As people get older, their lives pass at an ever-dizzying pace. People close themselves off with certainty. People laugh less and less. But when death snarls so close and hungry behind a young child, the child, in all his slow-motion time and openness, might invite the wolf in. There is room for new kinds of friendship and new shapes for hope.
For everyone else, the end is full of fervor and calamity. The parents try to flex reality. They try to stretch life a little longer, like the moon in the morning. But then pressure. But then sitting down to play a piano with keys arranged backwards. Impossible anger. Radiant denial. Resounding disorder. Time will teach the way, but first everything will have to be unlearned. The hammers will hug the strings; the strings will shake free.
Unaccounted
Pochard’s eyes buckle with the sight of scratches in the wall like bent nails. Bent nails covering the floor like broken fingers. What Pochard needs is a dead pulse. What Pochard says sounds the right way.
Pochard waits with a camera hung round his neck, can feel the hard streaks on the side of his face left behind by a slap, the spin and drag of being watched. What he wanted was the shame of alarms sounding, the orgasm of suggestion. Pochard wanted to feel trapped, like the tight water of a still lake. He wanted to feel pulled firm, like the snap of a snakeskin belt. Instead, he felt full of half-light and the patience of waiting for the right time to speak up.
“Tell me later,” his lover would say. “Shallow and easy.” But he knew he had been let go when he came upon the simple scene he did. She had dented their connection. In this small house that crouched on a block of mansions, his life had been sold out from under him. His mind was loose with mothers and thieves, either offering useless advice or clearing him out.
He could think of only his lover’s knobby teeth, shining broad through her smile now. He thought of children and powder kegs. He was hungry, but steered and muttered that feeling away.
He thought of when they’d met in the church hall, of the way her hips had hauled and bossed their way over to him. Of how they mixed their glances and how the Savior careened and sloped in his mind, trying to get him back on track. He had breathed in the scent of her and thought of burning candles and handfuls of pennies. He repeated her unusual name in his head: Grebe, Grebe, Grebe. Like the firm beeps of a heart monitor.
He avoided cracks in the sidewalk on his way home, like he believed again. He was thirty-eight, and he’d almost given up. He thought of her fluid wrists, which had curled like ribbon against scissor blades. His face, he was sure, had crawled with surprise as her eyes imploded into their sockets each time she blinked.
Once they had one another, they left the rest behind. They made a ritual of each other. Grebe proved difficult early on and Pochard reveled in it. She lied and cried, and he had dreams of Lady Macbeth. He tried to tune her out. He left sticks inside her mouth as placeholders, spread roads out across her body, eyed the trails of gathering tattoos like a shimmering gas leak, and when that wasn’t enough, they found new habits.
Pochard watched the thick slide of tar through Grebe, nauseously conscious of her ruin. He smelled the mesquite cling to her. He gave up his back pockets to her to try and help. He watched her roll into rooms like a truck without brakes. He italicized himself to fit into this new lifestyle; he pulled himself sideways. He dropped a mess of postcards across the country, trying to make sure someone always knew where to find him, if he needed looking for.
He scrubbed her stains and nudity and filth. He fell into and crawled out of that space between too many times to keep blaming her for it. He made temples and rubbed sharp corners round.
But still he wanted her fist in his mouth. He wanted to feel the cotton of her skin magnet to him with sweat. He wanted to taste the metal of her blood and feel the gold flecks of her eyes shine all fake on him. He wanted one more dark summer. He wanted to feel one more wall close in. The tiny electric motors in him began telling the truth, but he ignored them.
Now, after the months they’d spent together, after she’d turned out to be the one to swat him away, he wondered at how clocks must have pocketed the time away, at how he’d never learned his lesson, at how the fear boated through the murk of him, rocking and sinful. The windows bundled the light in and made it all clear.
The Crickets Try to Organize Themselves Into Some Raucous Pentameter
A gulch split Odette down the middle and she had the world believing this was the way she liked it. Odette spent entire days bending backward within herself, never letting on that she was uncomfortable, out of her element, ready to leave.
Odette had fallen in love with a waitress who was too good to be true. Odette thought the woman looked familiar and asked if they’d met somewhere. The waitress said, “Nope. I remember everyone I haven’t met.” Odette tried again the next weekend, made sure she was seated at an appropriate table. Nothing.
Odette dreamed of the waitress, dreamed she found a red silk blouse on the ground in the woods, and several yards up, she found the shirtless waitress crouched in a bush. Odette dreamed she handed the waitress her blouse with her head turned and then the waitress walked out of the woods while Odette walked farther in. The dream happened again and again. Odette went to the restaurant the next week. Still nothing.
The next time she had the dream she crossed a shallow brook before she found the red blouse in the woods, and when she found the waitress in the bush, after she’d put her blouse back on, the waitress said, “The water is taught to become wider.” Then the waitress walked back, and when Odette followed her several minutes later, the waitress was almost to the clearing, a full stretch of rapid river between them.
Odette returned to the restaurant and the waitress said, “Listen, I will never remember you, okay? I have been yumped up too many times and I’m not ready for it to happen again.” That killed Odette. She left a bigger tip that night.
Odette returned to the restaurant the next week and the waitress said, “Listen, you act like you know what I’m doing, but you don’t. Trust me.”
Odette said, “All I’ve got is every minute of the day.”
The next week, she went for a drink at the 40 °Club instead. She felt uncomfortable in low-class places, like she was pretending. All these people saying they preferred a dump, but she required a bartender in a collared shirt, a clean glass, a hand-stuffed olive. She couldn’t help but feel the money within her. At the 40 °Club, a banker appreciated her youth, thought she was an escort. “I’d like to use your dress as an alibi, if it’s all right with you.” She accepted the drink he offered her and hoped the mirrors would carry her off into some netherworld while he went on. Before long, his thumb bones cocked up and down her knee and she would be lying if she said she didn’t enjoy it.
The banker asked Odette if he could lure her home with him for a nightcap. Odette said, “You’ll have to delay the sunrise if you want me to go anywhere with you.” She’d drunk enough to arrange herself into poems that he wouldn’t understand. He urged her on, unable to take a circuitous “no” for an answer, but she spouted off another refusaclass="underline" “I’m sure you’ve got a lot of spare change and guts in your piggy bank, but I’m going to my own home alone before the light reveals me.”
“Odette is the world is Odette.”