RED HORSES PLEDGE DRIVE!

courtesy of Kidica

MEMORIES REPORTED MISSING 2003

by Sam Cooper

 

“Memory believes before knowing remembers.”

William Faulkner, Light in August

 

I.

The guitar strings are not at all smooth (not like he ever really thought they would be), but coiled, sharp, ridged; they are files for grinding down fingertips. And so rigid, less strings than cables—strong and unmovable, resistant to depression and repellant of the most pleading coax. They buzz and snap and belch, voices megaphoned by the cheap guitar amp that is missing the logo that should be on its front grill, and whose internal corners and tight spaces are filled with 20 years’ worth of dust and grime. The screws holding the whole thing together are rust-free only because of the constant invigorating vibration of steady use. His fingers hurt; he is a student, and there is no sensei save the cold emptiness of the house, the number (few) of his days, and the guitar itself. The guitar is a Fender Strat, sunburst-finished in black-faded-to-tobacco (he will not smoke a cigarette for four years), and is his junior by six years. It is perfect and he loves it, but he is already restless, lustful, late at night flipping through catalogues out of its sight, fantasizing about stroking the neck of a Gibson. His mother told war stories of bleeding fingers, blisters, peeling dermis like whorled cornhusks, anti-ability, shame. Her index finger is broken on her fret hand now—she calls it a boxer’s fracture—and he wonders if it hurts with the cold. He lets a note ring out, echo off the nearest wall, die, before unclenching his hand and stretching it, feeling the joints pop and the tendons complain. His thumb and middle finger on his right hand hold pressed desperately between them a plectrum (he learned the word a week before)—incorrect position, he knows, but comfortable, and he picks the low E string slowly, gains speed in a wrong-key imitation of the rhythm of one of his favorite songs. There is no one to cover their ears, or to gripe, or to give a thumbs up, or to roll their eyes with much love and support. He wrote a song in Chemistry that afternoon. It is long and he is proud; he used the word “fuck” for the first time, which felt great, powerful, incendiary, rebellious even—he is a little too old and definitely too young to admit that the thrill is mostly born out of “fuck” being naughty. He wonders if he will feel embarrassed to sing it (assuming there’s ever any finished product to be sung) in front of his mom. The song is something like his thirtieth, and this time, this one goddammit is going to have a guitar part to found the words and melody (the melody came to him first, a sloping baritone chant—he imagines himself growling it). The band he started, is in, leads, has existed for scant weeks, and even he knows it is a joke. He is not the only one of the four who can’t play note/beat one. But it has potential, the kind of potential that wells in his throat when he thinks, when he daydreams, listens. He has had the Fender for almost a year, and today he is teaching himself, chart on the floor at his feet, diagrams like spells visible even through the gloom and short distance, his first chord, an A. Fingers are a knot, a clump, a tumor on the neck, three of them pink sausages stacked on, glued to each other. Checking his position, angling the fretboard up toward his face—a baby’s face at a man’s altitude—he is satisfied and lets the instrument hang slack again, low-hung, body over his groin. He strums. Something approaching a pleasing sound chimes deafeningly from the amp (the guitar is in fact out of tune, as his year-hence self would have immediately heard, irked), and he does not smile. Second strum, no such luck, only a rude and deadened semimelodic crash. Nothing has changed, no movement in his fingers, no shift in his stance or strumming. He is puzzled. In his pocket his cell phone screams. Well, not his phone—his dad’s, but… His right hand gropes it out, grasps it, presses the call button and the keys light up and illuminate the tunnel wall of his ear canal before blinking out seconds later. His mom’s voice, sounding thin and annoyingly (annoyance being now a near-constant) apologetic. It’s okay, he’ll find something. No, really, there’s a microwave pizza left in the freezer he thinks. And the leftovers, yes. The usual. Fine. Fine means fine. No. It was fine. Nothing exciting. Nothing. It’s okay. He understands (and he thinks he does, really). Okay. Okay. Alright. Loves her too. Bye. It is not late but a crack in the curtains of the sliding glass door reveals an indigo sky, quickly, watchably, concentrating into ink. The phone slides back into his pocket. The guitar strings squeak as his left hand glides down their length. He looks at his watch. Fifteen more minutes then dinner in front of the TV, which is already on, volume low, across the room, then who knows. Left-hand fingers scrape against strings and hurt—tips bearing the sharp stab and straight indentations of a set of .10 nickel wounds, and joints and tendons the low-voltage ache of stress, pressure, repetition, repetition, repeat. The pinky of his right hand hooks around the pickup selector switch, and guides it clicking from one end of its slot to the other and back, while his thumb-and-middle-finger-held pick strums experimentally. The sound from the amp stutters from razor-thin and reedy to treacle-thick. Somewhere in the middle there is a tone that is full of air, inflated, aerated, hollow and round and warm. He settles on this one. Fist still rigor-mortised around an A, his pick lunges predatorily; he strums as hard as he can, over and over, just down stokes, pickup up velocity, his right bicep starting to burn as the seconds expire, searching for breakup, for buzzsaw distortion, for fire, and not knowing where to find it (in two months he will receive for Christmas his first distortion pedal, after discovering the true function and range of the gain knob on his amp and finding it wanting). His attack is occasionally arrhythmic, especially now that his fingers venture elsewhere on the neck, imitating the moves but not the results of true guitar playing. It’s okay, the rhythm, so much like his own heartbeat now, is enough. His haphazardness throws the pickup switch into its farthest position, and the tone of the guitar is emaciated, atrophied. His hand returns, clumsily, to an A. One of the dogs is improbably asleep through the sonic onslaught, and her legs twitch, running through a dream, her back attached to the side of the couch nearest to him. He can feel the strings move under his fretting fingers, up and down, imitating the waves of their output frequencies, the scale of their representational amplitude defined by the intensity of his strumming. It is increasingly painful, this movement—even the thinnest, unwound strings are like cheese cutters. And then something, the division between strings (pain-givers) and fingertips (pain-takers) blurred now, snaps, pops, shifts, breaks, and what was dull hot tense hurt is suddenly hyperawareness-of-biology-and-the-weakness-thus-implied pain, and he shoots his hand away from the neck in reflex, his strumming/picking hand lagging on the open strings so that there is only jangling atonality bellowing from the amp. He inspects his left fingers. The skin is broken on the tip of his middle digit, less cut than shredded, pulled off the flesh underneath. There is blood. The rest of the fingers are red and angry, and seem to throb visibly like bullfrog throats, but are otherwise unhurt. Crimson pools under the pinched and separated and wrinkled flap of skin, and peeks out from the edge, and a little is smeared down the finger, and he is surprised at the immediacy of its flow (he checks the strings hovering above the block of the second fret, and there it is: a half-inch of rust film on the G string, and nowhere else). He has never been one to push the blood out, preferring to let it dry and flake off… Ah, now a trickle, a slithering line of rouge tickling hotly down the front and then the inside of his finger. Cleanup is required. Carefully, mindful of the danger posed by sanguine meteorites to the carpet, his clothes, etc., he takes the guitar off his shoulder and puts it down, and there is a sound like a half-speed bell when its body makes contact with the floor, when the neck is set against the upper lip of the amp. He turns the amp off and a humming he was not even aware of leaves the air. There is acute pain in his finger, the air on the blood in thin space where there should be no space stinging like acid. At his movements, the dog awakes and gets up, stretches, looks at him. As he goes to ball up toilet paper to clot his leak, he notices he is smiling. He will not baby the cut. Tomorrow, he will play more, and it will likely open and weep again, and all the while scar tissue industriously meshing, weaving together just below the surface, so that when the calluses finally (finally) armor his fingertips, this one will be just that much thicker, that much stronger. Blood blots the toilet paper. His ears are ringing. Not from the volume of his practice. But with the sound that came tolling through the ancient cone of his amp’s speaker at the moment of bloodletting, a sound he is not, and will never be, able to describe, but one that he knows is crystalline and sublime and true honest beautiful scary perfect tiny like the sound made at the beginning of the universe and time with no one to hear it. One that he knows he will hunt fruitlessly for as long as he has fingers to play.

 

II.

The air is cold. It has been cold, is seems, since before the turning of the seasons, stimulating arm hair, browning leaves, bringing rain. Inside buildings heat has been pumping for weeks, dry and eye-burning like oven air. The wound on his left middle finger is still red, scabbed, a work of dried blood under a single layer, translucent like onion paper, of regenerated skin. It does not hurt anymore, but he has slowed in his practice. Which is not to say that the songs have stopped coming (the one written before, so proudly inclusive of “fuck” and Chemistry-class-birthed, never did get clothed with guitar chords)—his notebooks are filling up, his pens running dry with lines of verse accumulating in towers of black against white paper sky. He has failed, is aware and ashamed of the failure—a feeling that will become, justified or not, objectively true or not, familiar—to finish the song that honors tonight. He started with the title, “Samhain,” and struggled on from there through images that felt inadequate, words that felt bullied, prodded, corralled into rhyme and architecture. After furious scratching-out, bold rewriting, days of stepping back, reattacking, he gave up. He concedes that he might never succeed in wrangling the feeling, the, for lack of any better word, magic of tonight. That day in school, some people were dressed up. A full-body cow suit, a homemade Superman cape, a few rubber masks worn briefly and never in class, innumerable fairy (correction: faerie) wings all aglitter and gauzy, among the anime fans unrecognized character accoutrement, many Renaissance Festival dresses, facepaint, etc.; no weapons allowed, or anything offensive, no blood, a maybe unspoken (he can’t remember) rule forbidding anything too gory/disturbing/inappropriate (the latter never defined really) which is probed but never broken. Most people wore what they wear every day. His girlfriend wore a fuzzy cat-ears headband, the type you can get at a drugstore for low-denomination bills. He made a point to notice them, to call them, her, cute. He thought that the winks and feline pantomimes that accompanied the ears were anything but. Cute, that is. He wore ballooning black paints of heavy fabric, a black t-shirt with fender guitars warped into the shape of a grinning skull, letters stretched and bent into shapes reminiscent of tribal tattoos defining cheekbones teeth sockets etc., and modeling clay devil horns, bound to his head with nylon cord running through both horns’ bases, purchased at the very same Ren Fest where the girls bought their dresses. The hours of school passed glacially, painful in a very real and physical way. The day he escaped to with Last Bell practically still tolling was flatly overcast and blustery, raw, perfect he thought. No Drama rehearsal that afternoon, so right home. He kissed her wetly goodbye at the corner where her house is, noted: her hesitation to release him from embrace, her microexpressed pout and big eyes, her hand in his sliding down his fingers as he pulled away, pressure light but communicative, willed—he resisted them all and walked the rest of the way home. His mom got home from the hospital shortly after, gave him an update that he did not hear. It is now dusk. The sky is cleared and holds the last residue of sunset. The doorbell rings and he is not surprised; he saw them come up the driveway seconds before, peripherally, from the table where he and his mom are eating an appropriately autumnal meal. Butternut squash soup, cider, bread, grain salad. His mom gets up and hefts the rustic basket heaped with candy to thorax level. He remains seated and chewing, slurping, and hears the door squeal on its hinges. Elfin voices from where, if he had been out on the porch, his thighs would be. Trickortreat. Warm (but tired, he hears, can’t help but hear, very tired) chatter from his mom. What great costumes. You’re welcome. Thank you. My son does it every year. I’ll tell him. Happy Halloween. She shuts the door, returns to the table, on top of which she drops the veritable sucrose product cornucopia. There was an adorable little girl in a Princess Leia costume.  Cool.  The mom was complimenting—  I heard. They finish the meal with a few subsequent many-voiced interruptions, the intervals between which shrink and shrink. He brings his plate to the sink, tells her it was good, and goes to take a piss. As he exits the bathroom with moist hands he shakes lightly, the bathroom door being within close proximity to the entrance of the house, he catches his mom opening up to a new group of revelers. Trickortreat. He goes, stands beside his mom as she doles out sweets, looks at the costumes, smiles in what he hopes is a kind and not at all ironic or—God forbid—somehow pedophilic way at the children or maybe they’re preteens under all the paint and latex and polyester, looks at the costumes. One of them, a boy, has a gory headdress, a kind of half-head mask/hat, molded into an open cranium, rubber skin curled down like a banana peel, the furrowed mound of domed brain pink and wet with fake blood the boy must have added himself (it runs down the boy’s uncovered face which is smiling with eyes greedy and comically fixed, following the candy dropping into his bag, runs down onto his clothes, which are nondescript and will certainly be disposed of, ruined now, at the end of the night), nestled in shards of rubber bone, convincingly, horrifically, impressively. His eyes scan the children and their costumes and happy maybe uncertain or a little overstimulated or something faces, but he is watching his mom, watching for her gaze to hesitate on the boy in question, watching for some mineralization of her features or hiccup in her breath, listening for her “Happy Halloween!s” to becomes strained or pained or cold or disingenuous forced somehow telling or. None of it happens. This may be worse. His building annoyance loses bloodflow, deflates. The door closes and he can hear their voices, shrieking, getting quieter. His mom puts the candy basket down on the stairs. Getting low on Twix. She goes to the kitchen. There is a party tonight, a few minutes outside of town at a house in the country. A friend’s house, where most of everyone he knows will me. There will not be booze (he will never attend one of those parties all throughout high school, something he will later come close to regretting), only loud bassy music in the basement, the pop side of heavy metal, a cooler full of soda cans and upstairs plates of pizza rolls or maybe real pizza and certainly bowls of supermarket brand nacho cheese corn chips, and a blacklight—blacklights being something that have started to be a fixture for some reason at parties he goes to—so that every vein of lint, every flake of dead skin and daylight-invisible flaw is suddenly not just visible, but glowing, unmissable, unable to be ignored or remain uninspected. He does not want to go. He does not want to not go. The previous weekend he hosted a party of his own. He has had a Halloween party every year since he was two. They are now in some way legendary (sadly so, he thinks—only legendary in that their absence would be noted, not necessarily legendary in that they are expected or looked-forward-to or anything, although he likes to imagine that they are). No one would have blamed him if there was no party this year. He hand-made a Mad Hatter costume minutes before his first guests arrived. Sharpie checkers on an orange shirt (only one photo of him in this costume will ever surface, and he will hate it, his face scrunched and fatty and boylike, twisted into such happiness or at least what looks like happiness…he will hate this past self, will be jealous of him and hate him). He does not remember much past that. Tonight. Magical tonight. It’s not to be wasted, can’t be anything but wasted. I’m going for a walk to look at the neighborhood.  Okay. Why don’t you take the dogs?  …  You don’t have to.  Okay.  Isn’t there a party tonight? He is out the door and the night is cold. There are families of shadows creeping on and off sidewalks, under porchlights, silhouetted in doorways. Clouds like milk in ink roil around a three-quarter moon. A car passes. A puddle of flashlight oozes up vinyl siding. He is down on the street, footsteps making no noise; there are no other cars in view. From somewhere comes the rasp of a creepy sound effects loop, so muffled and distant that it seems more a part of the wind and air than something carried on them. Shrubs bound in false webs, trees studded with twinkling strings of stars. The moon dims, cumulously shrouded. Triangles of bright gold staring, following his movements like the eyes of funhouse portraits, from every garden walk and concrete step. The overall decorative effect of the neighborhood is relatively disappointing. Half-assed. Although most made some effort. A few houses are coldly dark and apparently hibernating, stony and serious and no fun at all, just begging for Tricks that will not be dealt them. Kids today, too good for their own good. He is walking fast. He is half a mile from his home now, has hit a particularly thick flock—a seemingly full set of Power Rangers, a vampire, two Harry Potters, a unimaginative bloody psychopath, more—herded by a few parents wielding pumpkinheaded flashlights who look at him warily, openly considering him Up To No Good. He nods and smiles as he passes, can smell one father’s brown leather jacket, turns away. He hears the flock’s frenzied chittering recede behind him, veer off towards a house he has passed already (he is traveling the opposite direction as they are), a house whose lawn is bathed in fog machine haze. Trickortreat. He walks on, saluted by dying trees standing at ease on either side of the street. A shiver radiates through his body, from  core outward. He should have grabbed a heavier coat on his way out the door, now has to hunch his shoulders up around his ears to combat the chill; the temperature is dropping. As in at this moment, and noticeably. He can feel it descending, falling, crumbling away and down and leaving his flesh vulnerable. His pace slows, gradually, so that at first he doesn’t know that he is stopping until he is no longer moving. Time slows too. His watch stops ticking. He only notices because it stops. There are no sounds. The wind has ceased. The air is dead. The moon is framed by smoky seas. Somewhere, nearby, he knows, children are thrilled, hissing between them, shouting laughter and mock-screams up into the dark, trying to freak each other out and probably succeeding but he cannot hear them. Tonight is when the veil is supposed to be thinnest. The two sides closer than any other annual point. Samhain. The Feast of the Dead. All Hallows Eve. The veil is thinnest, the membrane that lies between what’s living and what’s not (he knows now there are many kinds of dead) fragile, easily whispered through, parted for the passage of small folded messages, touched, pushed through, breached. Walking a razorblade. He is alone now. There is no sound. A streetlight blinks off.  He leans forward to resume movement. Does not move. No sound.

 

III.

The rain frosts the windowpane evenly, like spray paint—but whether the rain itself is a mist, or instead just heavy enough to splash watery particles on the window after striking some unseen surface below, he does not know. The light coming through the window is gray and spectral. Steals warmth and comfort instead of lending it, blurs shadows into stains, reflects cruelly off everything, turning moted air to smoke, hot flesh to stone. The room is small and close, despite the coldness of the light is warm for the most part, but not on the bed, which dominates nearly half the space and is under, pushed up against the drafty window. On the bed is a leopardprint bedspread which has ridden up and pulled, crumpled, limp, itself to the top of the mattress, a faded violet sheet, a mountain of kicked-down comforter, a few pillows, one of them sans case. There is music from a radio under the computer desk and he wishes the music was louder—at its present volume it is nothing but unsettling, the level and timbre of remembered conversation—but he knows that she set its (the radio’s) knob as such for him, to make him relaxed, to make him relax. He bows to her experience. The air has a smell, had a smell even without them in the room: inscrutable, somehow both musty and fresh like new hamster bedding, thinly perfumed with the remnants of something feminine and artificial. A gust moans through the centimetric crack at the bottom of the window. His backpack, its top darkened and soaked, is a carcass near the closed-and-locked door. The door is lightweight—he hopes it’s not too thin—and its handle rattles Parkinsonally with footsteps in the townhouse, the passing boom of car stereos, the wind. The song on the radio ends, switches to a commercial, as she unbuttons his fly. He is clothed and horizontal on the bed. His shoes, sopping, sit impatiently on the floor. The fabric of his pants nearest his ankles clings, chills. Her fingers on his zipper. He may or may not have stopped breathing. Downstairs her German shepherd barks, deep bellows with whining peaks, traveling through, inhabiting the walls, no doubt reprimanding some passing pedestrian out in the gloom. She stops; he must have made some sound or made some movement. Are you okay?  Yeah, I’m fine. I’m good.  Would you be more comfortable with your clothes on this time?  I guess. Whispers. Baby. The light makes the curls of her hair sharp. The light, he realizes, is the natural version of fluorescence. The bed is canopied crudely, not really canopied, hung with sheer material impaled on tacks to the walls of the alcove that holds the bed. The ceiling is blue, he knows from memory, but today is gray, like everything else. There is the ghostly flutter of cobwebs in the corner above his head, wisps nearly invisible like ripples in the very air they inhabit. She takes off her shirt with one X-arm motion, tosses it across the room so that it lands, joins the bra she removed under-shirt when they first settled in, brings his hand to rest between her breasts, and he assumes he is supposed to feel her heartbeat. Which he can’t through the hammerfall of his own pulse stampeding through his hand. I love you baby. Her skin is clammy, but underneath, flowing near the surface, he can feel heat in her fleshes. They kiss for a while. Shhhrelax. Relax.  I am relaxed. His neck is bent cruelly, head pushed up against the wall, pressure. The commercials end, a new song vamps up. He hates this song. She unstraddles him and the humid warmth she leaves behind down the length of his entire body evaporates and he shivers. She stands beside the bed, in profile, opens a drawer in her dresser, parts mounds of unfolded clothes, takes what he sees is a condom in dull foil into her hand. She puts it lightly between her teeth, and her hands go to her waistband. She tugs down, steps out of sweatpants and underwear and is now naked. She is voluptuous. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen her completely unclothed before. She shifts her weight and looks positively classical. The pout she wears is one he has come to understand as her attempt at sexiness; her mouth pursed and the corners slightly downturned (the condom has moved back to her hand), big puppy eyes, one eyebrow raised slightly, pleadingly. She says something but he is not listening, and hopes the affirmative noise he makes will satisfy whatever question she may have posed, approve any sentiment. She blinks exaggeratedly, prolonged. A draft seeps through the window and crawls across him, burrows under his clothes. She kneels on the bed, swings a leg over his legs, restraddles him, his knees. She holds the condom out to him, does not say anything. The books, Health Class said practice. He has not. He takes it, in an instant feels the contour of its ring (it is harder than he had imagined) in the foil. With the ends of fingertips rips the very top of the wrapper, does not breach the pouch. He must be blushing by now. He can’t bring himself to look at her, her face. He tries again, farther down, ripping in a curve as not to damage the packet’s cargo. He can feel her smile from four feet away. The condom’s out; he wants to examine it but doesn’t. Rolls it on. Wasn’t that big of a deal. She rubs his legs like she’s praising a dog, and scoots up and over him. Gives him a look. Are you ready. So special. A second frozen. He supposes this is it the big moment what every guy dreams about fantasizes about wears like a badge like a brand a shining ribbon. He says something, which may or may not be words. She lowers herself. Jesus. Her hands on his abdomen. His in fists by his side and then on her hips. Open your eyes. He moves, tries to move, moves. Baby. Desperate. Up and up. Let me see your eyes. Hands from his chest into his hands fingers interweaving. …love… I… Downstairs the front door opens, slams in the way only wind or weather’s reverse pressure can slam a door. Intake of breath, his, sharp. Punctuation. The earth does not shatter, does not stop turning. He does not die, not even a little. He stops moving. Did someone? Maybe we… But she knows, he can see it on her face, which isn’t unkind, but which he hates anyway, angry, still inside her, hates that she knows and thinks him all the cuter for it. She lifts herself off him, lies beside, against him. Cuddling is the word, her leg pinning him, her fingertips on his neck. He indulges her, wants to indulge her. But he has to, needs to go. No, please. The song on the radio that he despises crossfades to another one he despises only slightly less. A pillow falls to the floor, on his shoes; he fears it soaking up some of their moisture. His heart rate slows.  He removes the condom, throws it in the wastebasket under her desk at her prompting, closes his fly. He gives her a few more minutes. He tries hard to reflect while she murmurs and pretends to somehow be sated beside him. When his mom drives them (herself and him) to Thanksgiving two days later, he will have a secret inside. Not exactly burning but residing comfortably, metastasizing, tickling somewhere near his diaphragm. Eventually shrinking as time renders it assumed, as he tells (brags) to select few (many), every time he does so a piece of it flying crudely out of his mouth and dissolving, evaporating. He is out of the bed, leaving the fading ghost of a kiss, pulling on his shoes and putting on his jacket and backpack as she tries to get him to stay just a few more minutes in a pidgin English/babytalk. He can’t. Believe him, he wants to. Really. Loves her. She pulls the comforter up and over herself and the last he sees of her as he exits the bedroom is her hair twitching in the window’s frigid exhalation. Down the stairs, quietly. He can hear across his skin the presence of a human being—brother, what’s his name—in the living room of the townhouse, but does not turn to see. The German shepherd nips at his thigh as he goes out the front door, something he (the dog) has never done before, and catches a little skin between his (the dog’s) dulled-with-age teeth, doesn’t break the skin. He is out onto the sidewalk and already his face is damp with cold mist. Walking home. I must remember. I must remember. I must remember this. I must remember. The leaves on the concrete are slugs. Despite his future boasts, he knows something. Despite the spring in his step that he has put there, designed, thinking that it must be there, thinking that the world will see somehow, must see, he is a new man after all (but he allows that he’s not really a man at all, doesn’t feel like one, won’t feel like one for years), he knows something. He knows that nothing has been lost. Gone already.

 

IV.

His forehead is the kind of hot that needs no palm’s press or motherly kiss to detect. He can feel heat in waves leaving its plane, radiating out in rippled, invisible auras, dissipating a few feet from his person. The rest of his body is hot too, but this heat is contained, shackled and struggling vigorously within his tissues, simmering. Only escaping from his forehead. Something about vessels…concentrated in the face and scalp. Why head cuts bleed so horrifically. Hot blood tangles. Knots of capillaries pressed thick and flat like paper fibers into pulp between skin and skull. Surging, straining. Broadcasting fever. Furious chakra. He does not sweat. His eyes hurt, burn, and his mouth is acrid and prickly. The hallway shimmers—maybe the flicker of a fluorescent bar overhead or maybe the optical effect of the heat off his forehead, running down honey waves smoke bending refracting distorting the lens warping the melting abyss of pupil and making shimmer. His eyes burn. His feet have transported him miraculously to Algebra; one of the first of soon many ring-eyed scarecrows to wander in and settle into sadistic desk-chair combos, groaning like they’re first getting out of bed even though its afternoon now, a blade of an afternoon, cold and bright and sharp, but for 47-minute chunks it’s been this way all day except for the five minutes in between each chunk and of course lunch, when irises uniformly shrugged off their glaze and faces pulled themselves skyward and remained so until the next dead bell. Not his. He vomited earlier that morning, automatonically, in an empty bathroom kneeling, feeling the tiles print rules into his knees. He has looked in a mirror; he is ashen, except for his cheeks, which are splotchy apple-red continents. Fingers shake. Tongue steams. There is one other place that lets off heat: his right arm, just above the elbow, on his bicep, a place that lets it off differently, lets it seep out and into the fabric of his sleeve, throbbing and wet, cruel, speaking with his movements, tingling, ugly he knows and puckered now and discolored, this place, pulling at the arid ground around it and unyielding— the glass was dirty, certainly, there was no denying that —but giving no pain really now, although there had been pain, and something else too like sweetness at the very moment— there it was glittering, winking wickedly on the floor and he picked it up between thumb and forefinger daintily and knew without thought what he was to do, and went right into a bathroom, the nearest one —a kind of perverse stimulation of nerves of a tiny, specific, and hitherto untested sort, not pleasure really but more like the negative print of pleasure, outlines and features all there but colors reversed— and of course it was unclean not just dirtily but microbially for sure, but he was not thinking in straight paths and maybe not thinking at all and then it was too late and paper towels were needed and someone was coming in the bathroom clearing his throat with a cough and he had to hide it, should have washed it out, shouldn’t have at all, but there was no caring in that focused searing endless line or moment or —something right, something like falling into an assigned slot, but now he suffers its grimacing recompense, that moment’s— and sitting in class afterwards and a dotted line through his sleeve —and can’t decide if he is sorry. That day, the first and not last, the one after a day of bad news, not the worst but a downturn definitely at the hospital, seizures, his mom said, things moving faster than expected. Impossibly, he does not see the dots’ connections. He is outside of worldly touch. He is a perfect and airtight vessel; his maelstrom is only, sublimely, his own. The bell must have tolled; his teacher is speaking, too slow it seems. His hands are flat down on the desk and there is nothing else on the desk but his hands and the sludge of heat under them. His thirty-some classmates laugh briefly at something that his fever believes for a second is him and behind them all the clock thunders on deadly like far-off axfalls in a forest. And he burns up.

 

V.

Where there was recently noise, volume, echoes, there is now only stillness and peace. The breathing of the heat down through an overhead vent, the gentle tap of the twigs of bushes on the outside of the basement windows, the low sigh of the air in the room recovering from the recent abuse, of the earth settling around the walls. His ears are ringing and he is hot and sweating thinly and the fingers on his left hand hurt from two hours of playing. Half of the band has gone. He is waiting for his mom to come and pick him up and she is late. It has been dark for hours. The drummer still sits behind her drums (it is her basement) but now gets up and interweaves her fingers, flips palms outwards, pushes away from herself, and he can hear the soft pop of her joints. He notices his amp, on the floor and leaned back against the couch, is still on, hissing. He crosses to it and switches it off. His footsteps are slaps on hard wood. It’s hot.  No it isn’t. I’m freezing.  It’s like a fucking jungle. I’m all sweaty.  You’re always hot. He smiles and flops down on a section of the couch, arms flat against its cool leather. She goes to the other section and sits and crosses one leg over the other. The lights are set into the ceiling, dimmer bulbs dimmed so that the basement is orange and warm. He watches her reflected in the bulging glass of a big dark TV. She beats fingers lightly against her thighs—drummer’s tic—and she rocks forward on the offbeat so that her reflection’s face balloons and shrinks. He can also see himself in the glass, legs and knees huge and body far away and head even farther, almost too small to make out, on the very edge of the screen. He hears her breathing but not his own, and wonders what she hears. For what may be minutes they say nothing. He cools down. The sweat on his forehead evaporates, leaving an invisible, prickling patina of salt, and the color starts to leave his cheeks. His fingers ache and throb, but no longer sting. He inspects his right hand and sees that he has worn down the top of his index fingernail striking the strings of the guitar despite the pick. With his middle finger he presses down on the worn nail’s overhang and finds it thin and flexible. It is hard for him to stop repeating this action. I thought we sounded—  His voice fails and he notices that his throat is scratchy, hurts. More like swollen, or stretched around the ghost of a golf ball. He clears it, swallows phlegm down. –Sounded good.  Yeah, me too. I messed up a lot though.  It’s okay. We all did. He has more to say, but doesn’t say it. They both seem to know that their voices are somehow out of place, inappropriate in the reactionary calm, too loud and brash and braying, even if only whispers. They are content for now with silence, the eye of the storm. The band has been together for a few months, and planned for much longer before then. It has gone through as many members as it has names. He and the drummer, founders, are the only constants, will be the only constants. There are four of them at this point. Three of them fifteen years old (he included), one of them fourteen. Some pictures of the band have been taken: children behind their big instruments, smiles (when they are not wearing put-on scowls) earnest except for his, which is exaggerated, ironic. Blue jeans and sneakers, carbuncular faces, feet wide apart. A band with more attitude than skill, and not much attitude really. He is its leader—bringing in song after song to the other three, forging ahead with each one like they even came close to truly mastering the ones before it, calling the shots, calling it his—although he makes some attempt to deny it. Their songs are slow and brooding and long, their melodies and chord progressions simple. He writes about swamps and koi fish, freakshows and ashes, and clouds and stars. He is the hero of them all. His Stratocaster and amp roar amidst the entropic sludge of bass, keyboards and drums. His voice growls somewhere in it all—the cheap furry four-channel PA his mom bought for them inadequate, feeding back off the hard walls of the basement, wailing like an injured animal if turned up too loud. But now the sound of rended air healing itself with silence. Eye of the storm; always passes. It is the first week of December. He realizes that she is looking at him from behind the thick curtain of her hair, but he does not look back at her, instead pretending to scratch at something on his arm. Then he looks at his watch, curses. She’s always late.  It’s okay. You can stay as long as you need to. I don’t have any homework. He looks up at her and for once doesn’t see the shibboleth of false antagonism they have insisted on constructing between them, doesn’t see the silly girl he knows from school, but sees for the first time how beautiful she really is, sees the depth in her pupils. He feels something in his chest. Thanks. Shakes it off. Can’t really shake it off. (They will end up together in two years, the first time he will have been anywhere near happy in as much time, the inevitable [but ultimately doomed] product of: wide pendulum swings between intimacy and hostility [both just a way for them to flirt, he later realizes], a strange Fourth of July that ends with her arms around his neck in a friend’s pickup truck, pregnant glances at parties and band practice, an awkward kiss in his car one day after school [initiated by her and retracted the same day], months of subsequent confusion, a note written in Spanish and folded numerous times and handed to him for translation, and a wintry first date at the Natural History Museum, during which his heart thumped at twice its normal power.) They make small talk for a few minutes, having had enough of the silence. Somewhere above, he can hear her mom moving around, maybe in the kitchen. The house creaks when a gust of wind hits one side. He finds that he has been rubbing the leather arm of the couch compulsively, pushing down hard and away from himself, smoothing out the already-smooth dyed skin. There is the shine of headlights through the windows up by the ceiling, scanning laterally. In the driveway outside he hears what he knows is his mom’s van’s engine, burbling like a pot of oil, clicking and snarling. He gets up and looks out the window and is surprised. It is snowing. Big fat flakes fill the tubes of the headlights’ light, stick against the windows and the branches of the bushes just beyond. It’s snowing.  What? Really? She gets up and stands by him, brushing his arm as she moves. Wow. Really coming down.  Yeah.  Maybe we won’t have school tomorrow.  God I hope so. His mom honks the van’s horn. He rolls his eyes. Reaches for and puts on his coat. Slings his (already-in-gig-bag) guitar over his shoulder, unplugs his amp and picks it up with a grunt, feeling the tendons in his arm stretch earthward. He stands facing her. She has been standing watching the snow through the window with arms hugging her body. She turns to him. Well I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.  Hopefully not.  What? Oh, yeah.  Good job today.  Thanks.  See ya.  Bye. That feeling in his chest again. He trudges up the blond wooden stairs up to the front door, calls goodbye to her mom, turns the knob, pulls open, pushes through the glass outer door. The snow adorns his nose and eyelashes. It has obviously been snowing harder and longer than he realized. The trees lining the sidewalks are candied. A creamsicle sphere of pointillist halation surrounds each streetlamp. The snow is truly a blanket; the ground hibernates beneath it. He descends the drummer’s front steps, careful not to slip, and heads for the van. He can see his breath, warm life evidenced right before him. The wind is in his hair. He stops halfway to the van and looks once more around him, listens. The world, for the moment, is frozen and still. And silent, through the storm has come. 

 

VI.

There is a point that is more place than moment, the paperthin barrier line between two absolutes, a space neither light nor dark but somehow both, and also static and moving at incredible fluid velocity, and blindingly sublime. Empty and luminous. Something slips up and into this point and then it is more like a moment than a place, hanging twirling and crystalline in time but not in time really just in memory and imagination and fading from the very start, an afterimage before the image itself came to be. Balanced and liminal, perfectly paradoxical in every feature and facet, all inclusive of and negating extremes, the absolutes it seems to separate, a single whole value constructed from infinitely complex quantum refractions. Unlimited and unmappable, despite all worldwide attempts. Navigated twice, the first an embarkation into bright knowledge and the second into unknowable dark.  He does not see the launch or the crossing, but far away, he hears a voice in the night.

 

VII.

He is alone in the room, but can hear others nearby, through and echoing off the walls. Murmurs, voices close to cracking, nasal with recent tears, one or two occasionally rising obscenely above the others—women’s voices. The air is otherwise static and now he understands “deathly still;” it feels solid and is difficult to inhale. He sits in a wing chair in the living room, looking into the blaze of the kitchen, slumped so that his neck is bent at an awkward angle against corduroy upholstery, feet up on a cubic ottoman, legs straight out and crossed, one shin on top of the other. His hands move against an acoustic guitar’s neck and body, sliding up and down the strings and strumming gently with his thumb. He does not feel anything. The chords he forms are disjointed, strung together haphazardly, not ugly but not anything else. Many minutes pass, whispering guitar cutting through white noise quiet. Someone comes up to him and leaks words and he probably says something back. The front door opens and closes. More quiet, more voices, more minutes. The phone in the kitchen rings and it answered by one of the others, and then is handed over to his mom. The call is long and halting, punctuated by his mom’s answers to a stretched thread of unheard questions (if he strains his ears—jutting out his neck ever so slightly forward towards the kitchen—he thinks he can make out the tiny insect voice in the receiver). After a while he understands that the presence on the other end of the line is some sort of representative from an organ donation or similarly medical organization. He listens behind the shield of the guitar and its strumming, and learns details about his father has never heard before, has never thought about asking before, maybe never would have asked about. And suddenly the call cannot last long enough. And then it ends. His mom says Thankyou, and hangs up, looks at him and explains what he surmised minutes ago. She gives him a look of pure heartbreaking apology. He hates how red her eyes are. He says something bristly, wanting her to leave, calculating how much upward inflection, how much warmth to inject so she isn’t hurt. More. She says something else and goes off to finish whatever conversation she was having before. The atmosphere is humid with so many tears shed. Another bout of crying has started in the other room. He strums his guitar and does not feel anything. More people come to him and speak. He smiles a lot and talks with confidence and volume. Some of them leave afterwards, after offering strong, long hugs and kind words to everyone who will take them. He gets up from the chair and gets a soda from the refrigerator, puts some butter on a piece of bread and eats it, retreats back to the chair. He has not turned on the light next to the chair. Will not. Hours pass with every breath he takes. More people leave. It seems to him that more people leave than were there to begin with. Soon the house is as empty as it will be that night. His mom sits down on the couch in the room and he knows she wants him to sit with her. He does. They speak for some time. He does not feel anything. He moves like a machine, makes noise like a machine. Neither will remember what they speak about. Burning eyes and glances at the clock, and the deep-in-bone ache of exhaustion tells them it is time to try and sleep—it is almost morning. They get up and start turning off the lights downstairs. There is a tealight candle burning in the dining room and he goes to blow it out and she stops him and says that he can leave it. At the bottom of the stairs, she pulls him into a tight hug and whispers and whispers and doesn’t let go. He hugs back, careful to not squeeze as tight as her. She is not crying, and does not tremble, but gives off the impression of trembling. Like a gyroscope somewhere deep inside her is spinning off-kilter, consuming its own self-containment and stability as its orbits degrade. He goes up the stairs before her and straight into his room. Says goodnight and that he loves her. Her voice falters when she reciprocates. He closes his door but not all the way, feels a pang of guilt. The room’s light is switched on, as is the stereo. He puts on a CD, turns it down low, and goes to his armchair. He does not feel anything. But where he is at is not peace. A book is opened and reading is attempted for a while. No words are absorbed; he goes over the same page a dozen times before he gives up. And turns off the lamp. He sits staring into the dark for a while until the dark is not so dark. Outside the window he sees that the sky is no longer black but indigo. He does not look at the clock. His eyes burn. His breathing is even and measured. He is more tired than he has ever been. A different and alien kind of weariness. He knows innately that there is peace in rest. Just needs to sleep. Sleep is oblivion and oblivion is the medicine he needs. He climbs into his bed in the dark, not bothering to undress, pulls the covers over himself, and feels the coolness of the pillow on his face. His hot eyes close and soon he breathes sleep and soft lilac light creeps into his room—the sun’s lid opening on the horizon below skeletal trees. The hazy birth of a cold, unfair dawn.

 

~~~

2009

***{This one took a while to write. Many of those close to me will realize that this story is based on tragically true and incredibly personal events in my life: those surrounding the hospitalization and subsequent death of John Cooper, my father, in 2003 of terminal brain cancer. The specific events in the above piece, however, are fictionalized. Let me explain-- There are definite holes in my memory from that period of time. Instead of trying to reconstruct the FACTS of that time, I decided to write a work of prose that would hopefully reflect the TRUTH of what was going on, who I was, and how I felt. By abandoning factual accuracy, I freed myself up to really delve deep and create something that felt honest and profound. I hope. It took a long time for me to be able to write this. I had (and still have) mixed feelings about writing something so personal and memoirish; it's not really the kind of thing I want to be known for. But I think that it needed to happen, and I'm proud of it. I hope you enjoyed reading.-SC}  

ASCLEPEION

by Sam Cooper

C₁₇H₁₇CL₂N

The hospital lights are bright but not unpleasant, not like real hospital lights are. I am in a glass room at the center of a nest of corridors, and these corridors are lined with doors, which are all closed. The room I am in is for family and friends. No one else is there with me. The walls are glass and so is the door and the door closes with a swish when I enter it (this all starts with me entering the room), and then the room is still and airtight and mostly soundless.

My friend is dead. I can feel it in my body.

She died a few minutes ago and there was nothing the doctors could do. I do not know what she died of. I do not know if someone told me or if I intuited it—some change bodily or atmospheric? I don’t know. All I know is that now I can feel it, her death. Other people I know are in the hospital but not in the room with me and I think I can hear them crying and screaming. I myself start to cry. More like sob. The sound I make is sob sob sob, choking on my own tongue and vomiting up grief. My eyes squeeze shut and I can no longer stand. I fall to the floor and sob. There is a chair next to me, part of a grouping of furniture made of steel tubing and thin upholstered foam, and I try to support myself on it and pull myself up a little bit, but I end up sliding back down to my knees and then onto my side, and I feel my ribs press against the linoleum of the floor and hurt every time I inhale. I inhale hugely, masochistically. After a while the pain is too great and has replaced sorrow as fuel for my tears. I feel I am suffocating. Although I am shaking, and can’t feel my knees or any other joints for that matter, I somehow manage to rise. My eyes are still blurred with crying, but I look around. The swishing glass door has disappeared from, melted into the glass walls. I wonder why I am not worried. In a glass corner a coffee machine I did not see before switches on. Beyond the glass walls there are people walking, mostly in vague shadow. I wish they could not see me. I wish someone would see me. Maybe the glass is tinted. I know this to be untrue. My tears stop and suddenly my cheeks are dry and eyes clear. My throat burns as it gulps the coffee-scented air into my swollen lungs.

There is a chair in another one of the glass corners. On this chair is my dead friend’s backpack, colorless and shapeless. I cross to it, my chest the only part of me I can feel, hurting. I reach out a mechanical hand and touch it. The canvas is warm. I pinch the tab of the zipper and pull it up and over the tracked peak of the pack, and wrench the sides apart. The pack gapes. Inside are binders, folders, envelopes. In a moment that goes faster than one clock second, I rifle through one binder and take a sheaf of papers. Her hand stains all of them. If I could recognize or remember her scent, I’m sure I would find it perfuming the bleached fibers. I fold the papers once and again. They go in my pocket. I think they will not be missed—their absence will not be noted; no one else knows exactly the contents of her backpack. No one living. If I am wrong, I will gladly return anything wanted. But there is no time to sort through them now, no time to worry; time has run out. I must carry them with me, incubated near my flesh, folded and safe next to my skin, because now there is need for haste. Although the door has not reappeared in the glass walls, and no passing shadows look in on me, I am suddenly in a great hurry.

C₁₈H₂₁NO₄

I fell from a great height onto a flat plane of broken glass the size of Wyoming. The shards were big, most of them easily the size of my leg (I saw as I fell closer), and triangular and wickedly pointed, and none of them fit together. They lay in a rough single layer, in some places overlapping and piled on each other like pressed leaves made of formed sugar. From a great height the ground looked like the ocean at sunset, for an unseen light like the sun shot oblique fiery rays across the shards like the they were tiny peaks of a calm sea. As I fell, slow and haltingly like a goose feather, I felt fear, yes, but also no fear. My clothes were linen and loose and pastel pill blue. I was falling facedown, arms crossed in front of my chest like a golden pharaoh, so that the air I cut through rushed into my hair and pushed it up, sculpting it jagged like a war headdress. In the far sparkling distance, something like a river ran glowing and hot through the plane of shards. I smelled mint and motor oil.

Eventually, sleepily, I drifted closer to the ground, and saw that at my own projected ground zero, the shards of glass were fogging up like a giant’s breath was blowing under them. My lazy descent turned into a straight drop. I put my arms up in front of my eyes and make a sound like a chandelier crashing when I hit the ground.

My eyes, squeezed shut at the moment of impact, fluttered open. The light around me was no longer carrot-orange and slanted, but now was dull and cool like slate, and diffused from above or below or maybe all around, I didn’t know. The glass under me, at least that directly in front of my eyes, was no longer fogged, but sharp and clear and shining and cold. I moved and felt a queer tugging, like my skin was too tight around my flesh. As I got to my knees, I felt heavier than I ever remembered being. I did not look down at myself, or at the glass surrounding me. Would not. Sounds like windchimes rippled away from me, maybe echoes of my impact. I looked up at the sky as I got up and found it close and silvery, and completely neutral—indifferent. I was standing. I looked down at myself.

Out of my arms and chest and legs stuck many shards of glass, each at least eight inches long, glittering and refracting the hazy light around its edges and reflecting my own face (curiously blank and ashen and taking some seconds for me to recognize as my own), and emitting a high wet-finger-on-wineglass tone. There was no pain. None at all. Only the tugging, the tightness, my skin stretched over alien angles. There was no blood. On the ground, which I now saw to be less like ground and more like membrane (…the feeling of something on the other side…and was that translucency I sensed?...), was a bare patch, a space completely devoid of glass, the exact dimensions of my person.

Without feeling, without thought, without opinion, I pulled at one of the shards in my right arm. It did not come out without a struggle. My skin stretched along with it, elastic and pale and distended and translucent (like the ground/membrane maybe was) where it clung to glass. When the shard finally drew out of my arm, he note it sung was silenced, and its point was covered not in blood, but in honey. There was no pain.

I started on the next one.

C₂H₆O

In space that’s empty

And blank like inside eggshells,

I stand motionless.

I take a few steps…

And no change in perspective…

All is as before.

My footsounds echo

Off unseen walls and hard floor

And return ringing,

And my breath is slow

And quiet, and the air crisp

And citrus clean.

There’s no horizon,

But my focus is drawn to

Where it might have been.

A dot like black dust,

Shimmering in the bright void

Like through waves of heat

(Though the air is cool),

Seems to be approaching fast,

Growing into shape.

Fear rises inside

My intestines, dread of the

Thing nearing, showing

Neat outline now and

Depth as well—I can see it’s

Not human but beast—

Revealing itself

And its terrible hairy

Carnivore nature.

Four legs and black coat,

Eyes gone or too dark too see,

And surely sharp teeth.

I turn to retreat

(Retreat to where I don’t know),

But feet won’t obey.

And the thing draws near.

I cannot look; its gait seems

Familiar to me,

Its trotting rhythm

Known already to my ears,

And I can only

Think that it is my

Own animal shadow come

To wreak some revenge

For an unknown sin.

On me and my trembling form

It now closes in.

Determined but stuck,

And brave now, I uncover my eyes

To face my demise…

And I find that this

Terrible, deadly creature

Is my own pet dog.

I call out her name,

The joy and relief a high

Crackle in my voice.

But she canters past,

As if she does not hear me,

Tongue flapping behind,

And she continues

Off and away until she

Disappears from sight,

A black dot where the

Opposite horizon would

Be if there was one.

How strange, I think, and remain standing motionless for some time.

C₂₁H₃₀O₂

Vowing to hold on to this feeling, we interwove hands and tried to wake up, closing our eyes tight and wishing hard.

When that didn’t work, we tried opening our eyes as far as possible, holding each other’s wide and watering with gentle fingers and apologizing all the while.

Still unsuccessful, we sought the solution with our heads, devising ways to test the difference between sleep and everything else.

We decided there was no way to tell.

When we kissed, we realized that we were already awake, because neither of us ever had any dreams this good.

And then woke up.

C₁₇H₁₇CL₂N

Fade in.

I lie in a narrow hospital bed, naked under a paper gown, goosebumped, a bad taste in my mouth, badly having to pee. I have liver cancer. I have found this out, although I cannot remember how. It is night and I am waiting for some news or maybe a test result or maybe something else. The TV that hangs in its heavyduty cradle near the ceiling is on, but displays only infomercials. I am alone. I feel fine.

A doctor comes in, patent leather shoes shrieking, and he sits earnestly on the edge of my tiny hospital bed and says he is a no-bullshit guy and is going to be onehundredpercent straight with me. He wears frameless glasses so that his eyes can communicate the lack of bullshit better. He is, as promised, straight:

The liver cancer cells somehow traversed the tunnels of my veins and have landed and metastasized in my left arm—a pink-beige tumor like expectorated bubblegum the size of a strawberry, nestled and comfortable between my radius and ulna, fleshy moorings wrapped around the bones and stretching with their movement, nudging muscle aside. It will kill me if untreated. It will grow and infect the cells around it and then eventually he rest of the cells in my body until I am wholly corrupted and beyond help and I die. But—!

It can be removed. I can ostensibly be cured of the tumor and liver cancer of the arm. But only through radical action.

The plan is outlined: surgical amputation just below the elbow, careful incisions and prying and pulling and eventual and hopefully neat removal of the malignancy, reattachment, future wellness on my part. There’s one catch—no general anesthetic for some reason (But, he promises, no bullshit, the Best Local that modern science can provide. I won’t feel a thing.)—but I don’t care; I’m weeping with perfect religious joy and nodding compulsively and signing any forms I can get within my grasp. And to think!—I felt fine.

Dissolve.

To me, the operating room is only a pair of bright halogen lamps (one aimed at my left arm, and the other, for some reason, pointed directly at my eyes, an oilslick rainbow halo around its bulb) and the fuzzy darkness beyond them. The surgical team arrives. Voices talk at me and I talk back. There is a sting in my arm and I look in time to see a needle withdraw from skin. Numb. It happens so fast. Too fast. No one asks if I am ready. I can only watch.

Arm strapped down. Head strapped down. Told to relax. Bonesaw started somewhere out of my sight, whining and whirring, then brought into the light and its blade is no blade but the blurred impression of one, and it descends and cuts through my arm like the limb is beeswax. The sound is indescribable. Sand glass rusty nails. The vibrations travel to and rest in my teeth. My forearm is severed. There is blood, but not much, and inside the arm seems hollow and dry. There it is, the ugly glistening fruit. Doctors huddle around and attack with scalpels and forceps and emerge victorious—the enemy held aloft in the solid grip of surgical weaponry. The arm is repositioned. My teeth still ring like bells. The divorced forearm is drawn by some magnetism to its parent flesh, and snaps in place. The joint steams and bubbles and meshes and mends, and the only evidence of the saw trauma is a dull brown ring. I faint while doctors pat each other on the back and grin through their seafoam masks.

Quick cut.

I am in a field—an empty field, once planted with corn. Now all that’s left is the stubble of stalks cut and harvested. There is mist on the ground, shroudlike and unmoving, indifferent to the movements of our feet—movie mist. I am with people I know to be my friends, but their faces are blurred and they are dressed in gray. The ring near my elbow remains and aches, how I imagine a hairline fracture would feel some days after injury, although I have never broken a bone. It swings and flexes like it always had before; mobility seems unlimited. But there is the ache again, and I know without thought that the ache will never fade, just like the faint ring will never fade. I am wearing a long heavy coat, which has no color. I wander, feet crunching down mummified cornstubs. Birds that are like and unlike crows wing in spirals above me in the tan sky, and their cries are long and sad and come to rest and reverberate under my eyelids.

~~~~~~

2009

THIRD LAW

by Sam Cooper

 ***{note: This story is comprised of two chapters from an abandoned novel I was working on last year. With a little more editing and some rewriting, I think it might work as an independent piece.} 

 

Maureen Wolfe was awake long before the clock radio was set to go off, lying in the receding predawn and willing herself to go back to sleep. She was awake when Mark got up quietly from their bed to go to the gym and then to work, and, thinking she was still asleep, kissed her on the forehead. She was awake when the automatic coffeemaker downstairs turned on and filled the house with dark perfume. She gave up on finding more slumber, and reset the alarm before it could go off. Sitting up in bed, she folded her hands in her lap and closed her eyes.

“Lord give me strength,” she whispered. “To get through this day.”

She reached under the shade and turned on the bedside lamp.

“Give me humility, give me patience.”

The wooden floor was cold on her feet when she swung them out of the covers. She rolled her head and stretched out her neck.

“Gimme gimme gimme.”

Maureen wrapped herself in a bathrobe and put on her slippers, and went downstairs to pour herself a cup of coffee. She opened the refrigerator and splashed some milk into the mug. The pincer tie from the bag covering the English muffin tray was removed, and fork was stabbed into one all the way around, and the halves were placed into the toaster. The sun was coming up. It cut a thick, oblique block of light into the air of the kitchen from the southeastern window. The tiled floor was harsh and icy and its cold drifted up into the legs of her pajamas. She turned on the little kitchen TV, adjusted its bent antenna, and switched through the channels to see, as Mark sometimes joked, if the world had ended yet. Not today. She switched it off, and it whined as the power drained from it. The English muffin halves popped up steaming in the toaster, and Maureen spread some apple butter on them and ate.

 

-

 

State Trooper First Class Caleb Simon was still riding the high of his graduation from Just Trooper Caleb Simon a few days prior, and had offered to take the night shift to prove it. His station mates were grateful. The middle hump of the month had passed; it was time to really start worrying about quotas, and the after-dark hours were the best for getting the old numbers up. But it was a horrible, cold night, a night to be spent inside with the family, with a warm meal and some tea and a movie or a magazine or some cats or dogs. Simon had none of those except for the warm meal, TV, and rags, and those could wait. The night was ahead of him. Nothing eventful likely to happen except maybe a speeding roadstop or two. Maybe some suspicious teenagers hanging around the loading dock of the supermarket, or at the very worst, attempting some petty act of vandalism. Not much escaped the eyes of the watchful community, and not much wrong was done. Especially not on a night like this.

No one called Trooper First Class Simon “Trooper First Class.” No one even called him “Trooper.” Those who knew his name called him Caleb, sometimes Cal, and those who didn’t called him “Officer.” Even in his own thoughts, he usually referred to himself as Officer Simon, a weirdly rigid habit that, in no insignificant way, made him feel like he truly inhabited the position of authority. Although it had been his lifelong dream to be a State Trooper, he had never liked the word. It felt somehow vulgar leaving the mouth. Officer was just fine. He was only Trooper (now TFC) Simon on his reports and to his superiors.

His badge seemed heavy with the official recognition of his three years of exceptional service. It felt good, even if the most exciting moments of three year’s exceptional service in somewhere like Tuscarora consisted mostly of breaking up barfights and being present on the scene for the benefit of overwrought, overzealous fender-benderers. Sometimes some theft to deal with, or loitering, or truancy. The vast majority of his time spent on speeding tickets, DUIs, trespassing. He hadn’t once in his service so far witnessed an unnatural death, a really thrilling felony. But that was fine by him, even if he admitted he was somewhat jealous of the dinosaurs’ war stories. It meant he, and the other guys, were doing their jobs.

Three year’s worth of anything added up. He was proud. On his way up. No one could argue against it. On the way to Sergeant now, and beyond. It was Fate. Every second of his life so far had existed to birth each new moment, and so it would be until the big messy timeline ended. This was something he had always remembered knowing, even if he didn’t always have the words put to it.  It only got truer and truer. If his father was right about nothing else, as he likely wasn’t, he was right about that.

 

-

 

She put the mug down on the counter and went back upstairs, where she disrobed and stepped into the tub for a short shower. It was not relaxing, it was not energizing, it was simply routine. Looking in the mirror afterwards, Maureen rubbed a slender finger under her eye and stretched down the skin there. Not too bad this morning. She dried her hair and put on her clothes, an ensemble chosen solely for comfort: loose blouse, jeans, flat shoes. She sobbed briefly sitting on the edge of her bed, and then wiped away her tears and put on some makeup. She returned to her coffee, now lukewarm but still drinkable. The air was getting warmer. She downed the coffee, rinsed the mug out, and put it in the dishwasher.

The phone rang, but she did not pick it up. It was certainly the automated Central Substitute system, calling to inform her of an opening at some school or the other, and she refused to take any jobs today. She had, however, agreed to spend the first part of the day volunteering at Town Hall, helping to pack up some of the files into boxes before the Big Renovation that had been promised for years and was now finally peeking its head over the horizon. In reality, all it meant was a good thorough cleaning, and a new coat of paint on the walls inside and out.

She locked the heavy front door behind her and stepped out onto the wraparound porch, and the air was still cool enough to make her consider going back inside to get a jacket, but she didn’t. The trimmed grass around the stepping stones to the driveway was dew-wet and left little slashes of damp on the bottoms of her pant legs. She bent down at the flowerbed nearest to the house, and gathered up some black-eyed susans, and cut them close to the ground with a pair of gardening shears from the porch. The flowers were cold and wet from the night. She bent down again and plucked a long blade of fountain grass and wrapped it around the stems of the flower bundle and tied it in a bow in the front, something her mother had taught her in this very garden when she was a girl. She got in the van and put the flowers on the passenger seat and made the short drive to Main Street, where she parked in front of Town Hall. There were a few people out and about, and a schoolbus passed on the way to the high school.

Town Hall resided in the Old Bank Building, a crackled, white, two-story structure with a triangular roof at the south end of the western row of shops and business on Main. Maureen opened the door with the key Commissioner Stewart had dropped off at her house the night before and the little bell on the frame chimed. Inside, there were towers of cardboard boxes leaning amongst the desks. The vault’s ornate steel door was open, and inside were some of the Town Hall’s filing cabinets, whose contents she would be transferring. She took an empty box from the stack into the vault and placed it in the middle of the floor, and then opened the bottommost drawer of the nearest cabinet and began to pack its contents away. Soon the box was filled and she moved on to another, and then another. A small stack grew at the entrance to the vault.

She skimmed over everything she unfiled, partly out of curiosity, and partly out of a desire to kill time. Mostly the filing cabinet was filled with minor documents, deeds and licenses, some of them dating back to the thirties and farther. Placed seemingly at random among them were more interesting artifacts: a few yellowed death certificates, a green folder of newspaper clippings relating to Tuscarora’s now long-defunct baseball team, and a paper-clipped bunch of brittle photographs, each one placed in an individual plastic protector. There were some fuzzy landscapes and family gatherings, some nineteenth century daguerreotype portraits with the painted fabric backdrops and the name of the studio embossed on the border of the print, and a plastic envelope filled with around a dozen miscellaneous shots. The one that most intrigued Maureen was a small print, maybe from the twenties or thirties, showing an old man with a violin. He was dressed in a skinny black suit, with a high starched collar, and a bowler hat. The smile above his bushy white goatee was wide. His expression was one of pure joy as he held the fiddle to his chin, bow poised to strike. It made her smile, to wonder who he was, who took the picture, where he was headed all dressed up with his shining instrument.

In the back storage room of the building, taking a break to weep quietly, she considered stealing it; no one would miss it from this unmarked, unorganized wreck. But she would never do anything like that. It just wouldn’t be Christian of her. When she returned to the vault, the photo was placed in its own individual protective plastic protector. The whole bundle was placed in a cardboard box as the front entrance chimed.

Janet Hendrickson, from four houses down, came in through the door at noon, right on time, to relieve Maureen. “Here I am,” said Janet, and she looked around. Maureen came out of the vault to greet her. “Wow, this place is in a state.”

“Yes.”

“Wishing you hadn’t agreed to this at last month’s meeting?”

“No, it’s not too bad.” Yes. I am wishing that.

“That’s good.” Janet wound her way through a few box skyscrapers, and hugged Maureen tightly when she reached her. “How you doing?”

“I’ve been better.” Maureen hugged back.

“You going out there today?”

“Yes. I was about to go over to the hardware store and pick some new wire for the flowers.”

“We’re all thinking about him today. He’s in our prayers. So are you and Mark and Marie.”

“Thank you.”

Janet unwrapped her arms from around Maureen’s body and wiped a tear from her eye. “Well,” she said, sighing. “I better get to boxing if this place is gonna get cleared out by Saturday.”

“She’s calling home this afternoon, you know.”

“Marie?”

“Yes.”

“Well that’s good.”

“We haven’t heard from her since the week we moved her into her dorm. She’s very busy, and seems to be having a great time.”

There was a long pause. The women looked around at the cardboard chaos.

“This seems like a lot of trouble for a new coat of paint, if you ask me,” said Maureen.

“Agreed.”

They said goodbye, and Maureen gathered up her purse and walked outside. The bright sun made her glad she had not brought a sweater. She felt eyes on her as she made the short distance to the hardware store. They meant well.

She went in, and found the gardening supplies aisle. The wire she was looking for was not immediately visible, but she found it hanging on the rack behind a spool of thicker wire. When she brought it to the counter, she saw a display full of permanent markers, and picked out a black one, thinking it would be good to have with her in case the lettering needed re-touching. She would throw it away immediately afterward. At the register, Ken Edwards smiled at her with warm eyes and said today it was on him. She thanked him and left.

 

-

 

Simon’s cruiser was parked out of the way, in a wide pseudo-alley next to Town Hall, the windows starting to fog with his body heat and the steam rising out of the travel mug in the cup holder, drops of moisture forming and rolling slowly down the inside of the glass. Waiting like a crouching lion. Or a cheetah. Cheetahs are faster. Definitely predatory. Headlights off, like feline nightvision eyes half-closed in feigned safe sleep. Biding its time, ready to pounce and devour. Simon tried not to think like this too often; it made him feel like a child. But sometimes alone on patrol like this, his action-movie-raised id broke through and it was just too fun not to let it, especially when time passed as slowly and boringly as it did now. The radar was on, and registering nothing, as it had all night. No one really out tonight, at least not the kind of people the radar was interested in. The scanner scanned and its little sieve speakers droned with static and voices mostly just chitchatting over the line. The rain had slowed to a mist, and it made frosted glass out of the windshield. Simon switched on the wipers for a single sweep, when they returned to their ports at the hood of the car, nothing was revealed on the street beyond. Might as well close his eyes for a few minutes of sleep. But that would be unprofessional, unrepresentative of the now-heavy badge pinned on the cotton-poly blend of his uniform’s chest. The dispatcher’s tin can voice coming through the radio speaker was calling for him, and he picked up the talkbox and pressed down the button and said he copied

“We got an Eleven-Seventy-Nine on Route Six South outta Tuscarora. Nine-one-one call from male driver. Please proceed to scene and remain until ambulance arrives. Serious injury reported.” Well that’s something.

Officer Simon copied and put down the box, started the engine and turned on the flashers. He left the sirens off. Not needed, not at this hour, especially not on a night like this.

He pulled out onto Main and zoomed through town, the wheels’ shushing audible over even the engine and the scanner. The focus he had become accustomed to in the last three years crept in at the sides of his mind, a kind of tunnel vision that forced his view forward, and yet made him acutely aware of every tree and fencepost that whizzed by as the cruiser accelerated. Plant life on either side became a sequence of blurred and bleached-out still photos in the strobe of the cruiser’s light bar, and the road ahead existed only as a pool of warm asphalt in the Venn diagram of the headlights, leaking out of the voidal night. He had been driving for a few minutes before the singlemindedness let up a little bit and he was able to think a little ahead. This wasn’t going to be good. At the very best, a shook-up teenager (with overreactive parents just down the line) or a cranky geriatric. At the very worst… well, cross that bridge when he got to it. Wasn’t going to be good, that was for sure.

Simon saw the glow of the taillights before anything else: a diffuse hellish glow emanating unearthily through silhouetted trunks. The cruiser rounded the big curve and the car came into view: mangled amongst the trees. His breath caught in his throat and all the adrenaline pumping through his tight veins and the folds of his brain sank to his stomach where it remained bitterly. He was right; it was bad. He parked the cruiser across the road from the scene and left the flashers on, and their pulse mixed with the hellish red taillights and gave the woods a sinister funhouse double-vision shake. He opened the door and got out, puffing his cheeks and blowing air through pursed lips. He went to the trunk, opened it, grabbed three flares. This was a bad spot: both directions of the curve were completely blind. The road was wet. It was worth the miniscule temporal detour to throw a couple flares down and avoid being hit by some distracted rubbernecker drawn like the proverbial moth to the flashing blue lights. People respected flares, and always slowed for them. Something about the fire, caveman instinct or something. . The flares were popped on and sputtered bright and smoky. Simon looked both ways down the dark arboreal tunnel that was the country highway and trotted to each end of the curve, placing a flare there and at the apex on the center double line. Then he headed to the automobile in the trees. It was bad, all right.

 

-

 

She had now reached the point that the entire day revolved around, and the point she was most hesitant to engage. The van waited for her, almost goading in its parking space. Her hands were suddenly shaking, her eyes wild. She approached it warily, and then opened the door and got in. When the key was turned in the ignition, the radio swelled into full volume, but Maureen turned it off. It didn’t seem right. She put the van into reverse, backed it out onto Main, and her brain, sensing fragility, switched into a state of smooth self-preservation.

 

-

 

The car was small, a Camry maybe. It was hard to tell. The front was crumpled slightly off-center-to-the-passenger-side in a grotesque, rounded V, the concavity matching exactly the thickness and shape of a now-scarred tree about five yards from where the car rested: driver’s side against another, smaller tree. The crumpling was more like a gash; an ugly, wrinkled empty space reaching halfway or more up what used to be the hood, dripping metallic innards. The front wheels leaned drunkenly in towards each other, and the windshield was solid spiderwebs of crack and shatter. The roof was smashed in as well, although not nearly as extremely as the front. It was a mere widthwise dent in comparison. The front windows were blown out. It was a Camry, all right. Engine was still hot and steamed and sputtered in the misty atmosphere. No gas was olfactorally evident, which was pretty damn surprising, considering the damage. Still, best not to venture to close with any flare.

Simon, now self-proclaimed Old Hat at recreating, at least roughly, the timeline of an automobile incident, had a flash of what had happened:

Camry comes along, doing maybe sixty-to-seventy, driver goes into the big curve too fast, applies brakes, skids on wet pavement, loses control, goes head-on into first tree, severely damaging front of vehicle and probably causing most serious of whatever injuries may have occurred, car swings around tree and catches some kind of air and flips onto driver’s side, travels short distance to second tree, where roof hits trunk with considerably less force than initial first-tree impact but probably accounting for the absence of the passenger and driver windows, car crashes back down onto the wheels (or what’s left of them at this point) on the earth, kicking up a small cloud of steam, mud, and damp leaves. And then probably the quiet as the shock sets in, and the woods settle down and then there’s just the sound of the shredded vehicle hissing and maybe a groan or moan from the driver’s seat.

 

-

 

The drive to the sharp curve just outside of Tuscarora was automatic, vacant. She tried to avoid that stretch of road as much as possible, but it was hard when there were only three possible routes out of town. Sometimes she had to go south. She felt numb. Her eyes barely saw the pavement as it whizzed by. Her mind hardly perceived the town ending into the cornfields ending into the woods. Her hands worked in a blessedly mechanical way, guiding the van to stop in the clearing across from the spot. Her legs swung themselves out of the door. Her arm reached for the flowers, the wire, the marker, and her brain switched back on.

She looked down and up the curve, listened, heard nothing but the breeze and far-off birds and the groan of old wooden limbs. She crossed the road, breathing hard, her ribcage pounding.

The cross was radiant against the rough mud color of the treebark. It was nailed there at about heart height, and around its base were the faded remains of flowers, notes, balloons, photographs, stuffed animals.  All the little objects from last year had been sun-bleached into the same bone meal color. They were dry and brittle with road residue. There were a few new offerings: a sealed letter, three roses, and a plush lion. Not as many as last year. The scene appeared soft to Maureen, as if observed through a Vaseline lens. She realized she had started to cry. Not sob. Her mouth was not twisted into a grotesquery of anguish, but her eyes were blurred and a steady stream of tears ran from their corners. On the cross was written: “In Loving Memory of Michael Scott Wolfe.”

 

-

 

Officer Simon came up to the passenger side of the once-Camry with flashlight out and pointed, and bent down, stomach flesh pressing into the sharp top of his belt as he peered in through the window frame. There were papers and trash and CDs strewn around the interior as if a tornado had occurred, ridiculously isolated, inside. It looked like something out of a gag, and would have been almost funny, if the debris hadn’t been covered in a droplet spatter of crimson. There was no evidence of any airbag deployed. The driver sat slumped in his seat, breathing wetly and moaning slightly with every exhale. Blood ran from his mouth and face and soaked the entirety of his shirt. He looked up slow and agonized into Simon’s flashlight.

He was young, maybe sixteen or seventeen. His hair was dark and matted and wet, and the one eye visible was brown. The word that came to Caleb Simon’s mind with regards to the boy’s face was “ruined.” All he could figure was that this fragile visage had come into sudden and violent conflict with the steering wheel. The left half of the face was literally concave, and blood flowed freely from split skin. It was already starting to swell; the left eye was puffed shut. The shattered nose was, somehow, horribly, both smashed inwards and bent into a ghastly angle towards the right side of the face. The mouth was pulled taut and open in a near-silent, painful grimace, over teeth oranged with blood and the pulpy places where teeth used to be. How the fuck did this kid make the 911 call? But there was the bloodied cell phone, still open and clutched desperately in a hand so still and tense as to suggest rigor mortis. There was a steady stream of black-red falling down into the kid’s lap and Simon followed it up to its source at the top of his skull. The dent in the roof translated into a solid sag in the ceiling of the interior, which reached its inverse peak in the space where the crown of an upright driver’s head would usually be. The dark and the hair made assessing the trauma to the skull impossible. How the fuck was this kid even conscious? Rivulets of blood ran from hairline and down over the unnatural, severe dimples of the mashed face, to the chin and dripped down. The air smelled metallic and corporeal. The overall impression was: meat. He could only imagine what horrors had occurred internally, as a human body, with all its organs and fluids and bones and tissues, came to an unmerciful halt after traveling happily along at a great speed, in all probability coming into contact with any number of automotive surfaces and objects seemingly designed to inflict as much harm on living flesh as possible. Meat.

 

-

 

Maureen went about her duties carefully and quickly. It wasn’t safe standing on the side of this shoulderless country road. Cars slowed as they passed.  Dead leaves were brushed off the arms of the cross, and a chokeweed vine was pulled away. She was glad she bought the marker; some of the letters’ paint had chipped off, and she filled in the gaps. She pressed the flowers against the vertical board of the cross, and wrapped the wire around their stems and the cross and the tree. When she passed the spool behind the tree, she could barely reach around its trunk to hand it off from one hand to the other. Hugging the tree in this fashion, she felt nothing but a freezing revulsion, and nearly jumped back when the wire was safely in the front again. It was necessary to embrace the monster three times before the job was done. She had forgotten to bring the shears or some scissors, so she bent the wire back and forth on the spool until it snapped at the desired place. Taking a step backward, she arranged the black-eyed susans to fan out attractively under his name. She, if she was capable of such a thing at a time like this, admired her handiwork.

 Closing her eyes and grasping one hand in the other, she prayed. But no sentences or invocations of His name were included. It was no prayer that could be learned in any church. It was the prayer that lies gestating inside every human being from birth, a seed of grieving meditation that sprouts once or several times in every life. Sometimes too early, sometimes late enough to transmit the illusion of being fair.  Never expected or embraced. Maureen stood at the curve in the terrible road, sending bright warmth from her being like a weapon against the thick darkness that threatened to overcome her every, and especially this, day. She sent it to her son’s memory, and his spirit, and the warmth that reflected off his memory, his spirit, flooded reciprocally into her and was bittersweet comfort, and at the very least, she felt like somehow she could survive for another day. Every tear that fell from her face carried with it any one of the blackest moments in the last five years, and although she knew they would accumulate again, and soon, she felt lighter. She opened her eyes, pressed a finger to her lips, and placed it in the center of “Michael.” Then she walked back across the road, started the van, and drove to the house she called home.

Up in the room her husband and she shared, she took a half hour to collect herself. She removed the dripped mascara and the other makeup she had on with cold cream, and changed into sweatpants and a t-shirt. She rinsed her face in icy water.

Downstairs, she slid a voluminous novel off one of the bookshelves in the dining room, and, wanting her attention to be taken up by something other than the fact of her solitude in the empty house, drew her legs up onto the couch in the living room and read. More than two hours slipped featurelessly by, with only the sound of the hallway grandfather ticking and thin pages turning breaking the still of the air. Then, at three, as promised, the phone rang.

Maureen was not surprised or startled, and got up to answer it. “Hello,” she said.

“Hey Mom, how are you doing?” Maureen was startled, however, at how distant her daughter’s voice sounded. It was like an echo without the repeat.

“Okay. Well, no. Bad, really. But I guess I’m okay. So, yes, okay.” Her voice caught momentarily in her throat. “How about you, honey?”

“The same. It’s a tough day.”

“Yes.”

“Did you go out there?”

“Yes. I got back a few hours ago.”

“Anything new this year?”

“Yes. A letter, a stuffed lion, and some roses. Not much.”

“But something. This is the way it goes, I imagine. Less every year.”

“I wish you could have been there. Or your father.”

“Me too.”

There was a very long pause while two generations of women shared a near-psychic connection of sorrow over the telephone wires. The white noise on both ends was like the ocean, and came in quiet waves as mother and daughter breathed. Finally: “How is school?”

“Oh, it’s great. I never thought I would love it this much.” Marie’s voice lightened.

“I’m so happy to hear that.”

“I know it sounds cheesy, but all the ideas… it’s so different from Tuscarora. People think here.” There was a tiny note of gleeful sarcasm in her voice.

“Welcome to college. How are your classes?”

“Good. Critical Methods in the Study of Literature is a little rough, but I think I’m managing okay.”

“Are you keeping up your studies?”

“Yes, mother.”

“Sorry. I’m a mom. I have to ask.”

“Yeah.”

“Still getting along with your roommate? What was her name?”

“Rachel. And yes. In fact, she and I have become fast friends.”

“I’m so glad to hear that.”

“I’m thinking about getting involved with the theater department if I can.”

“Oh, Marie that would be wonderful. I’m sure I’ve told you, but when-”

“Shoot.”

“What?”

“There’s someone at the door. I think it’s John. We’re going out to a club tonight. I have to go.”

“Wait, who is John? What kind of club?”

“I’m sorry Mom, I have to go. Give my love to Dad. Maybe I’ll call later. Bye!”

“Alright, but Marie-” The line was dead.

Maureen hung up her end of the line and could only shake her head and smile as she walked back to the couch in the living room. Spreading her wings, indeed.

Sitting down and putting her feet up, she glanced around the room, and she felt unwelcome, small in the big old house. The angles of the corners were harsh and cold. She lay down, placed her head on a corduroy pillow. The walls’ planes and shadows were suddenly alien. There was no homely kindness here, no life anymore. The memories soaked into the paint and wood and plaster were now stale, and left the air tasting burnt. She knew now that she was completely incongruous with this space, this house that she used to call home. She drew her knees up to her chest, and squeezed her eyelids shut so tight that little concentric circles of light burst behind them. The day overwhelmed her and she fell asleep.

A few hours later, Mark came home and woke her up by lightly touching her shoulder. She started and bolted upright on the couch, looked at him like a wounded horse before recognizing him and placing a hand over her heart.

“You were asleep,” he said gently, sitting down on the cushion at her feet. His jacket was off, but his tie was still pulled to near-strangulation tightness.

“I know.”

“I’m sorry I startled you.”

“It’s okay. I was having a bad dream.”

“You were saying something, but I couldn’t make it out.”

“Hm.”

“Anyway, I’m glad I’m home.” He bent forward and kissed her on the cheek. She leaned into him automatically, accepted the kiss.

“Hm.”

Maureen watched his scarecrow figure disappear down the hall, and heard his light footsteps ascend the stairs. The house was dark, and the air was cool. She had forgotten about dinner; there was no meal planned, and honestly, she had no intention on planning any. She sat back in the couch and stretched her arms. Mark ambled down the stairs in jeans and a white t-shirt and stocking feet, and joined her in the living room.

“I could fix some dinner,” he offered, trying sweetly to bribe her. “Or we could get carry out.”

“Okay.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know.”

“How about Chinese?”

“Okay.”

He ordered their meal on the phone, getting for Maureen her usual, and then drove into town to pick it up at Oriental Dynasty in town. She waited with her book for a while, and then set their places in the kitchen with two paper plates, paper towels, and tablespoons for serving. Mark returned shortly, and arranged on the table several white cartons from the plastic bag they had given him to carry it all in, and set out the little plastic tubs of dumpling sauce and the two sets of joined bamboo chopsticks. They sat down and he dug into his cashew chicken, and she into her lo mein, and they dipped the pork dumplings into the thin oily sauce. It was silent for some time. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was; she hadn’t eaten since that morning.

“I wish you would have come today,” she said quietly.

Mark put his chopsticks down and wiped his mouth as if defeated. He sighed and looked into his wife’s eyes. “Me too. But you know it wasn’t possible.”

“It’s been five years. That’s a biggie.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Work, work.”

“Yes. Work. I miss him just as much as you do.”

“I know.”

“I was a mess all day.”

“I was too.”

“How was it out there?”

“Okay. Someone brought a few things.”

“I’ll drive by tomorrow.”

“I think we should move.”

Mark, who had begun eating again, interrupted his chopstick’s trip to his mouth. “What?”

“I think we should move.”

“I heard you. Why?”

“Look around.” He did. “This isn’t home. At least not anymore.”

“It looks like our kitchen, our home.”

“No it doesn’t. It’s a home. Its status as ours has been slipping away for some time now, and dissipated for good when Marie left.”

“Hm.”

“Lets move out farther in the country, where no one knows us. The next county, maybe out of state. A smaller house. This place is too big for us. It was always a little too big for us, this family. We can pick up and move tomorrow if we wanted to.”

“No, we couldn’t. I’m a manager at the bank now. I can’t just up and leave.”

“You have responsibilities.”

“Yes, I do. And I could do without the sarcasm. Not everyone has a job tailored for a nomadic lifestyle. I’ve built a career here.”

“Fine. Let’s not fight.”

She had caught it just before it tumbled down the precipice. They knew each other well, and both were secretly relieved, even if they projected chilliness for a few minutes of silence afterwards. The meal was finished, and Mark cleared the table. On his way back the trashcan, he stood behind Maureen and rubbed her shoulder apologetically. She leaned her head down to his arm in acceptance. She rose from the table and followed him into the living room to spend the rest of the night basking in the light of the TV, hoping to banish the darkness with the ghostly tricolor illumination.

 

-

 

“Jesus Christ,” breathed Officer Simon.

There was a sound coming from the split lips of the boy, something in the dead middle of the spectrum between a gurgle and a howl. But quiet, terribly quiet.

“Alright.” Simon had to fight back the urge to be sick. “Hang in there. An ambulance is on its way.”

“I…” the kid seemed to be saying, every breath now a sanguine sputter. Or maybe it was just ah.

“Don’t talk. Just hang in there.” The cop tried the door. Of course, jammed by the crumpled roof. The driver’s side would be as well, even if it wasn’t flush with the treetrunk. And if he somehow could get the kid out, what then? Who knows what kind of unspeakable damage had been done to his body. Moving him so impulsively would be idiotic. But it was maddening, to just bend by the window and watch the warm life drain out of this young body.

“I…” The kid was crying too, or at least Simon thought he was. It was hard to tell with the sweat and the blood and the mist coming in the windows. The one open eye was swiveling wildly, frantically, terrified. Moisture running out. The breaths were coming shallower.

“Just calm down, now. Everything’s going to be okay. You’ll be okay.” He looked desperately southward down the curve of the road, searching for any sign of flashing lights or the faintest hint of sirens. Nothing.

The eye stopped swirling in its socket and fixed on Simon’s face. The pupil’s aperture constricted in the beam of the flashlight “I…” The kid’s tongue pushed into the empty space where teeth had recently been. “…know.” Or was it no? Simon preferred the former. The lips pulled back again into the grimace.

“Shh.” Simon was going to puke. Not because of the blood or the meat or anything, but the feeling. He swallowed hard, tried to focus. Where the hell was the ambulance?

There was silence now for a few moments and Officer Simon and the young driver just breathed. The trooper allowed himself a short visual break from the gore in front of him. He stood up straight and scanned the darkness all around. The engine was cooling; there was less hissing from front of the car. Somewhere in the woods a twig snapped, under the foot of a deer or raccoon, or maybe just from the stress of some unseen pressure or the cold air. There was a sudden and malicious gust of wind that howled through the open spaces of the vehicle’s frame. The flares in the road sputtered, no passing cars for them to warn. Both human bodies shivered. The kid made a small sound and Simon leaned down to him.

“Th…” Again, the tongue in the bloodied gums. It was sickening. “This… hurts.” The s’s spraying a fine mist of red against the inside of the windshield.

“What does?”

“Ev-every…thing…” Breaths like Morse Code. This was getting real bad, real fast. The kid wasn’t going to last much longer. Simon could feel frantic acid bubbling in his stomach.

“Look, I’m gonna go see where the hell that ambulance is.” The one eye wide with terror. “You hang in there. Stay with me. I’ll be right back.” He straightened and turned towards his cruiser.

From inside the wreck, weakly, moistly: “…no…”

Officer Simon ran to the road and through the sulfur smoke of the flares back to the cruiser, and radioed dispatch and asked about the status of the ambulance just as the sirens became audible through the woods. The lights came into view, and when the ambulance pulled up on the side of the road and parked, the flashers mixed with those of the cruiser and the combined illumination was syncopated and disorienting. Simon and the EMTs hurried to the Camry, but when their flashlights met the boy’s eye, the pupil was unflinchingly dilated and still.

Sitting in his cruiser, watching through rain-beaded glass at the boy being loaded into the ambulance in a black zippered bag, Simon ran the license plates of the Camry. Actually registered to a one Mrs. Maureen Wolfe. There was a number listed, a number he was going to have to call in a moment. What was he supposed to say to her? That he felt so bad, he felt so sorry for her loss? He didn’t feel anything like that. All he felt was cold.