in the dark.

musical chairs

the girl and i regard each other from our places in the room. she has been watching me far longer than i've been aware. she smirks at me grey eyed from her victorian armchair, rococo pink like easter eggs. my alarm rings. i look behind me to find the sound coming from a grandfather clock with a useless face, hands pointing to sigils instead of digits. it's chaos o'clock. i look back and she has advanced like a chess piece on an oversized board, her chair moved suddenly towards me with not even a whisper of taffeta or a skid of furniture on floor. she is surrounded now by a deranged tea party, a page from a demented story book. mangy blind rodents tightrope across her shoulders, their feet catching in her decayed apron straps. toad footmen in waistcoats look on from moldy doily lily pads in the wingback balconies, unamused. unnamed shadow and fur masked creatures cavort perversely at her feet, and she strokes the forehead of the march hare, sitting beside her with his teacup poised for a sip. my alarm rings again. they do not like this. the chair thrusts forward forcefully, now cornering me. the room grows as i shrink, surrendering to wonderland. i can see now the violet outline of her irises, paintbrush strokes on fine china. her smug set mouth is pink taffy pitch. she's the kind who doesn't mind staining her dress. i keep hitting snooze.

vinyl

i've always said the albums i like best are not the catchy ones. no, no, no. not the immediate ones. you know the ones i mean, the ones that get stuck in your head for days, months even. the ones stuck on repeat because they're easily lovable. those are fun, but not my strange kind.

i prefer the difficult ones. those that take a few listens to grow on you. the ones maybe were even turned off in the middle because it was too much right then to process. but then later you catch yourself humming as you go about your day, or even dream a few lovely bars, waking up thinking you composed it, then realize you didn't. "i've heard this one before." it may take a minute to place it. you get it. and then before you know it, you've tumbled face first into adoration for its concept, its rhythms. you listen completely open and learn all of its words, stunned by its brilliance more at each listen than the time before. everything else gets blown out of your mind. the other music you've listened to prior seems silly and ill-composed and vapid. maybe you try out a few other records but the needle doesn't fit right. they don't warble in the same places or have the same static pop and hiss, or that last note before silence that leaves you wanting to listen all over again from the intro. the records you listened to when you were younger are still dear to you but you've outgrown them. you're haunted. try as you might you'll never be the same. there's no pretending you didn't hear it, being that you are forever changed.

sometimes i must admit, i starve myself of music for days, weeks. imagining it with my eyes closed, the fullness of this note, the hardness of that. i follow the falls and lifts by memory, punctuated by the odd skip, the scars and flaws i also prefer, those are savored as much in the dark as the perfections. i deny myself the pleasure so much that my teeth ache from longing to hear the real thing. ache to bite into a favorite song as if it had skin, as if it could pretend to resist before flooding me ten times sharper.

when the needle fits the groove, oh. to scratch that itch. to fill inner with outer, to bring it inside, and keep it there pulsing, to seize it, pick it apart, devour it, put it back together again. to feel it radiate through your entirety, and just when it can't possibly get any better it does. with each beat light washes out my head and i'm filled to the brim, humming along, throat clenched and forgetting to breathe, although somehow keeping perfect time. i run my fingertips over invisible lyrics like braille, pretending. i have to force my toes to uncurl so i can walk again. yeah, yeah, yeah.