building a house

It’s raining again. Because we’re in Seattle. And that is what it does here. It’s not like rain back East which drenches, or in Wyoming where it blows in with the wind and spurts down from mountains. Here the rain comes with a cloud cover. “What’s wrong?” you ask, and I think you almost really want to know. But I say, “I’m fine,” because it’s easier to lie, easier to build a carapace against despair than to let you in. Then you get up to close the window because the rain is blowing in and the bed is getting wet.

Afterimage

Say no. But my body just shrugged. My fingers just unbuttoned my jeans. You were there but I missed you. Under the rippling chemical surface maybe you are still there. I should go I said and went. But still there are the parts of you my hands remember, still there are the parts of me that remember your hands. Still there are ways my body has of reminding itself of itself. There are these remains. These bodiless bones. I remember the feeling, still my body remembers, still remembers my body still remembers your body remembers my body in the dark.

chicanery

The little girl with the red shoes pulled back the curtain and told the man behind it, “It’s time to go home!”
“But!” said the man. “But!” He was unaccustomed to having people see his face. And this was not how the story was supposed to go.
“It’s time to go home!” the girl said again. She was a sturdy thing of about ten or eleven, with bright blue eyes and hair that looked like it would never stay in a ponytail. “You look silly back there, and no one believes that thing about the wizard.”

Chicanery

Years after the SATs, we found some old vocabulary flashcards and brought them with us on a long drive. The cards were ruffled and bent, a few even torn in half; the definition of diaphanous was arrested at transpare. We took turns quizzing each other, applied our knowledge to the road: I execrate traffic, she said, knuckles white on the wheel. It was perhaps our last drive; weeks later we looked at each other sadly, said nothing—said, There’s nothing left to say. But the remembering is full of words, plangent and fractious; a thousand names for that last saturnine night.

chicanery

After it was over, he looked down to study his hands. They were wrinkled, the way an old man’s are; strange, that. He felt an ocean of depth beneath him, and his careful movements seemed to be all that kept him afloat. His gait was unsteady as he moved to his victim. He moved noisily across the forest floor, there was no reason to remain silent now. He crouched over his prey, staring into her eyes.

“Ouch, you hurt me you jerk face! I want to use the tire swing too!” He smiled, and shook the water from his ears.

afterimage

We sit by the beach, quietlike, listening to the waves lapping and watching the sky. “It looks like a painting,” you whisper. And I can see what you mean. The way the ends of the purple sunset blur into the sepiaed black of the night sky, and then the darker water, as if someone dragged their brush down as it was running out of paint. Lightning hits somewhere behind the cloud and for a second, the sky is lit up. And again. And again. A coherent rubato. We both know but don’t say, thunder follows lightning, and after thunder, rain.

afterimage

I woke up, and you were there, looming over me. Part of me wished you were there, the same part that knew I was awake and that your image was a holdover from a dream I had just before I woke. I roll over and imagine you here with me; your touch and your smell. Groggy and sleep-ridden as I am I fall asleep thinking of you, and dream of you again. When I wake this time you are there across the bed and I reach out to you, feeling your long limbs curl around me, strangling me to death.