short fiction

more short fiction "Come, Become a Man"

PEDESTRIAN 

I know just the place for when the storm lets up. At the tree its autumn always. The foliage is a solar gold, and a baby step from her front door. We will baptize one another there. Again she’ll have the name she had when the cosmos dreamed her. I am the sea which softens sand, I weather crags. The future of geography depicts a coast of softest glass. Grace Anne Spice as specks of white. Thousands maybe millions of them, crystalline. You can see yourself reflecting in a beach of glass. Mirrors pop up now and then in groups of ten along I-40. This glass depicts a man barefoot and he’s charming as hell, handsome too and tall. He’s ambling to the resurrection. All I do is I will knock on her door. Storm hits hard and we live out our days in bedding. We visit the tree, the only one on the block. The stand-alone evokes the grove. Thank God for the deciduous. I’ve dreamed too much in pine. The tree is somewhere down the street, standing there all radiant. Sheen that’s orange and gold year-round sometimes and galaxies among the leaves that stare back at you. You can see yourself in a canopy like that. You can see yourself reflected in a beach of glass.

It’s coming down hard enough that it hurts now. I imagine back at the diner in Clarksville there’s still a simple fellow wearing camouflage, saying something like, “Boy, there’s some weather out there.” Whether I wander on or hitch it, decide for me please, because I can feel the cold now. Ice first and then snow on the ground. My feet are down there somewhere. I know. It was a revelation to me too.“I wonder what scenery all this used to be, this concrete. Abstract, I imagine. It gets swampy this far south, you’ll see.” (I aloud am keeping me company.) “You’ll see the swampy, once you’re off the interstate. Sometimes when you’re on it. Am I on it today or what? Soon we’ll pass the swamp with all those trees reaching decapitated out of the water. There must be mischief in that murky. Tiny bayou looks like a children’s film I watched. What’s it called. I’ll spare you the whole you know the one with the plot, where the protagonist does some stuff, and there is conflict, and growth, and contrasts, and twists and turns, and come on you know the one. No, I’ll spare you that. It’s the one about dinosaur friends, animated dinosaur friends. I think the swamp is coming up. I wonder are there friends in there. In the swamp with trees reaching decapitated out of the water. You know they are logs just waiting to happen. You won’t call them trees anymore, once they are flush with the horizon, lying flat, maybe floating. The highway is a flattened pillar if you think about it. Can you imagine? It was a revelation to me too. What would you call a vertical highway, I wonder. I’ll ask Borges, easy guy to find believe it or not always hanging out in libraries. In that story ‘The Immortals,’ the architecture of their city is darn wonky. The design implies the irrational, and a surplus of dimensions. Ones where never dying makes sense. Heaven, I guess -- where people live forever, and dogs too if you believe the movies. I don’t believe in movies. I do not allow myself to have opinions about the things I cannot sit through. Not like this can I. No sir, all the places my mind is going. Where is it not, really? What do you expect a body to do, Gutensohn. Sit still? Well fuck you, Junior, and bah humbug every day until there are no more. How’s this for sitting still at the cinema?

I see my dreams on


movie screens deserted,


and in dozens of them
empty

cinemas my brimming head

contains. But only at night and

all of them look
at me

about the same
to me
where

they are empty. And the reve

in them.
It’s too tried for

me to wrap
my sleeping

deep-in head around. If there

were a pill I’d take a pill
if a

pill were a pill to lend my

dreams the kind of wealth

everyone
blabs about,
else’s

hearts seem to carry,
and instead

I sit brimming vacant among the chairs,

where a stranger here myself
is not the waking way

I know so well not where mirth

is what I find in quiet crowds.

With hums and whispers, swell,

swell swelling as the sea
might

do his thumbs,
yes that my thumbs,

they
be like tap tap tapping prayers

in silence – aye! The kind of silence

only toddler, dog, and she

with great imagination can hear,

or maybe a synesthete
hears

in pitch black, mind ye.

I would give
to dream even slowly,


dream only scenes holy,


never again would it be so lonely

see them at all, anywhere, to

remember I had them of drive-in

speaker boxes slurring gravitas
at the

nervous
and the smooching teens.

Handle it,the truth is it’s a sin to

kill
a mockingbird
and black boy

stereotypes
are the elephant in the room

and what color is the elephant I wonder.

Face it, It’s a Wonderful Life is


‘Oh Mary everybody
gave me money

so I wouldn’t kill myself wow you guys

Merry Christmas’


and that’s about it, but

Bring me your campy your
sappy

you’re gonna need

Dramamine is what I’d take all day

 if
it made me dream or remember

them I’d take them I’d take

any sort of reverie

because reverie

my name is reverie.

I don’t know whether to call this one “Kill a Mocking Bird O Mary Everybody” or something else, like “You Guys Wow.” Or maybe “Gonna Need Dramamine You Guys Wow.”

I get no farther than a mile probably before a friendly fellow picks me up and thank God he’s fat and colored, I could use some, I am gaunt and pale like prophets are. The man says I must be colder than shit, odd to think about. He wonders why did I call him Sir. Because I am grateful, I say. He wants to know all about my pilgrimage. He doesn’t say so but I know it, and I take him out on the boat I call S.S. Fabula, the vessel where I weave my loom-like stories. We are flotsam there, one-off cruisers, and seasick atop the waves a-chopping, telling tale, exalting banks maternal where the Son once burrowed deep. Wooping and a hollering and a carrying on. He doesn’t quite get what I mean. Neither do I exactly. So we are in the same boat in that sense. I reckon in an Ahab-Ishmael kind of since we are all in the same boat.

“I get elated like I am lately,” I apologize, “and some invisible thing or force out there is throwing all that ethereal language at me and it festers until I pass it on, to someone else, and not just, say, the atmosphere which, you know, the atmosphere listens -- don’t get me wrong -- if you woo her right, if you woo her right she listens. The atmosphere. I am grateful that you’re listening. Descriptions like those, like the one-off cruisers, I don’t know where they come from they just do, they just are all of a sudden and they come -- and are -- at such a rate that after a while -- if one ‘while’ equals forty-eight hours or so sleepless -- my noggin gets plumb tuckered out. Buddy. My word and goodness gracious alive all the novels I’ve talked away today, I’m getting hoarse by it. These wordings that the ether sends me, they are novel and never slow. Forty-eight or so gone sleepless and I cannot make sense of them anymore, I wear myself out, but they are all I have the energy to believe I’m so tired I am.”

I say this about being tired and I am struck with spirit again. It’s making sense and waking all of me. There are dots everywhere, counting on me to connect them. I have work to do. I close my eyes. This must be what dying is like. I stand before the firing squad. My life is flashing before my eyes. It’s not sequential like they show it on television. It comes as a wave, like up in Akash or in a Colombian epic, but it’s more than just a wave. It’s all at once. It comes a wave but a wave that keeps on growing, keeps on cresting. And higher and higher. Enredo a la Moratín, poor Paquita. Playback reveals that I am coming to an end. It peaks and peaks and peaks,

the end. Its peaks have peaks. From the womb I watch the biggest of the big kids, snapping my collar bone on the merry-go-round. I am weaning, teething, potty training, twelfth grade James. Twelfth I know because Kathleen is my girlfriend. But so is Susy, and Evelyn, and all the others. But not Grace I wonder why. My first bicycle wreck in slow motion -- Canto XXIX, is the soundtrack, in Italian, in the voice of my college World Lit teacher, Mohammed split down the middle strung up by his own entrails and warning me not to touch my penis before I eat pancakes, watch cartoons, or move in for my first kiss. I wonder why not Grace. All the while, learning to take a dump with Maw Maw. Maw Maw reads Where The Wild Sidewalk Things End by Mo Silverdick. All the poems all at once. For a fleeting moment Maw Maw was every woman to me, and now hen she’s just the feminists.

Feminist Maw Maw, she loves Tony Hawk the video game.

Feminist Maw Maw is with me in the Impala, where currently I am dying, and doing it up comical. It’s comical, I guess, that I meet my maker while taking a dump. Comical in a chubby black man’s Chevrolet. That he’s albino and digs the smell of toddler butt on vinyl. Goodness gracious alive. Can you imagine? Meanwhile Brendan Alligheri tears Mohammed in two, and hangs him by the guts again. All in terza rima can you imagine? He knows terza rima so well. And the in-unison with President Obama – and this has got be a joke.

I get it, stars, I’m the dream catcher.

I get it. I’m not dying. It’s not me it’s just the world that is ending, and it is going to be hilarious. I open my eyes. We are not a step closer to Little Rock. No time has passed that I can tell. We are still behind the I’m Pro- Choice and I Vote sticker, some entitled Episcopal I’m sure, hair light brown. I tell my chauffeur about the death waves, and Feminist Maw Maw beefing her rib cage on the half-pipe.

“Feminist Maw Maw, she loves Tony Hawk the video game.” “What?”
“I thought you’d like to know the world is ending. Buddy.”
I thought you’d like to know. He doesn’t understand, he says. He says he doesn’t understand, as if I understand. I don’t understand. I’m just a vessel for these things, just doing my job Ma’am. Dad gum it and gall darn -- the novels I’ve talked away today I’m hoarse by it!

He giggles. “How you suppose to save the world and ain’t got no shoes on?”

“Multiply and fruitful,” I say. Here’s how I see it. The world is ending, and we’re all gonna die, even me and that’s saying something, boy. All our

lives will flash before our eyes, el enredo final, I know what that’s like now, and by God I’m going to have Grace Anne Spice with me, when it happens for keeps -- but when is that. How soon is now? “You’re polite as heck for listening. Pal.”

Where was Grace in the playback? Her absence whispers the unfulfilled. The answer is obvious. Grace Anne Spice will be there when I die. The how is that I have to find her soon. After all, the world is waiting on me. But I have work to do if I’m to make it worth the wait. It will end like Macondo. The Son will read the past aloud, from Adam to Omega. And then the meta, the beyond. The instant He says Omega, it’s his conception- resurrection of a sudden, the future is undone, it swells and swelling, it shrinks, and black-holes us into what dreams may come.

Again this makes no sense to my chauffer. But I have nailed it so carefree. What’s there not to get. Nailed it on the head so tiny.

Such a smidge of a skull His must have been. Beginning of month four, I reckon he approached mere cartilage on the marrow meter. Surely He came out blooding royal, all over Dr. Hands. I hope the blood and tissue experience was profoundly unpleasant for Dr. Hands.

He’s seen what I have and it certainly made an impression on me.

This is no country for old men. No. I am mackerel-covered. I am crowded and commending whatever is begotten, born, and dies. The monumental and unageing, the singing masters of my soul.

The Son last seen as chubby red and iron droplets in her underwear, I am sick at the thought.

Still I am comforted by the ease with which the soul escapes the body. I am sailing for Byzantium. Ride out wanderlust.
At exit, His corporation was a month short of halfway formed. I doubt

she ever gleaned the wreath of chromosomes within her. She must have feared the tangled rosary. The Son to her was just a school of sloppy beads, nothing to pray home about, no outline recognizable, the Son, dismissed, her doing. I know now that not to do it was the only way to do it. There never was a good way to do it, no do it right, no do it over, not ’til now.

“Return the pride and joy,” I explain. “Replace one cub with another. Lest I die of old age and brokenhearted, I reckon. To perish for old age at mine, can you imagine?”

Who is this girl he wants to know. To me she is the shore and my fuel. Just look at the initials on her origami heart. I undid it was my undoing.

My chauffeur accelerates again as if he doesn’t follow. Bullshit he does not follow how can you not follow. There are shepherds and there are shepherds, don’t you see, and I am the latter. So pick up the pace, black sheep, and I say look buddy. Look. Buddy. You’ve got to know the resurrection. Bible Belt and all. We had ourselves a child, and now the world is waiting on me to end itself, I can’t let you down. The child is ready to save the all, be the all, bring you all or y’all the safety and salvation in His blood before it’s over, all of it. But I did not know this until He was gone, the little one. He was acing every test, I bet extra credit even. Baby Boy, he incubated undetected, for a third of a trip round the star that warms us. Sacred cell assembly as redeemer, under construction. Unwanted property, the slave and savior, donated. Who in this center where we wait can count the miracles we will have missed for the gospel’s extraction? My God. My God, enumerate. My God – my Mother Mary at the vacuum.

“We owe him at least a resurrection, don’t you get it? Crucifixion in the womb, can you imagine?”

My chauffeur doesn’t answer. “Aw sleet sleet motherfucker!”

Really coming down now. Clipse is on his busted stereo. The thing about hip-hop is you rhyme proud about a busted stereo. Naseous at the weight of battle, drugged at the sheen of wealth. ‘Momma I’m Sorry’ is the song now.

“I’m sorry I stopped calling,” I say. Just in case she is listening. There are wiretaps in most cars you know. And proof -- I divined it from the stars just now, and yes the method is brand new but I have not been wrong yet have I. My eyelids heavy as the machinery turning over in my brain. My eyelids saying I want to sleep, the machinery says I cannot. I ask him for one of his bananas and with a straight face he hands me a peach. I think about this for far too long. Lost my appetite. I was tired a minute ago. I was a hungry-sleepy then. Glad it’s over with, I toss the peach out the window. He nearly tosses me for it, boy. Can you imagine? I could hit the ground running, I say, and he laughs at this. It’s a metaphor of course, which I document on my ‘To Decipher Later’ list. My chauffeur is still laughing. He likes me clearly and how can he not. I laugh too – and oh how I teach him what joy and its jumping are all about. No sooner am I patting myself on the back than I am recalling that wise old adage: He who one-ups a driver has boots for walking and that’s just what they’ll do if their owner one-ups the driver. No shoes on me though, much less boots. I didn’t mean to one-up the driver. I’m just so way-up-there, I reckon, it’s hard not to outdo other people sometimes. He faces me like I’m the Holy Ghost itself and nails the accelerator. I would have hit the ground running, I tell him. “Snow or no snow, feeling or not. My feet are numb nothings by now.”

“You still ain’t told me what the hell you doing without no shoes.” “Soul for soles.” I am on a roll, boy. “Carries me swift does the soul. Weeds out sharpened stones and takes me up in flight. In rhapsody lobbed gentle, over stones that stab in secret. Fuck the jagged, says the soul and so I glide along, hung-up, swept and airborne. That is, when I’m not treading on those round, those smooth, those prehistoric eggs of Macondo. That’s the town that stands for all the world. Like the colonel I am also facing the firing squad, looking back on childhood and on youth’s pebbles in a stream, I think they must be of dinosaurs. I stare down death. Meanwhile life is dancing before my eyes. I am feasting on the past. When my offspring read the world aloud, I appear before them with a crucifixion in my face, they are the present and feasting on the past. In such collusion of ere and hither the yon disappears – it is vanished, the Twin Born After announcing his resurrection in this way. Can you imagine. Where is he now I wonder.”

My chauffeur exits onto 430 and we’re in the city, west side I think, take me to Ascension. But he’s from over east I think, other side of the tracks. He doesn’t understand Ascension. “Right on, Ascension! Hey, let’s you and me keep in touch,” I say. “Got a business card or something?” I’m out of the Impala now. I miss Feminist Maw Maw.

            Feminist Maw Maw. She loves Tony Hawk the video game.

“I’ll holler at you later.” But he pretends not to get it and drives off. Christ, everyone is an actor lately. Shaking his head, and laughing. Hard to believe it, people see the light so clear and shake their heads and chuckle under their breaths. Shake their heads and drive off shadeward and chuckling. No ascension for you I reckon. All right. I’m chuckling now too, laughing at the end of the world.

“Not the police!” I knock. “I’m sorry I --”
“Stop that,” the woman says. “You can stop knocking now.”
But where is the shore. Where is she. We don’t know what shore

you’re talking about. Sure you do she’s inside she’s made her pilgrimage like me. She’s awaiting the father of her gone, and too of her coming. My Maw Maw used to live in this house, I explain, but she’s a feminist now. And the door shuts sesame at my profile. Practically breaks my nose, this gale force closure. I walk east up the hill, climbing Ascension and bleeding on my smock. I am at the grungy thoroughfare, and fuck calling it Colonel Glenn because fuck that guy whoever he was, this is Asher Avenue. It is if the stoned, the nicotiners, and the whoring-outs and unemployeds are here, and they are. Brendan knows them all I’m sure. Brendan is the key. When I find him I’ll send him back to his children and that’s what sets it in all motion. World, it won’t be long.

So I ask around. Nobody knows Brendan. Everyone is an actor lately.

Christ. I walk into the gas station about a mile before the light at University. I ask the woman working, girl really, and she has to be white about the whole thing, which means she lies to me. I say you do too know him and she chases me out when I finally get livid about it, a broom in her hand. We’re standing in the white condensed there on the car tarmac. Softest glass but no reflection in it. I curse the white girl in my mother’s tongue. Prince of Cubs, I say. The world will call him Thomas, he is the Twin, and I’m not going anywhere.

In the meantime, wishing now it weren’t so cold. I have roads to read. I’d be at home, at Grace by now if I had steered the coach that brought me. No, I am only feet. There is no getting warm around here. I am going to lose my feet to frost and then what. I am lyricking to warm them. I say speak muse, recall autumn bond fires and the like. One muse whispers me a kiss and I free the words as sentimental fluids. The tears are streamlined, now celestial, they are jolting they are heaving past lip after yon lip, can you imagine. Words and sentimental fluids at a crossroads; at the crucible between the mouth and brain; gain the twain and a scene brews; travels verse-like through the nasal cave. The words I smell are these.

Speak, Gravity.

Create now ascension I climb the where

and what
and peak at why and Gravity

 do save the tale of what
for later.

You make the where you are

the lasting image. You last imagined

past the ceiling sky.
You are painted

with ascension ink on elevators.

I have seen your work

through telescopes – you made the fields

Elysian there at Saturn with your scythe.


Crafty, and congrats, you did it --

now find my wife.

The verses, they just spit on through the old factory bulb. The scent is coastal perfume.

The sea, the shore, a love supreme.
When I reach her, when I reach for her, she’ll be not coy. We don’tmake worlds wait long for their vanishing. I’ll waltz her bedward and it’s all right if she bleeds. After all, this discharge is my last and only chance to feel the warmth of Him, Prince of Cubs. At the sight of the sea -- her angled heart will tell her -- it could stop itself if that is what she wants. In this dialogue the salmon-filled reminds her she has stopped already one too many. Crucified with forceps. I reach for her and she is waiting naked on her knees, the sheets are soaked with the blood royal. I know how the story goes, I see the future.

But alas I am still in the parking lot. I have not ascended of the verses like I thought I would.

“Hey man will you tell her I’m for real?” A nod, and an of course I will. I trust him to. A friend of Brendan’s is a brother of mine no matter melanin, nor matter how fucked up my mother’s other son may be. The white girl attends the conversation. I flee. Here I am the world’s about to him and I fear for my life. Yes I fear for my life and where is she. Where is Grace. Land ho! -- a jar’s fallen from the shelf. A yogic breath and my heart is racing. And my thoughts are lapping it, oh hell. Oh hell it hits me and I’m Jesus’ son already. Already mighty, mighty. Mighty mighty mocking bird oh Mary everybody you guys wow. Wow you guys -- Hell. Hell or Heaven or both. Both Heaven and the road up-to, vertical, per Borges, Jorge, sort of -- Argentine in infrastructure, rotting dirty-dirty, chummy-chummy with him aren’t we now. Aren’t we now. Aren’t we.

I’m out of breath from racing feet and thought and so I light a cigarette. Winston and I part gladly though. It’s too cold to have your hands out of pocket. It’s a bad idea to keep them swaddled when there’s balancing to do. But I’ve made it this far without busting anything on the ice, full speed even. I thank the ether I have not fallen. Then at thanks my crummy fate perfected, as a baby step gets out from under me. My back is on the ice and my eyes on Winston slowly losing his cherry. I am in pain and lulled by the icy sizzle of less and less ardent orange. Hands like payment out of pocket but it is too late for equilibrium. My eyes roam over to my feet. Fa- ggot Da-ddy are they battered! Tender too and swollen purple. Behind me, the trail of blood. If I die it will not be of exposure. I eye the building of reflective glass and high tint closest me. Who knows what goes on in an unmarked building with no windows. Gagged and bound rites, maybe, or meth chefs. A dungeon either way. Parked out front are two white, Ford church-wagons. Also no windows, kids call them rape vans. My reflection should be on them though and the building both. I don’t remember the last I looked in a mirror. First one in forever is the skin of a dungeon probably. I’d crack this case if I could but I’ve got work to do.

It looks like I’m casing the place I’m sure but I don’t care how it looks. I’ve got work to do. Glory! how ashamed I was before the full moon. Knowing what I know about whom it is the world waits on, what do I care if Asher Avenue's whoring-outs think I’m meddling. Any fucked-up crazy enough to be out in this frigid is too busy shitting a brick about it to notice the vagabond-peregrino I am, unshod and trying to sneak a peek at who knows what. Who knows what I am curious not enough to find out. I’ve got work to do. Put it on my growing list of shit to decipher. The more I don’t find out the more I wonder what this place is. The more options I consider, the darker the options. The darker they, less gusto for the investigation I wasn’t going to do anyway, whatever.

Who knows how long I have been up close staring into this house of mirror without seeing my reflection. My cheeks are caked solid with the tears. This hair in my face nonsense will not do. Funny I forget my pocket knife until I’m lowering ears with it. Blade so dull I hear each follicle snapping distinct. I am lucky not to slice a finger, or a forehead; the blade dullest is most dangerous I reckon; the leverage behind it gets so reckless- frustrated that you pay down the sharpness-deficit as it goes astray at a tender part of you. Now the blizzard is taking a break. I open my eyes at the wall of mirror. My oh tender me my name is reverie and behold, boy.

Ecce, blizzard prince! My name is reverie!

“Damn I look good,” I shout at sirens. “We should have a party.”