It was for her that night fell so fast. She landed in that spot in the middle of the woods and lay as light rain fell all over her. Wetting the papery ribbons of her dress and staining the leaves in the lowest branches hanging over her still-closed eyes. She lay open on the cold ground. She didn’t notice as the beings began preparing a bed beneath her as she lay. She couldn’t hear them.
House Mom stoops over a pile of clothes shaped around a log, tending to the pleated sweatshirt tucked around its “waist.” Other small lumps of clothing are arranged around her like fallout. The little lumps sing and vibrate on the floor and dance around in circles on a sheet of steam coating the concrete floor. House Mom thinks of everything and has set out bowls of rainwater for the lumps, who absorb it into their folds.
House Mom collects rainwater in wooden bowls set outside in the yard. The grey packed dirt has not seen rain in some time, the canopy having grown so thick, but the bowls fill just the same — there is rain enough at least for wooden bowls. The girl watches from inside a glass casket set down in the middle of a clearing in the yard, dried leaves mounded up all around. She presses her hands up in front of her, suctioned to the lid of the box. Dried chamomile fills the bottom to the glass box, stuffs her pockets, and has been pressed into the toes of her shoes. Chamomile sleeps in her hair and fills out the parcels where her breasts used to be. House Mom tends to the dried leaves surrounding the glass box. She straightens the sheets of ice guarding the pond and mends their cracks with a mixture of mud and chamomile.
A trail of smoke can be seen from near and far as House Mom tends to the fireplace of the small shed early in the morning. She pours white wine over the hot rocks in the fireplace and goes to sleep under a cloud of butter broth. She arranges the small lumps around her close and the big one guards the door at her feet.
Leaves pile up at the door. Leaves pile up on the glass box in the yard where outside at night two palms are pressed to the glass, sleeping, ready to spring.
House Mom loves the girl in the glass box very much (misses the girl in the glass box) and is tending to her and her slumbering chamomile pods like you would tend to a fire that’s keeping you alive. The fire that’s putting out a signal far off into the surrounding hills:
Mother stands on the beach and animates all the little lumps of cloth with every breath. Her breath sets them in motion, sets out currents of electricity animating those dozens (then hundreds… thousands) of little lumps of cloth, sending them quaking through the forests and fields and towns on the edge of the woods.
He sighs and weeps for you. The silent song of feathers spinning solemnly in the morgue moonlight… a grievous roar sounds from high up on a perch in the silence of winter passing into death. You cannot hear it. Just know that it happens and it’s for you — it’s all for you. You keep me alive with the spiral water in the glass. Of night and the water of violence, of longing that will never be forgiven, it marks the glass like acid. There were some whispers among feathers that this was the right part of town for longing. The right time of the day in this death-dappled region of earth. The sun a stone setting on the plate etched to the horizon.
I’ve been getting the feeling that I’m being followed. “You!” I shout, turning around… My dream cat came for me, but this time it was an ugly little thing. Half cat, half rat. It looked like it had been mangled in an accident. Its snout was long and deflated with fragments of bone swimming around inside, black, wet, and cold. Its eyes were dull and dark bone polished black. Could it see? Probably not. It was grey-brown. The most vivid thing I remember is it coming up to me and taking my fingers in its mouth. I could feel that it didn’t have any teeth, and it was cold and wet in there. I recoiled in horror and tried to get away from it but the cat was quick and darted around the whole yard, wherever I went. It chased me everywhere. It was so fast I couldn’t even see it anymore. Rather, I felt it darting around, following me. And suddenly I began to notice deflated cat carcasses everywhere, under dirt that I kicked up running — but they were all petrified rats, all grey powdery fur. The cat’s name was Ratzl.
Resting in a man’s bed, unfamiliar smells of dryer sheets — lying in a dirt plot I could feel my heart beating in my back. My throat seemed to close. Mother sat in the window. Toxic fumes made the world fuzzy and blurred with a revolving vagueness. Tiny shining stars burned sweetly all around me as she sent them down to settle on the earth. They bore their way into the dirt, slowly worming around until they found secret tufts of moss and there fed, and grew. I was sick every day now. Practically immobile, I vomited violently at every turn. I tugged at my raw throat and coughed forth an owl pellet. My eyes pounding out of my head, fighting passing out I tore at it, breaking it open with my hands I discovered the fine white bones of my dream cat. I had eaten him!
~ ~ ~
I LAY DOWN IN SOME TALL GRASS GROWING through a fissure in dry concrete next to an onramp. I went to sleep with my arm extending out into the northbound lane. Thumbs up. No one ever stops. I woke up sometime later and the light had changed, wincing over the tops of some burnt trees… My body had been moved several yards down the road. I noticed this only after raising my half-worm-eaten face from the pavement, heavy and winey, glancing back to where I had been several hours/days before. I would be moved several more times, from one cot to another, from the back seat to the front, from a familiar bed to a different man’s — and would only notice when I woke. How shifty they had been, to move my body while I’d been away, my head heavy and winey, filled with regret.
Seth and I sat on the low narrow couch at the rear of our trailer in the woods — so long ago. The space heater in the corner sputtered bad breath out into the small room. I reached over and tickled the roof of his mouth with my index finger. He laughed and did the same to me. We were drunk. We fucked with my hands over his face.
Bleating, horrid calls to the streets… passing by towns slowly, descending toward the hot, humid afternoon-hell in that secret place, searching out some semblance of normalcy out of the shallow night, your fractured thoughts occupied by that fateful hour of afternoon. Possessed calls piercing the night, you’re caught in its thrall, head pounding, looking for answers. It’s all wrong, you’re all wrong. You’ve been here before.
Orangetime and that other world caught between the living and the dead. Caught on videotape trying to get some answers from that silent glare way up in the ceiling behind the register. Outside a man lays inert and sweating on the sidewalk, people on the street poking at him.
No one notices the negative space around life. Surrounding this town, between trees and businesses. Around the chatter of the afternoon; around our rustlings in your room, the negative space tracing the contours of your insomniac sleep of the undead… Walking down your street I passed by your house. The window was open and from out on the street I could see you, very small in the little wooden window frame lying down on your bed. It was noisy outside but I could tell it was quiet in there like nothing could touch you. A hot patch of air was hanging down on you, low down and all around you like a careful cloud while you slept. Wind whipped at my ankles and I could hear it gathering all the power of the neighborhood up with the dust and leaves. I had walked for two days to this spot. Pressing my hands against the sidewalk — your sidewalk — brought back all the soot and sticks scratching along the surface. My gaze fastened on a leaf rising on the wind and it brought me up to you, seeing you through your window but you can’t see me. Oh Seth! What am I doing out here without you?