mosquito rain

A pond formed at our yard's tail when the rain got zealous for what seemed to be weeks. It was like an internal organ had liquefied; the smell, the color, and the way everything softened and became unsure.

The kids took a kayak to it, oaring the distance between the fence walls. They took BB guns to it too, raising small splashes as they pierced the surface and the frogs no bigger than their own thumbs. The frogs stopped where they were and released a small dye of red into the pond.

One day the kids even set up tarps and slid in, rashes mounting their skin that night, making it hard to sleep.

As adults, we hadn't risked the ceaseless discomfort of the storm. We ran from the car to the house like it was the heat of battle. We stayed inside. Checked the sump pump and checked the forecast. Made a game out of compiling a list of things we'd do when it all let up. Arcane places to dust, an aerated and fertilized front and back lawn and the machines we'd need to rent for that, feasts with lines charred to their surface, a cold can pressed to our heads after it was all done.

Meanwhile the mosquitoes were laying unseen eggs on every welt of water around us. There was ferocious begetting, with generations generating generations as if it were shift work.

There was no way we could guess at how deep the bond of blood could really be.

In a temporary letup of the rain on day 24, I ran out in my sandals and placed a pile of coal briquettes on the shore, which was now making an attempt at the composite deck we'd built the year before under a singe.

The mosquitoes? I imagined them falling to the yard like a TV station switched off for a night.

And that's it.

I still have no picture in my mind for what happens to their corpses once they've dropped.

the soul huckster

A soul huckster in a loosened print tie handed me a pamphlet. Feeling lost to an almost irrevocable degree, I found myself soon in a pew under a ceiling that was knotty and arched and going yellow. Switching between ass and knee, I listened to what they were saying, following along with my finger and my voice.

I shook hands with strangers and they said, "Peace." Some meant it more than others, I think. Some were violent with their sincerity. Some had hands that were limp and cold as frozen peas.

There was wine to be had, but not for me, not having the right credentials. I couldn't even have the disc of snack.

No matter.

I listened to the church announcements, putting my pen to my tongue to re-awaken the ink. But I didn't write anything down in the book I have for keeping track of dates where there are things I want to do.

I did though, on the soft bottom of my palm, write the one thing that kept coming to me and disrupting my obedience the whole service over.

It was: "Dear Lord Above, Please Help Me, Rodriguez Z. Cobalus, To Lose His Stomach."

a bag of pulp

The ribs in me were like the needles of pines that day, taking in the air that happens once February starts dying.

I was riding my motorcycle along the inner arm of a bend in The Big River, a few dashes from the towering trestle bridge that attaches our town to another state. There are shacks on water down in that bend, and I was going to see someone I didn't know not well but well enough to go to see. His name, back then, was Robbie.

Now it's Rob.

We all tend to shed some things as we get older.

Robbie was the same age as me, 24, but you'd never tell that from the sick color of his skin, the way he walked leaned really far back with his stomach leading.

He looked off balance. Or out of. Unsteady, I mean. You almost wanted to grab him by the elbow like you would someone who was triple or more your age and frail.

His dog (of indistinct breeding - fat as a retired defensive lineman, with tight-knit fur and a bald tail) ran shrunk blind circles around the shack, stopping to take occasional pulls from the river water, thrashing and spitting up chunks of ice.

Hearing the noise of his dog taking me in sight, Robbie came out the door but left it open. He raised his right hand to set the sky right.

Above the platform of his hand, I Robbie had on the crown he often wore. It was made from chain link fence that had offset his childhood home from many acres of state land. He'd filed the sharp ends down so they didn't jab into his temples, forehead, scalp.

In his left hand was holding onto what they'd handed to him and asked to give to me.

It was in a paper bag that looked soft, like it was wanting to turn back into pulp. He urgently motioned me on-board with that bag and I thought everything'd scatter.

I take what happens next with the lightness of, say, a tank.

Out of the narrow edge of my left eye, I saw this huge bird with exotic, important colors curl its beak around the latch of the cramped metal cage it was in. It made a sound like the snapping together of wet fingers. The cage made a rattle sound, a metallic shiver.

Then again. That's it. Twice, and the door was open, the bird out, unsteady at first, but its wings remembering their role quickly, and the thing balanced in the air, flew over to where the dog was standing, totally weirded out—we were all frozen by the onslaught of what was going down—and did a several foot free-fall right into the huge dog's mid-back, dug in its claws.

Its wings had to work hard to make it happen, but eventually the bird found its stride and was far off down the river, holding the stiff, stunned dog.

"Robbie!" I said.

Robbie said my name, dropped my bag, then went back inside, closing the door behind him.

On my Yamaha, headed home with the bag bungeed to the seat behind me, a scarf tied around all my head but the eyes, I realized this: There are certain things in life you can understand perfectly, certain things you can't at all.

It doesn't matter.

What it comes down to, when someone asks, What was the craziest thing you ever witness first hand? or What’s the saddest thing you’ve seen? or Do you believe in chance? or What makes you laugh? or How do you define pure true real love?—when you’re asked these things, or anything really, you just need to have some words you can use.

Something whole to swallow

I ate bread off the floor. It tasted like dirt. Not because of the floor. The floor was not dirty. But because times were tight as the head of a snare drum and we'd dug up the blackness of our yard, mixed it with the soured dregs of a stout bottle and hoped that it would lift up in the hot sun.

The result was the cold rightness of a corpse.

But by evening we were back at the shovel, sleeves rolled to let our arms deep into the trashcans along the alley. The clanks and cuts of bottles.

A dash. A pinch. Something whole to swallow. And full knowledge that science works only so well or not at all.

Something good, afloat in grease

The one with the crutch is saying bourbon sweet bourbon I want to sing with you. The stretch he had early that morning—so good it was almost like pain—was a harbinger of weird shit to come. Jerry's saying there are faces there, in the perverted lick of each flame over the log, and they each one looks like a kid caught in the womb, ultrasounded. One of those bugs that looks like a stick but mobile appears out of nowhere, balancing on some old, disused spider web, and Charlie the girl is screaming loud my god, my fucking god. Her bright red drink spills across the lawn.

How can it be. The headlights. Literally, lights on our heads. And Randal, whose house it is, asking himself who these fucking people are. The cars keep coming. Each engine is like another stab after the body's already gone cold He's thinking of the neighbors and how each new idling must be another slipknot for their REM sleep.

When morning, with bodies sprawled and damp with dew, comes, he'll hold a hankerchief over his face like a veil from some other culture. The door will thwack behind him. He'll say, you bastard roosters, you tangles of shit! Then he'll invite them all in for brunch. Something good, afloat in grease.

the myth of the woman who scared easily

There are cold bats hanging from the ceiling of the room where your hat gets hung. There are worms in the earth. There is something that will crawl across your skin and just freak you out.

Hear the sound, canid or feline, in the empty woods of wherever, that sounds like it could kill you before it even needs the spears in its mouth?

You could write a novel about caves stuffed with days that are darker than death. You could eat an ice cream cone and stroke out. Not even have time to come up with one word to describe how it feels.

Doesn't matter much.

The only thing sure is that airplanes will continue to fall from the sky like cigarettes dropped out of highway cars. Oil fire as the only mirage. Floods and all that. Plain godawful gestalt.

At night, when it crashes and scatters, you'll hear the floorboards scream some ugly ass ancient song, some bone-splitting tone; you'll be caught with your pants down or without pants at all. The careful days will unravel and flap.

Remember the myth of the woman who scared easily. Her moral. And her hair, the color of dark ale, fine enough to cut through rock.

(Old Pine by Cecilia Lieder)

The Slap of Conclusion

I have a new short story up on Showed & Told. It's called "The Slap of Conclusion". Go read 'er.

Seymour Reid Cartographic Cinema Society

I wrote a new story called "Seymour Reid Cartographic Cinema Society". It was published on Showed & Told today. Go read it!

Baby Boy's tube

For as long as we knew him, Baby Boy was small enough that I could slip him in a plastic tube, screw on the cap, and then insert the tube into the top of my cell phone, like some outsized, rounded SIM card.

His breath would cause moisture to bead the walls. Sometimes, if I left Baby Boy in long enough, water would become like a sconce over the trio of air holes on the cap. So I had to make sure to eject and unscrew the tube before Baby Boy turned the color of an angry plum.

Baby Boy was a genius, not certifiable, but a genius nonetheless. The reason I'm saying this is not just because we are his mom & his dad. I don't think it's just the normal bias.

Here's why: At a few days old, he was answering my questions (abstract and stuttered as usual) with nearly perfect diction and grammar, as well as clever flights of rhetoric. When we let his out of the tube after his naps, he'd spring to life, climb out and sprint across the table, his pin-ish legs propelling him forward with agile grace.

He gave us love, so much of it.

But the cells in his body never got it together enough to pile up, to make him bigger. Years passed and he stayed vanishingly small.

He told us he liked the tube a whole lot. He didn't feel like he was getting too old for it and God knows he wasn't getting too big. He found it a comfort to be tucked away in a place so dark while he dreamt of chasing fire ants or scaling bonsai trees. The night-like awayness of where he slept help make his dreams real, he said.

As much as the tube calmed him, it was also exceedingly convenient for us, as you can imagine. I could even bring him to work and everything, without anyone noticing. The tube muted his sobs, snores, and coos. So we kept him in it. Everyone was happy.

Coursing, physical agony set in on the sad day when - drunkenly, I'll admit - my cell phone unhinged from my belt loop holster and disappeared to who knows where, and Baby Boy, our boy, disappeared with it.

a yawn that sounds like a lullaby sung by rippling water

On the other side of the world, everyone has headaches. There's a constant squeal coming from the sky, dropping down like torrential rain.

When we heard of this over the airway, the voices of the reporters were almost totally buried under the broken woofer, in-the-redness of the background squeal. Plus, if you add accents to the mix, well, at first we thought it was a prank and we were foolish enough to not fall for it.

Now, hours later, our leaders are addressing us in clipped sentences, saying they're sending out an air raid to attack the heavens over our allies. The true identity of enemy is unknown, vague as a light mist. But we have the equipment and the manpower, so we're going after it all guns blazing. Relief workers are sent to dispense aspirin.

There's this girl. Her eyes are mismatched, like the squares on a checkerboard. She has a voice so soft and sweet you have to fight to hear it and it's always worth it. We're on the couch, watching the mayor on public access tv make noose-like pleas for cooperation. He wants us to take up ribbons and knot them around old oak trees and all that, to unify! and to make the global local.

As he says this, this girl—she's a genius—, she lets out a yawn that sounds like a lullaby sung by rippling water, then drops the lids over her wondrous, discordant eyes, presses her left ear against my shoulder, falls asleep and never wakes up.

At the exact moment I feel her heart surrenders itself, I know I'm in love, irrevocably.