bleodswean | Recent Entries

the unwavering stare: self-portrait, skull, Hasselblad remote, my father's watch, tree of knowledge

Welcome to my Sticky Post. A first for me in over twenty-three years of (live)journaling, but it seems like today’s journalers are more discerning. I don’t do Tumblr, or X, or IG, or Facebook / Meta, or TikTok. And sadly, I don’t really do LJ any longer as I can’t get the cross posting to work. In 2022, I made a dedicated effort to commit to DW and here we are. It ain’t the glory daze of olde, but I’m coming to terms with that. Every few months I will fall into a despair-like need to lament those long-gone LJ times and then it’s out of my system and we’re onward and upward. Although this is happening less and less as I move further and further downstream in the River of Life.

I have no friending policy. I read the flist every morning and comment as much as I can before work starts. I’m interested in almost all things and all folx. If I’m not interested, I won’t make a scene, because I’m not interested in drama. Been there, done that.

I’m a professional photographer by trade. Semi-retired now. Although it seems I'm shooting more weddings and babies lately than I have in a long time. I'm currently compiling a work of Serious Children portraits.

We run a family business. We live in a gorgeous hand-built home, on many forested acres, in a small mountain village in Northern California. Military brat and I’ve traveled the world and moved every three years of my minor days. English and Philosophy major, dropped out to manage a Tower Records import section. Spent the 80’s mohawked and living a very downtown alternative life. Spent the 90’s and 00’s raising children off the grid and living a very nature-based alternative life. LOL.

I do write and have published short fic and flash fic and poetry (and will make it a point to create a link post for my original work soon!). I also write fanfic and have some fic over at A03. I dabble in fandoms, wait to become obsessed before I write and read for a fandom and that seems to happen a couple few times every year. That being said, I do have a personal fandom I write in continuously - a modern dress Persephone / Hades. It's a myth that I've been working with for decades.

Music IS the soundtrack to my life and an important part of my days. I’ve been listening to Nick Cave since 1982 when I bought my first Birthday Party album. I still listen to him today. He is my musical muse. I also listen to a lot of darkgrass and folk, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Swans, Beefheart, and Cameron Winter.

I’ve been reading voraciously since I was 10 years old when I contracted rheumatic fever and a librarian sent home The Narnia Chronicles to keep me company in my sickbed. Now I read: Cormac McCarthy *genuflect*, AS Byatt, DH Lawrence, TS Eliot, Joyce Carol Oates, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Mary Oliver, David Whyte, Brian Evenson, and all things folk & fairy tale.

I’m older than most of you, younger than some. I’m finding myself here less and less and that’s disappointing, but a natural attrition, I suppose.

Merry Met!

ETA: In July of 2024, the Park Fire destroyed 2/3rds of the mountain village of Cohasset, California; I have spent the past year helping my friends and neighbors - survivors - tell their stories.

“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Come join us at a new Wuthering Heights community where we are beginning our Wuthering Heights read-a-long and will soon be discussing this complicated novel! Is it really a love story? Is Cathy certifiable? Does Heathcliff have a wounding story that justifies his revenge? Why is everyone so reprehensible? Or are they? Do the children shed the legacy of betrayal and rage?

There might be icon challenges! And fic prompts! And discussions of other writings female and gothic!

OUR SOULS ARE MADE OF

our_souls_are_made_of | Recent Entries

READ UP TO CHAPTER FOUR AND CHECK IN SATURDAY MORNING!!!!

OVER HERE -

our_souls_are_made_of | Recent Entries

I know there aren’t any diehard Cormac McCarthy fans on the flist and that’s too bad. I will hold forth about him regardless. LOL. I do recognize that he’s a bit of a peculiar flavour for an unusual literary connoisseur. I was standing dumbly in the library wanting to read something and feeling that strange deep brain itch. What is it what is it? And my eye fell on the Cormac shelf and I thought HUH I never finished my plan last year to read the four Tennessee tomes. And when I reached up for the thin volume title Child of God, it was as though struck by lightning, and I remembered that I had loaned that to my father the year before he died. And that was all a complicated bit of emotion, but I drew it down anyway and decided to take that dark, unsettling plunge into fetid waters. This book is difficult. And I had to LOL when all the pearl clutchers were outraged that Cormac had some sort of underaged bird in a cage at some point in his life as though they were exposing a saint as a chronic masturbator and yet I’m pointing wildly to this book – PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE! This is the cat who wrote Child of God, puhleaze get yourselves comported. This book. Sheesh. And I thought my father should read this. WUT?! Actually he was a Cormac fan but like most Cormac fans, the SouthernGoth foursome are rarely known. We did discuss it at the time and then I loaned him Annihilation. Which he actually enjoyed muchly.

Anyway. I read CoG and spent most of yesterday in a dreamlike space in which my mind wandered the universe seeking out this man’s spirit. I love him so very very very desperately. He was a genius and a wordsmith, yes, but more, his was a Dangerous Intelligence and a life laid out with strange signposts and somehow someway he managed to take his brilliance and observational gifts from start to finish. The Tennessee four are IMPORTANT in his oeuvre and some in the Ivory Towers need to put Blood Meridian the eff down and study these four novels. They are biographical in that this man clearly had an issue with his Family of Origin because no one would write Child of God unless they truly wanted to self-flagellate and publicly humiliate themselves as a way to punish their father.

So, I read The Orchard Keeper which is dismissed by academicians. I love it and it shows McCarthy reveling in his discovery of language. HIS LANGUAGE. Then I read Suttree which is his biographical masterpiece and most clearly obvious outloud musings about a symbolic meaning of Death. Then I had to gently gently return to my favourite novel of all time – Outer Dark and relish it entirely without wearing it too thin to hold onto. And yesterday I read Child of God. I find myself purged and resatiated and now am ready for the Westerns. Which I don’t care for as deeply as I care for the SouthernGoths, however, one must ruck through in order to reach the Dantean conclusion which is his twinpack – Stella Maris and Passenger.

That’s where my head and heart and body have been and currently are. I have time to wallow in this pit. But by tomorrow I have to return to what we call The Real World.

Ooooh, I'm going to need a WH icon! Maybe we should start with an icon challenge!

Anywho. Let's set a date for our Wuthering Heights discussion. Once a date is set, this gives folks time to procure a copy and begin reading. This book is best discussed in small bites. So, once we set a date, we can then set a reading assignment. I'm sure this would be "cleaner" in a dedicated comm but I've started so many comms these past few years only to have them shrivel up and die from lack of brain food. I don't mind hosting here, but that's not idea either!

Discuss!

two log cabins with snow on the roofs in a wintery forest the text snowflake challenge january 1 - 31 in white cursive text

PETS OF FANDOM

Interestingly enough, I have no pets in my fanfics. There IS a pet in my personal myth - Cerberus, the three-headed dog. And I have only ever mentioned him once. In an older Persephone / Hades modern dress fic here - Imprint the Stars to Remember the Sky

Challenge #1

The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.

Here's my journal's intro post!

My goal with Snowflake is to create a daily posting habit! Also to meet new journalers!

I'm not currently writing in any particular fandom. Last year, some of us were writing rabidly in Nosferatu. That was invigorating, to say the least! I'm always interested in drabbling and miss the drabble communities but will post one from time to time. I do have plans for a writing project for this year!

Happy New Year! Here's to 2026!

I've tried. Snuck an hour in here and a half hour in there. Werewolves appeared to me -

Run and run and run and hide. Burrow and dig and twist and hide. Under the roots, under the bed. Hide and hide and hide. Lest you’re found and dragged out into the light. Blinded and made smaller in the day. You flourish beneath the moonlight, wither in the sunlight.

And then the verb becomes the noun. They’ve trapped you and moved in with clubs. You’re skinned and your hide stretched and hung for all to see. Destroyed, vanquished, no more.

But in the woods, there is a domicile, and, in that den, there is your mate and beneath her body squirms her pup, eyes and ears closed. This dyad foul, in the ways that you are foul. To the hunted and the hunter.

Don’t go into the village, you’ve been taught, they will do you harm. But only after you’ve rent them limb from limb from limb.

But. Even if I could figure out one story, I certainly don't have two in me this week. I feel it's only right to save one of you amazing writers who are writing LONG and writing so very well! Here's to you! Slainthe!

Thanks to Gary who has been carving time out of his own hide to provide this amazing space for all of us to play play play in. Always and forever grateful to him. And to all of you.

Blessed be!

The house was just as enticing in the early morning light as it had been in the pitched black night. She was curled into a window seat in the front room. It was a turret, and the glass was curved, and the sashes were curved and the trim and molding curved as well. Outside the fog was thick and she couldn’t see as far as the numbered street or lettered street she knew the house sat on the corner of and she contented herself with the image of the house as an island ringed with a moat of mist.

She sipped the hot coffee out of an exquisite porcelain teacup. It was all she could find. The kitchen had not been renovated, just like the house in its entirety, and she had stood amazed at the time travel aspect of it but was determined to make a pot of coffee. Her aunt had used a similar percolator when she was a child and taught her how to make a good pot of coffee so that she and her mother could drink cup after cup with a box of handpicked donuts. They would pour her a cup of half-and-half and a dollop of coffee to sip.

There was a glass bottle of sweet cream in the aqua blue Norge and that was a treat but perhaps not a surprise. Everything about the house and about him was proving to be an adventure.

She had been neither loud nor quiet when she slipped out of bed and opened the bedroom door. Simply awake and slightly discombobulated in the basement room. If anything, she was pleased that some interior timepiece had woken her without the grey dawn. The room was entirely without light and once her eyes were open, she had to fight with herself a bit to not press herself against the warm body beside her and descend again into a dreamless sleep.

By touch, she had fished her phone out of the pile of her discarded dress and shoes and bag on the floor of his bedroom, remembered the silk robe on the back of the bathroom door and shrugged into that on her way up the basement stairs. Out of the seemingly endless dark and into the growing light.

Tapping the phone awake, she had no reception and couldn’t seem to find his wi-fi. She wanted to text her girls, check in, find out where everyone had nested for the night. Had they all caught a Lyft together back to the Art Palace, or perhaps Daisy had slipped away with the goat boy that had been braying at her at the bar. She needed Snaps and spilt tea and check ins but the phone was useless. She peered harder outside and wondered if she wandered the substantially sized yard, maybe let herself out the ornate iron gate at the edge of the sidewalk and into the street, if she could find a hot spot.

You made coffee, he said with a wonderment in his voice. She looked over her shoulder, and he was standing in the opening of the double sliding pocket doors, a pair of black silk pajama bottoms slung low on his hips. Now she could see the blackwork tattoos clearly. A kind of flesh tome, arcane spell work.

She toasted him with the last of the coffee in her teacup. As you see, she smiled.

But you couldn’t find the mugs. He tsked tsked. Then smiled broadly. Good morning, morning girl. You’re shining like a spring dawn over there. Burning all my fog off, too.

She stood and stretched, her hands high above her head, an informal fifth position. How do I log onto your wifi?

He laughed. What’s that? I’m going to help myself to a cup of joe and judging your barista skills while I drink it. He disappeared into the adjoining kitchen.

She followed him. He motioned with the percolator, and she held out the teacup, and he steadied her wrist with a hand and poured. He topped it off with the cream and doctored his own.

Moment of truth, he said and pulled deeply at his cup. His eyes closed and he mimed ecstasy, and she laughed. You can stay, he announced. What magic will you perform with a rasher of bacon and a bakers of eggs?

Coffee may be the limit of my domestic arts.

Lucky for both of us, then that I know the way to the diner. Back to the window seat?

She nodded and followed him. They sat facing one another, their backs against the window moldings. He leaned his head against the glass and sipped his coffee and stared at her through half masted eyes.

You are the most beautiful creature I’ve ever beheld. What made you finally relent?

Hyacinth.

A flower made you agree to come home with me last night? How long have I been begging you?

Hyacinth is a friend.

The tall one with the braids?

Yes.

He waited.

She read Tarot for me yesterday evening, before we went out and met up with all of you at the Zebra. She said it was opportune, and I could act if I chose to. She said it was safe.

Ah! I’m many things, but safe? What cards, if I may be so bold, were pulled?

She held her finger up to her lips and shook her head.

Fine, fine. Will you stay the weekend?

She shrugged. I have nothing to wear.

That robe suits. Perfectly.

Hmmm. Seriously, though, how do I log onto the internet.

He narrowed his eyes. Seriously, though, there’s no internet here.

What do you mean? I know there’s no cell reception.

Isn’t that weird? Maybe it’s the metal roof. At least that’s what others have said. No matter. I don’t have one of those phones.

You don’t have a cell?

He counted off on his fingers. No cell, no computer, no tv.

I don’t understand.

It’s too early for me to rant about it. And an empty stomach. But I do have a rant, and I will hold forth. Especially if you’re going to become a regular. Right now, I can still feel those last two Old Fashioneds in my skullbone. Let’s walk to breakfast.

A regular?

He grimaced. That didn’t come out right. Bad joke. There are no regulars, my darling girl. I’m a hermit.

More like a Luddite.

That, too. A long dry spell broken only be the occasional moon baths. You must believe me. I’ve been waiting for you for a long time. How long have you and I been circling one another anyway? Downtown, in the dark, in crowds, in corner bars, and parties, and the one-off raves? Be honest!

Nearly half a year? Spring and summer.

Have you seen anyone on my arm? Have you? You haven’t. Let’s shake out last night’s garments and put them back on. I’ll walk you home after we dine and you can pack an overnight bag with everything you own and stay and stay and stay and stay.

That sounds like a long time. With no internet.

You don’t know what you don’t know. Time will become yours again. Those false gods will fade away. The old gods are all waiting for you.

She is three years old. Toddling and running. Falling and tumbling. At the bottom of the garden. It is October. She is dressed in woolen tights and a corduroy dress. She wants these togs off, she wants to roll down the lawn and into the pile of leaves, bury herself beneath the musty damp of mold. She is content jumping in and out of a long, narrow puddle of rainy mud until her mother isn’t looking, then she sits and pulls off the rubber boots, and runs and jumps and lands in the leaf pile.

She listens to the roly poly bugs tell her they will see her in the spring.

) O (

She is nine years old. A magical number a fox has whispered to her. It is October and she is squatting in the dirt at the bottom of the garden, barefooted and wearing a pair of red leather lederhosen she found in the attic. And her favorite t-shirt with a smiling sunflower. She isn’t cold but she knows her mother would tell her to put on warm clothes if she saw her. But she’s not home. The garden is her world, the limits explained to her by adults, and she is a dutiful child so she does not wander over the wall. Very often.

She is digging a hole with a hand trowel. To talk to the earthworms. Hello, how are you, goodbye.

) O (

She is thirteen. A magical number the moon has whispered to her. It is October and she is cross legged in the loam at the bottom of the garden. She is troweling dirt into thrifted pottery, tea kettles and teacups, gently extracting the worms and letting them loose them back into the ground. She’s going to fill each one with fall-blooming flowers and line her windowsill with them. Her room has become a haven, the walls papered with art prints and cut up coffee table book illustrations. Her bed a sanctuary, her notebooks filling with poetry and sketches. She cannot draw but she can summon life out of the dirt and her bedroom is a hothouse of plants. One of her girls teaches her to macrame and this she takes to, knotting plant hangers.

A newt is uncovered, unblinking eyes, she gently pats him back into his early hibernation. Go back to sleep.

) O (

She is seventeen years old. On the cusp of everything. Her mother is in the house, angry and sad simultaneously, there is a distance between them. She is outside, sitting on the rock wall, facing outward. The wood is beckoning, there’s a brook there, if she crosses it there is a meadow just ahead. The moon is rising, a Harvest Moon, it is October. The world is lit in silver light. She shrugs out of her coat, toes out of her sneakers. Leaps down from the wall and into the wilds. She shimmies out of her jeans and pulls the sweater over her head. She begins to run.

An owl calls. Another answers. She runs into the forest, straight through the creek, splashing water, jumping over mossy rocks. She stops and listens, closes her eyes and strains her ears. A flute and laughter. A crackling bonfire. An invitation. I'm here! she calls out loud. I'm here! I'm here! I'm here!

) O (

She is ageless now. It is October. She has been working in the garden since dawn. Raking all the fallen leaves into a pile. Shoveling composted fertilizer over the beds, mulching beneath the greenery, singing a lullaby to all the sleepy insects and animals, birds and bats, tree, shrub, flower, bulb. She ate her lunch leaning on the wall at the bottom of the yard, looking out at the inch fill housing built where the wood once stood. So much dirt had to be hauled in to soak up the creek water and fill in the holes where the trees had been pulled out. There is no more owl call at dusk. At dusk, she sets a match to the leaf pile and squints her eye, imagining it a bonfire. The neighbors will most probably report the smoke. She doesn’t care. She thinks of her mother and how fiercely she didn’t care either. Threatening to burn it all down, to lay waste to springtime, decimate all plants and crops. She remembers promising her mother she would return. And she did. She waits for the immensity of the moon rising and casting her shadow long before she undresses. A moon bath, a cleansing. It’s time for change. A time to be wrapped in the embrace of overwintering.

Will she return again? She cannot answer.

She wanders purposefully to the bottom of the garden, the far boundary of the yard. She played here as a child. She wrote bad poetry here as a girl. She scaled the wall and ran away as a teenager. And her love found her as a maiden. The dirt is cold under the soles of her bare feet. The air is cool breezing around her naked flesh. She has forgotten more than she could ever remember. But that’s okay, it slips off her like an old skin. Dormancy appeals. It’s been a long day of chores and tasks. Her back aches, her palms blistered, her knees complaining. She kneels in the organic rubble of decades, the leavings of the living, the remains of the dead. Pets buried here, wild animals hit by cars in the road, all of her milk teeth. Where are you, she whispers. She must be very, very quiet now to hear the answer. Where are you, my love? she asks, leaning forward, scooping handfuls of the graveolent dirt up and feeding it to herself. She is so hungry.

This is very long. 3300 words. It is the story of September. The story of my daughter's cardiac ablation. If there are signs and omens in the universe, then this week's prompt is one of them. For me.

( Read more... )

For three days he had scoured the forest, seeking the cottage. He had been told that’s where she resided and his need of her satisfied once he found her. Directions had been both vague and specific and the scrap of paper with the scribbled map which at first had seemed so straightforward a way was now crumpled and wearing thin and read more akin to a map drawn by a madman than the woman he had paid to sketch it out for him.

He had met that woman in a darkened corner of a pub in a nearby village, a place he had never frequented before and couldn’t find again when he tried to return to ask more questions. His palm still itched where she had fished the silver out of it. His first sight of her had his pulse racing, comely and he had thoughts of seduction. But she paid him no mind in matters of lust and when she excused herself and never returned, she had appeared quite ugly to him.

All of this had taken place over the past nine days, starting the night of the moon high in the night sky and waxing gibbous. Soon the moon would hang low and full as though it could be plucked out of its heavens like an unearthly fruit.

His grudge was a piece of fruit grown mealy, kept too long.

The grudge he’d kept with him for over half a year, through the winter, spring and summer. He had harvested it the autumn before when she’d married another.

He loathed both of them, but it was for her he most especially wished injury.

And he would have it done, not by his hand because he couldn’t risk harm to his reputation and during his more honest moments he could admit that he was frightened of her husband.

He last saw her on market day the month before and she was gone heavy with child. And that decided it for him. He would do her harm.

It was no easy task to find the witch. The search occupied his every waking hour and most of those asleep, dark dreams filled with blood and the sound of breaking bones. He could feel something turning inside of him, bowing his shoulders and creaking his spine and yet he pressed on. In corners of foul-smelling public houses, in alleys so narrow one had to enter sideways, behind trees ancient and hollowed and scratched with symbols that made his eyes narrow. But he would have what he would have and gathering information led him to the woman who drew the map.

Finally, he stumbled upon the place. Down twisted pathways, over a poisoned creek, beneath a split hanging tree, past the shadows of night animals stilled by his passing by, he smelled the woodsmoke and spied the candle guttering on the sill. He knocked and the door swung open. A hunched figure in a chair rocking beside a massive hearth with soup cauldron bubbling.

Come closer, the ragged voice instructed him, and he drew closer. Leaving the door open to the sounds of creatures hunting and the hunted crying out.

Terrible things took place. She pricked him and he bled. She bid him drink and he vomited. His head swam but his heart stayed the course, and he made his case as though she were the magistrate.

When they were done, it’s done, she told him. In the corner, rose a shadow, up and out of the dirt floor, curling out of a pile of fetid matter, spine straightening, shoulders settling, head rising. A thing that seemed to shudder and tremble but not from fear but because it was fear.

What’s that, he asked, his voice a strangled whisper.

That’s your desire.

Not my desire!

No? she asked him, cocking her head the way a bird of prey will do.

I have no desire that is embodied so. This horrid creature. He was flailing. You’ve called it forth.

Payment of your own blood and bile would suggest otherwise, my boy. You asked of me to spell a weapon, to cast it out into the world, its target a girl, we let it loose together. You and me. She lowered herself into the rocking chair pulling a briar wood pipe out of the pocket of her skirt, leaning forward to light it with a punk from the fire. She blew out two streams of gray smoke from her nostrils and looked up at him. Your desire manifested, became corporeal.

No! He said putting both hands out in front of him. Why does it approach me? The timber of his voice rising, shrill.

It’s ready to accompany you, my son.

I’m not your son, you wicked hag.

You weren’t born of my body, but you are now my child, child. Go from here and never return, ungrateful man. She bent her body away from him, toward the flickering light of the fire and in that illumination she looked different.

He blanched. Then turned and made quickly for the door, slamming it closed behind him, panting on the stone stoop. Above him, the moon was rising full. He began to run down the cobbled path, through the opened gate, into the menacing woods, behind him he could hear the beating of leathered wings.

Going for my soak, she called, pinning her hair up as she made her way to the bathroom.

Their apartment had been created out of dormered attic space on the top floor of a three-story Victorian house. The dying elms stood even taller than the peaked roofline and through most of the windows one had to peer through the peeling white bark branches and the hand-sized leaves. The house stood resolute and glorious with a postage stamp backyard and just a hedge between the porch and the cracked sidewalk in front. The first half of its centuried life had been as a single-family home, the last half as a multi-family building with five units. Two on the ground floor and two on the second floor, the attic a sprawling dwelling space comprised of nooks and crannies tucked beneath the eaves, long coveted in the downtown art scene and handed off from one hipster to another whenever vacated. They had lived in it happily for three years. The first heady year of finding themselves exactly where they were supposed to be was gone and some weekends they spent touring open houses. They wanted to believe themselves to be people who could renovate their own Victorian.

She was settled into the massive claw foot tub, scented and bubbled, candles lit, her day washing off her skin. She reached over to a stool for a jar of clay mask and began slathering her face. He came in and turned on the lamp that stood on an antique table beside the door. He had a book in his hands.

What will you regale me with tonight, my librarian?

Bathtime story hour? Hmmm. Might have to pitch that at our next meeting.

She laughed.

I found this old civil engineering book in the depository this morning. It’s about designing inner townships, gridded streets, parks, dedicated shop fronts, municipalities, no mention of suburban boroughs whatsoever.

Sounds riveting.

Doesn’t it just!

Some things are not written to be read aloud.

All things are written to be read. He settled on the floor, his shoulder blades against the curled edge of the tub. The giant tome opened on his upraised knees. There’s a lot of diagrams.

As there should be. Read the poems in between.

He began at the beginning and the low sonorous sound of his voice ran along the patterned lino and individual words became hard to distinguish.

It’s putting me to sleep, she complained.

A diabolical plan when you’re immersed up to your chin in water. It’s putting me to sleep, too. Admittedly.

But

Yes

Can you imagine how we came to this. How we left our caves and discovered the meadows and then somehow devised city planning. Concrete.

Not intended as a jungle by any stretch.

No. But then why did it become so primitive?

Imagine Pan and a maenad lying on their backs in long meadow grasses, a creek burbling nearby. Birdsong and breezes in the treetops.

In Arcadia!

And somehow urbanism surfaced in their consciousness. The goat foot god must have known that would be the beginning of the end for him. The religion of the slurbs. The slow but sure death of the villagers.

Should we become pastoralists?

Too late for that, I’m afraid. Transcendentalists, perhaps?

She filled the cups of her hands with bath water and rinsed her face. You’re not joining me tonight?

I think I’d rather you get dressed and let’s walk down to the park, feed the ducks.

O’ that they were swans. The waterfowl are all asleep, my dreamer. Tucked into the bushes.

Beneath the debris of the unhoused.

You’re getting morose. From a book! I’ll get dressed. Go mix us up some drinks and pour them into our Stanleys and we will wander the city for a while and get slightly drunk. We can look for new For Sale signs.

No escape to a life in the country for us?

What on earth would we do in all that wide open space?

He lay beside her

Listening to her breathe

For two

played that over in his mind and thought no

For three

For each of us

she breathes

When he fell into sleep he dreamt

He was inside the earth, inside a cave

Dark but safe

A hearth fire

Flame light flickering on the walls

Blood red and illuminating two figures seated beside it

Naked and on all fours crawling forward

The distance was exhausting

On his belly pulling

Across the floor of the earthen womb

The two were women

Mother

Crone

paying him no attention

Murmuring to each other

In voices muffled to his ear

But familiar and for a long moment

He lay content and felt the world expand

In the dream he became aware

It was time to wake

He pulled his body upward to a lotus and watched the two

Through slitted eyes as though the dim

Fire light was sun light

Here’s the secret

Keep it secret

I cannot

You must be able to

Don’t tell me

Please don't tell me it

The mother held her newborn to her breast

This is the weaver, she told him

She showed him the cord

anchored inside her body

Tethered to the child

this is the measure

the crone reached across with glinting shears

and cut

She was asleep, dreaming. And in the dream

there was a girl child,

innocent but serious, opened but mysterious,

blonde ringlets and bare footed

Running to and fro

A forgotten joyousness ensouled

They were upstairs, in his front room, all of them

Herself and himself,

her summer girls and their goat boys,

his messenger and boatman,

and even the moon. Lounging as was their wont,

drinking and smoking, bantering and laughing

listening to the grandmother clock tick the seconds

as though each minute was a favourite song

The child a focus of no one’s attention

but her own

and she was fiercely focused

because somehow

the girl child had found her secret heart,

clutching it against her body with both hands as she scampered

Let me see, she told the child,

show me what you have there

Imploring and intentful

Aware she did not want to frighten her

When at last she heeded,

Solemnly obeying,

Coming forward, leaning against her knees,

she gently gently lifted her heart from the offering hands

and settled back into a rocking chair

beside a hearth

She opened her blouse to offer her breast

because her heart was a nursling daughter,

slick with blood and vernix and

new born.

Wake up, he whispered.

Playing the devil's advocate with inkstainedfingertips amazing twisty entry last week. Skol, my friend!

Good morning, Liam.

The voice was warm and filled with yellow light. He was sleepy and curled tight into his own elbows and knees. The bed was nothing like the little bed Grandmother had tucked him into every night, at the foot of her own bed, but if he squeezed his eyes shut very tightly and hummed so that all the noise outside his head muted and remembered the peculiar smell that perfumed the deep lines in the palms of her hands, he was sleeping safe and sound in Grandmother’s room.

Enough of the Land of Nod for you, Liam. Rise and shine with the sun.

He cracked one eye and then the other. An unwashed taste in his mouth, the bleach smell of the sheet and the mothball must of the blanket, the racket coming from the hallway. Someone screaming. Someone crying. Someone shouting. And the underlying whisper of low-pitched voices.

He was still in the hospital.

And where was Granny? He knew where the monsters were, he had dispatched one of them back to where monsters should go. The monster was gone. But Granny was gone, too. Granny who had told him stories about the monsters in their house, who helped him to understand. Softly, he began to cry.

The morning sun was streaking through the sparkling clear glass in the kitchen. He was very fastidious, wiping things clean, rinsing things out, drying things and then folding the dishtowel neatly on the countertop. His morning coffee was finished, the maker put away, a soft-boiled egg eaten and crumbs from his toast wiped up. All cleared away. He was seated once again at the table, the Glock in pieces across the surface, the morning’s newspaper spread out beneath the dissembled handgun. Gun oil and a rag in his hands.

He had decided that today would be the day. It was his 89^th birthday. How he had made it nearly to 90 was an impossible contemplation. He couldn’t conceive of it. Not entirely. Could a person’s internal engine run on the fuel of rage and grief for decades? It could and his had indeed. Sixty years of such incitement.

Six decades of isolation. His wife dead, her mother dead, his son institutionalized. And for the most part, the house as though they had all gone to bed the night before and only he rising in the morning. Alone. The old woman’s bedroom door closed. His wife’s bureau and closet unopened. The child’s room had been torn apart by the police. He had cleared it out later, down to the floorboards, up to the rafters and then closed that door forevermore. Most of it he had burned in the burn barrel out back.

He knew he should have breached the old woman’s room, knew that’s where the answers most probably could be found, but for what end. His wife had hinted enough and yet they had done nothing. His wife obedient, he disbelieving, and the child the victim. He had no doubt about any of that. But proving it would be redundant. Redundant to what he learned that terrible night.

What had his life been? Was this a penance served? For what transgression?

At first, he could not find it in himself to forgive, but as the years departed from his life, and the doctors implored, he began to believe he could. He should. For the sake of the boy.

It was proven useless. A fool's errand. And where after all was said and done and tried did the store of his fatherly love reside?

Again and again, meeting after meeting, even consultations in his own living room, gods how could he sit there and remember walking into the house that evening, his wife shot point blank between the eyes, her body being desecrated by the boy with the kitchen cleaver in his hand. He remembered the drenching shock and then his hands around the child’s throat, he would have choked the very life out of him, but the cunning creature had brought the knife up in both small hands and got him good on the inside of his thigh. Cutting through the thick canvas of the work trousers he had on, and he let go and the boy was gone, through the door into the yard over the fence and down into the wilds of the creek behind the house. He had let out a roar and followed. There was nothing left for him in the house. He knew his wife was dead. She had been beheaded.

Later they told him as if it were a kindness about the Glock and the nine-millimeter sized hole in her forehead. Told him all about it when they returned the gun into his possession.

There was no fixing the child. He had suggested they test him for some sort of poison the old woman might have been feeding him. And not just the poison of her words.

Years passed and the boy grew into an adult and now was descending into a late middle-aged man. Entirely unhinged, they declared, but with different words, clinical, dry, encyclopedic. It was undeniable that the child believed in the monsters he had surely been told about by a vengeful old witch of a woman.

And what of her? Had she always despised her own daughter, loathed her son in law? For what possible reason? Had the boy inherited some kind of mental condition from his grandmother? That seemed reasonable.

But doubt had been cast. In the beginning. Two long years of it. The police and the doctors, the lawyers and the judge, all casting a damning light on him as though by his own hand some trauma had been visited upon his family. After a few years of that, and the child showing no signs of improvement, they finally, blessedly left father and son alone with their own monstrous thoughts.

He had stopped all interaction. The state paid the outrageous bills. The asylum was his home now, the doctors his family. He hadn't visited in, well, decades.

Today, he would visit, the Glock tucked into a pocket. With his own retribution. But first he would visit the cemetery. Leave flowers for his wife, spit on her mother's grave.

He reassembled the pistol and began to load the magazine. His son believed in monsters? Then today he would be a monster.

A backyard theater at the rear of the Queen Anne, because of course. A house so marvelously malleable that it can bend and flex architecturally as prompted. Created cerebrally and thus housed in the imagination of writer and reader.

It’s summertime now and the property is more interesting from the outside. The dying Dutch elms given another season of life, crowned with yellow green leaves, a line of cypress acting privacy buffer between the house and the street, the white noise of crickets.

Perhaps in winter, the drama will move indoors, footlights in the front room, velvet curtains strung on ropes traversing the length and rugs rolled back to allow trodding on the hardwood floors. With hand-painted screens carried inside to block the windows and the fireplace. Better acoustics, but less space for the audience. Black box theater, intimate if you will, downstage actors just within an arm’s reach.

That’s a different story to share, different plays, muted costumes and dimmed lighting.

With warm nights and strung fairy lights and old banks of movie house seats, the backyard theater comes to repertory life behind the ageing three story house. Cement steps lead down from the French sleeping porch to two patches of lawn divided by a brick walkway meandering its herringboned way to the matching carriage house at the bottom of the deep lot. The old and leaning building with its hinged double doors that front the alley. All the alleys have recently been named by city elders, and this one has been mysteriously designated Pomegranate Alley. Tree fruited alleyways in this section of downtown referred to as Elysian Fields; Orange, Apple, Peach, Plum. All night shades in midtown are labeled Tartarus; Tomato, Eggplant, Blueberry. The housing market requires more bedsits. Garages, she-sheds, and accessory dwelling units are converted or built to oblige.

The carriage house has seen many incarnations since the decade it housed a horse and carriage, but its current state is to serve the stage. Costume shop, makeup and mirrors, dressing rooms, warm up barre, speakers and light bars are stacked in one corner, a desk with a copy machine and stacks of stapled scripts.

He names the troupe in honor of the bone theater of the bard - the Beoley Skull Players. The name comes before the players themselves are recruited. Seduced at poetry readings, a local theater in the round, an improv workshop, and amongst friends. In the springtime.

He has cajoled construction of the stage, converting anyone who owns a hammer, sketching continuously on bar napkins. He consigns a shop of bridal seamstresses to construct the grand drape. On a monumental afternoon, the sumptuous velvet is hung on tracks, inside a magnificent proscenium arch he himself has painted. Is any of the construction weatherproof? Or all a passing fancy.

Someone is giving away an old upright piano on Facebook Marketplace and he hauls it into the backyard but is told the stage hasn’t been built for that. It sits unevenly on a patch of ground. Anyone who admits to a single piano lesson is invited to play.

The sets begin to be built. The Beoley Skull Players are nothing if not artistic. Solo cups filled with poster paint, wire and paper mache. Cardboard and plywood and exclamations.

As the work commences, someone wonders aloud one evening, drinking port and using torn pieces of baguette to eat gobs of whipped cream cheese, if the play really is the thing. The preparation feels more alive and immediate and filled with symbolism. The doubter is shushed and told to wait just wait. Wait and see. We are creating worlds and if a tree falls in the forest can it be heard if its not perceived.

He wants to perform the quintessential summertime play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Of course. He is told that the smallest cast is thirteen. This pleases him. He believes he can direct.

He will play Puck. He refuses her a part because he desperately needs her to be his audience, and she agrees. She can move along a catwalk but has no desire to take on a role, memorize lines, project her voice, and emote.

In a fit of inspiration, he claims it comes to him in a dream, he deems the troupe skeletal and from that proclamation forward the actors appear in skullface. White boned figures of death donned in fantastical garb. Bottom, Theseus, Hermia, Oberon, Titania, Lysander. Skeletons each one. Blackened eye sockets, cavernous nasal cavities, jaw-socket-wide grins. He is pleased to the point of joyful seizure each time he jumps from the stage during rehearsals and stands back to take it all in. He falls in love with his theater.

Dress rehearsal is a jubilant affair. Photos are leaked on Instagram and phones begin blowing up. How to procure tickets for the next evening.

He lays in bed with her until late afternoon. When they surface from their basement bower the house and yard is overrun with people. Everyone is sworn off liquor, but lines of coke are requisite. It is opening night. Grease paint and quick calisthenics. Operatic vocal warmups and meditative breathing exercises. Bottom decides he will strap a GoPro to his head and does. An industrious group concocts a signature cocktail and sells them from the porch.

They must wait for the sun to set, the twinkle lights come on, a beautiful woman in a top hat admonishes seats to be taken please. Gothic ballads have been playing through the sound system but stop. A spotlight travels the yard and stage, shadows and illuminates the drapery, the strung lights are extinguished, the murmurs quiet and quiet and quiet. Backstage, the players stand in a tight circle, holding hands and whisper an old old line to one another.

The story is posted!

Tell Your Park Fire Story

I have to take an unwanted BYE in Idol this week as the story and work has kept me too busy to pen anything fictional and fun. Next prompt.

That shattering glass, not a windshield but a doorway of shock and awe, into another place. As though she had left a place for the sole reason of arriving at another place. No wandering in between. She had never been good at telling a story, not like Daddy could be around a fire, but if she had survived then perhaps, she would have been able to say out loud those moments in a way that would capture the sheer impossibility of a human body in flight. Not falling but flying, the propulsion of her skeleton, all bone projectile, into the headlight lit darkness. The impact of her head with the windscreen was the killing blow, of course it was, yet she traveled onward still alive, through the glass, over the crumpled hood and into the forever night. Leaving both sneakers behind as she went. Did she see the stars in their firmament? In this strange leave-taking she lingered on a while, the air above and surround her insubstantial, the pavement solid beneath her, the summer scorched heat of it a small comfort to her cooling body, the bloody halo of her long blonde hair creating a vision of such suffering, such loss, hers a miraculous martyred death. Our Teenaged Lady of the Automobile Collision. The shattered shoulder bones, the leaking skull. The impossible sense of soaring passing through her nerve endings, dissipating through her pores. Simultaneous departure and arrival and departure. The touch and go of her short life.

The afternoon of the day had grown hot. Morning spent working in Daddy’s garden. It was time for the leafy branches to be snipped off close to the stem to allow the lengthening buds all the sunlight. He didn’t pay her out, they had nothing extra for allowances, but after the harvest late in the fall, just before winter, he could be generous with the crumpled bills that began to stuff his pockets. She’d walk her brothers to the store, cold winds blowing through them, and buy the boys candy bars and herself a fashion magazine.

Daddy had two other daughters before she was born. One lived up in Alaska with her own momma and the other one of them lived in an old camp trailer on Daddy’s property with her baby. She was her momma’s oldest, after her came four more, all boys and of course Daddy was partial to them on account that they were boys, but he was good to all his children and just the day before this day Momma said she was expecting another one come springtime. She whisper prayed that it would be a girl, a sister, another sister.

Now the day was bending open the bars that held her prisoner, soon she would be freed. It was just gone noon. She had made sandwiches for her brothers, cleaned the kitchen and Momma told her she was allowed to walk down the road to the swimming hole. She longed to go on her own and Momma said that was fine, too, but only on account that two of her brothers seemed to be suffering from the heat and Momma wanted to keep a closer eye on them. It was hot and had been hot for going on a week. They’d taken to sleeping out of doors on the wood slatted porch, but the night before a bear had woken them up pawing through garbage and the compost and Daddy said they had to be back inside the house until he either could get a decent shot off or someone else on the hill got him first. Dressed bear in the chest freezer would be a treat.

She was fourteen years old that summer day. Highschool in the fall and she couldn’t imagine what that would be like. Tried and failed. Thought she might be more than what she was, if such a thing was possible and even then, couldn’t tell you accurately what that more looked like. Knew that somewhere out there more was waiting to be had, one just needed to get to where it was at. Arrive with eyes wide opened and announce themselves with attention.

Cut off shorts and a bikini top, knock off Converse low tops, and her waist-length hair swinging over her shoulders, near white it was so light colored, and she swung it back and forth with a practiced toss of her head. Girl we known it was you from way down the road, he said to her when he pulled over. Driving his uncle’s truck leaning out the window at her diesel exhaust smelling so dangerously sweet and another boy she didn’t know jumped out and opened the passenger side door for her like they’d been expecting her and no one but her, and she climbed up into the cab and knew her daddy wouldn’t be at all happy because he said Levi’s family was one to steer clear of whenever mannerly possible. But Levi had his hair shorn short dagger sideburns delineating his jaw line and a swagger in his long-legged stride. On the bus, he sat way at the back while she had to sit in the front with her younger brothers, sometimes holding Caden’s hand to keep him from crying, which he was prone to doing because the only thing he wanted in the wide world was to be home in the kitchen with Momma. The high schoolers got off the bus first stop and when it came springtime, Levi started tapping her on the shoulder as he walked past and then that last week of school he sat himself down right behind her on the way home every day and caught the ends of her hair in his loose-fisted palms. Sometimes his fingers, dirty and sticky with cannabis oil would tap tap the knobs of her spine. You’re real skinny, he would tell her in a voice so quiet and low it could only be meant as a secret of some kind. And the nerves would explode across her shoulders and at night in her bed she would think about the heat of his fingers and roll over onto her stomach believing that wings could be coaxed out of the two thin blades in her back. Those shoulder bones were a storehouse inside her body for all that tingling sensation caused by his fingers on her flesh.

Now she was sitting on the bench seat right up next to him. Don’t be shy girl he laughed. Bet you ain’t brave enough to jump off that high rock. The other boy had his window rolled down open too and he craned his body out of it and whooped loud. Levi gunned the big truck and black exhaust rolled out of the dual pipes and he fishtailed a bit and she gasped but the boys laughed. And soon she was laughing too.

They raced one another down to the swimming hole but the boys veered up the narrow path to the high rock. She kept on down to the rocky beach, looking up. Can you see me from there? He called down to her and she nodded. What? He yelled. I can, I can see you! She visored both hands over her eyes and watched him watching her as he leaped off the rock.

There was no way not to be alive that afternoon.

She felt no pain outside the hurt of leaving. She couldn’t close her eyes as though to sleep; her soul was exiting through her vision itself. What’s the time, she asked. Her world spinning now, the dizziness of the calling fade. No more thought everything a retinal remembering.

That day in the rain when I was almost turned sixteen telling him I had missed that month and he began to speed down and down the winding dirt roads? Or later while we raised up three young’uns and he had a bad spell with liquor and somehow it all came to a screaming head that afternoon in the truck? Or was it only the two of us again, that morning of such sadness, driving in the snow back from the hospital? Or before all that, the first sweltered day of summer when he drove us down to the swimming hole, before ditching his friend because he said he had something he wanted to show me, just him and me, and I knew without knowing how that this was my arriving.

If it’s any …

It isn’t.

I just thought …

Don’t. Your thoughts are. Hesitation. Rudimentary. But sincere. I recognize that.

Well. For most …

Stop. Please. I’m not most.

Silence, broken then with.

There is no comfort, no consolation, you see? There is only a letting go. My releasing. Mine. It is a great sluicing of water from off the skin when surfacing out of the depths. A leprosy in which the body sheds its recognizable humanity. Akin to fire, flooding, all the great equalizers of the human spirit is loss.

No pain can be endless.

Time lessens, nothing heals. Perhaps the final loss, the dissolution of self. There is that momentary pause in which the soul tells the self rest rest rest now. With those strange urgent shushings the mind exhales and closes an interior eye and the soul sighs and the body relaxes.

Always with the most extreme of analogies.

It’s how I process. How I’m formed. The shape of me in this incarnation is allegorical. I admit it. Is it unbearable of me to explain a poetic inclination?

Of course not.

Catch me in one of those expirations then. That numbing prelude to a sleep brought on by the physical and existential exhaustion of the quivering small beast caught in the snare incapable of the final severing of the trapped limb. Perhaps, between respirations I will show gratitude for whatever platitude you long to utter. With such kindness in the dulcet tones of your compassion.

So insulting. But I forgive you.

It is no kindness to me. I’m admitting this to you now so that there can be no misunderstanding between us afterwards. In the quiet of acceptance, in the weaking of the bleeding out. You offered me not a ligature, not even a bandage, only the word bandage. Followed by an expectation of a deed done well. Yet, I will nod and listen insomuch as I am able before the next suck breath moment in which I am once again filled with not a gain but a loss. Filled with loss, if you can imagine such a thing. You who have been unlucky to suffer not. Yes, I say unlucky, yes, I call you cursed for your wholeness, your innocence of these mortal woundings, of the soul’s agonies.

And you, I suppose, are blessed by this devastation?

Confounded and cast out by the privilege of cataclysmic injury yet I finger the beads and whisper the prayers and allow my eyes to roll back in their sockets from the sheer unknowingness of meaning, the definition of absolutes. Our mother, our father. All these soulful beings arting in their heavens. There is a consecration in catastrophe.

I disagree. You are martyring yourself to this.

Martyr? Laughing. This laying on of hands while the blade is hidden in the sleeve, dropped into the palm, the knife snicking out plunging into the heart between the ribs through the lungs a great sucking sound when its pulled back out. Taking life itself with it. The body heartbeating to death through the collapsing arteries.

All this because I wanted nothing more than to offer succor.

Are you familiar with the consolation prize, my friend?

Certainly, narrowly failing to win.

No, finishing last.

Yet recognized!

I don’t want to be recognized for my wounding. Your sympathy is of no value to me. Only to you. So, in an earnest effort to be brotherlike, to recognize that you too will one day bleed, I bite my tongue at refusing your solace. Give it here. In great bucketloads. Pour it out and over me. I’ll hold my breath to keep from drowning in your mollification. It offers some respite, admittedly, to others.

It’s that you can’t bear to be likened to others.

He’d been sick for a week. Summer cold they called it when he was a boy, but he didn’t think it was hay fever. What would he have been allergic to? Mold and dust? They’d mucked out the barn late, a mid-spring chore but time had wandered away from them and it was nearer to summer. The horses had already been turned out into the lower forty, hock deep in an abundance of growth and greenery, noses hidden in carpets of bluebells.

The barn took the both of them two days and just after that he’d fallen ill. Sick as the proverbial dog. Racking coughs, lungs that sounded like cedar being kindled. She was fine as houses, and they hadn’t been to town nor had a customer up from town for the mill. But he couldn’t breathe. Literally, figuratively, the physicality of inhalation and exhalation becoming an emotional toil. His lungs didn’t hurt; they were just not working the way they’d worked for the entirety of his life. She’d teased him good and hard about it. He was two decades her senior and he allowed the ribbing, deciding it was a good-natured lambast, but alone thought slantways about the distance measured by an ageing body and knew at sixty-eight he was old and at forty-seven she was not. Or not near as.

But he didn’t couldn’t spell out in words the extent of what he was experiencing. Later realizing not telling her was fear borne from a deep childlike belief that he could possibly jinx the very ability of his body to keep him bodied, ensouled. He tamped down his symptoms, dismissed the idea of going into the clinic. Waved away even a hint of diagnostic concern.

Naming a thing doesn’t always give the namer power. Some things acquire a name, and the power becomes all theirs, monstrous, overbearing, overarching, made real and whole.

The first sense of hardening, something lodged, something stiff inside his chest had woken him out of an already bad sleep and came at him with an existential dread so fathomless that he knew in those darkly pre-dawn hours that God had reached inside his body and touched the unseen organs toiling in their mysterious viscera at keeping him earthside. He knew he had been beckoned, felt that finger quirk within the twinned grey lobes, filters of the very air itself. A whisper come home son.

But he didn’t. Heed the call, respond. In another aeon without medical choices he would have acquiesced, quickly bent a knee to such a godly mandate, and within the year dutifully laid his stoved-up body down and not gotten himself back up again. He was astonished at how his corporeal self, pavlovian began to slaver at the command of fate.

It was hard work, to flee, to turn away from the lure of the abyss, the echo coming back emptied of his pleas, hauling great mouthfuls of air into his hardened lungs, willing them to soften beneath his will, to generate as though it were an act he understood or had any sort of control over oxygenated blood. His mind committed to a marathon, but he learned the body does not work that way.

Acquiescence. An exam, then labs, then quiet pronouncements from white coated analyzers.

ILD. Interstitial Lung Disease. There came the naming, the christening he’d gone to such extremes avoiding. He did not feel empowered. Identification did not lead to compartmentalization. The panic of it made it more difficult to breathe.

Accusations or recriminations were never part of the conversation in the sterile examination rooms. Neither courtroom nor pulpit. Regrets only his. All their probing and prodding, questions and answers.

But. Had he done this to himself?

Cemented his own lungs? The bronchus, bronchioles solidified inside the yeasty lobes. The deflated sacs, gummed closed. He wasn’t a smoker, leaf or grass. No childhood asthma, no rheumatoid arthritis. His heart was steady, his arteries clear. Occupational dust or fibers.

Years at the sawmill, whittling a figure of a man close to earth, organic and respectful of the mighty conifers, the broad-leafed hardwoods. Riven down to the heartwood, the splitting and the milling. The board feet of his daily grind, the blades, the growing mounds of sawdust, the smells and soils of a hard day’s work. The labor of the felling and the bucking, the chain dragging, and the ripping. The packaging, boards and stickers, and the redolent incense. The perfume of his own wood lot, his own lumber yard. It lined the inside of his sinuses, and he relished it. Tasted it on his tongue, scraped it out between his molars.

Fibrosis, necrosis, pyrosis.

One year. Into the second wearing oxygen but his strength was sapped. His vision swimmy, his ears ringing with the labors of his breathing.

Double lung transplant.

Now that was a thing to give a body the shakes. He quivered like a strung bow as charts and diagrams were shown, then the contractual agreement and he wanted to make a dark joke but could read the room. These men did not see themselves on a side other than that of a clinical, mathematical God. This for that. One life for another. Interchangeable beneath the skin that pretends a difference between one or the other. All scientific progress and supposed presupposed human gain. He signed and jested silently, inside his head about blood and souls bartered for a bit more of this and a lot more of that.

The waiting and the worsening. The dizziness brought on both by his body and his thoughts.

The loneliness ached him more than the faltered breath, the straining ribcage, the sinking realization, the bartered understanding. She tried to comfort or strengthen him up by relating the stories of her two births. It’s like birth, she said. It’s entering a room in which there is only one exit. He could not grasp the concept. For him the room was not a room, but a box fitted to the width and breadth of his shoulders, the length of his skeleton head to toe.

After after afterwards. Sitting wrapped in a blanket he’d pilfered from the months’ long stay at rehab on a rocker on the deck he had built when a younger man a different man a man breathing through his own lungs staring out across the land he owned had bought for her wanting not just one thing but all the things for her for her for them such a short allowance we are given he measured the length of a thing against the weight of a thing and wondered. And could simply not decide.