Mango Bones--or, whatever technical botanical term applies to those in the prenatal form of posthumousness, (hell, I guess just regular mangoes

[excerpts of Excerpts of Madness, Decrepitude, and Shoplifting, Somewhere in the Florida Everglades]

H.M.
+
C.T
I was fourteen when I had my baby. Fourteen.

With Heidi.

Me, and Heidi.

[. . .]

Clara (née Ivy)
By the third time the starchy man-boy with the backwards Dolphins cap and Bermuda shorts--terrible meatball polo-- burnt-noodly tattoo, on his arm, something in calligraphy, Jesus Christ as big around as a candy dish, ($200 crock of shit, 18th birthday gift, probably, from his parents probably, the name of a girl) though at least it wasn't barbed wire. By the third time he molded his prime rib neck around glance at her--just sitting on the bench, just watching the washers--Clara stared right back. She hated gawkers.

Could not stand gawkers. Could not. Could not stomach a rubberneck, no balls on a rubberneck, no apparent business of their own, they had no right to make business of anyone's else's business and no balls to say so, they curdled traffic at five o'clock. They made her feel like she was losing on points.

[. . .]

The Cocaine Letters
. . . feel a not at all inconsiderable degree of wistful pity, on the topic of Radish. This so long as you're wanting all honesty here, little brother-man
mijo-mine <-(See that beauty, right? Education! This Spanish stuff is cake)

(p. 4)
You won't see any boys back homewards-bound, too much like Radish So a basis for comparison is hard for me to pick out for you. Danny might be the closest (Shit-the-Sandbox Danny that is, Danny down the street I mean, NOT Danny Rockford that spineless fuckin bonbon. Shit-the-Sandbox Danny you remember. Danny Rockf Fiat.) Danny might be the closest it gets, But still plenty of wiggle room between him and Radish. Radish a pretty tragic figure.

See here, mi mijo, Radish, such to my surprise, something of an unrealized prodigy. In this case in the field of medical science. Yes indeed!! Quite the natural! In fact as a matter of fac, I have it heard, from a multitude of (very reliable mostly) eye witness accounts, that Radish in fact. . .

On the day of his birth. . .

This fellow. . .

(wait for it)
turn ------>


Page (5)

. . . performed his very own Caesarian section. (HAH HAH HAH)

(The prodigal child! Right! (In medical science, and, dental development alike! Right! Right mein mijo!!!!

(HAH HAH Haha HAH HaH Hah Ha) but really though this is one cold-boned motherfucker.

If you want all honesty here, the reason I brought up Shit-the-Sandbox Danny (page 3) is probably since I almost do, every damn time I talk to the guy. (hah ha) But that's par for the course. Par by far, little brother-man. When four hours in a Boston Whaler is the only thing separating you and Havana (aka La Coca Mecca) (akaka Schnoz Vegas) aka Cuban Disneyworld. you spend more like four thousand puckering up to some categorically spooky cunts.

[. . .]

Clara (née Ivy)
Saturday, lunchtime, nice buttery autumn weather, so how odd then--right--that there were only two people doing laundry? Day like this! This time of day! How odd! Baffling! No one else doing laundry, except for the two of them, the man-boy must have thought. For some suspicious reason. Saturday. Mysterious. Terribly, tragically mysterious. Some real Agatha Christie shit here.

This guy spiritually channeling Fred Durst through the oujia rag of his Fruit of the Loom (clearly visible, Clara noted, all the way down to the half-court marker of his linebacker ass), was no doubt puzzling over where everyone else was. Where else but a laundromat, was time worth spending. At lunchtime. On a Saturday.

Perhaps she, that woman over there, knew something about it; and perhaps if he, Acting Representative-in-Chief of the Florida Chapter of Scooby and the Gang, simply eyeballed the woman's woke-up-late ballerina bun from fifteen feet away, for some seconds at a time, in between hauling the muggy guts of a load of colors from the washer, then possibly the accused could be lanced boil-like into a Best-Selling confession.

Sorry, Shaggy, Clara thought as she stared. No swamp ghosts here. She scrutinized the strawberry jam of razorburn all inside and around his coffee-ground beard--though, maybe it was just acne. No Shyamalan reveal. No shrieky violins. Sorry, Shaggy, "Rosebud" I ain't.

[. . .]

Marcus was smoking pot on his thousand threadcount sheets with his boots still on when he decided to kill the neighbor's cat.

[. . .]

Clara (née Ivy)
. . . "--my brother, Jesus. He got some, fucking. Jesus. Some tribal, something." Contemplatively, looking pained, he scratched the bristles and the pink of his neck. "Seahorse. Some fucking thing like that."

Clara laughed, along with him, at the half-told joke except the guy was not laughing. He was not looking at her. He was smiling, a little, but just watching the washers. He was also, very actively, not rolling back down the sleeves of his terrible meatball polo, and was, instead, continuing to very unsubtly bend and ramrod his elbow to make the horseshoe of his tricep make the noodles of his Hebrew tattoo shimmy and shake, like a "no vacancy" sign. Clara wished she had still had the bench to herself. "How big?"

"Big." He held his hands up like he was playing basketball.

"Oh, wow."

"Yeah."

"Wow. Yeah. Where?"

He still was not looking at her. He seemed bored. Which bothered Clara, not as much as the stares had but it still bothered her, that this guy would think that after peek-a-booing her from the washer for that long that he could pull off acting like he hadn't been, and then thrusting his guns on display as if it were always necessary to roll up the sleeves of his murder-me-marinara wardrobe, lest they pop over his shimmying no vacancy horseshoes and yeah, sorry ladies, there's no helping it, Derbys number 1 and 2 just take off at a gallop on their own like that.

It bothered Clara because she knew, knew photographically well, every sweating shape and shade of an affectation of confidence when she saw one.

And, it bothered her. It bothered her, because this Xbox Live motherfucker was pulling it off.

"Abe, by the way." He held out his hand.

"Like Abraham?"

"Right."

Clara took it, and shook it. "Nice to meet you, Abe. Aubrie."

H.M.
+
C.T
How I found out is Heidi's mom and dad drove up to talk about it. They are nice enough folks. I saw them pulling onto our street just as I got back from school. They had this shitty soup-colored Plymouth Reliant. Old car. Old car. Lots of dogs had been in that car. You could just tell. Not from smell, there wasn't any dog smell. The upholstery just had that feeling to it.

I liked that car though. Heidi's dad would let me help with the oil changes and tire checks sometimes. He showed me how to put in a new radio, too. Nice man. Nice folks. Heidi's parents didn't grudge their girl a harmless little jr. high crush, not even a black one. Cool parents. Nice to me. Nice enough folks. The shittiest stew-colored Plymouth to get its upholstery smeared with roadtrip dog balls and drool but you know? These things happen.

Besides. That day I found out about me and Heidi, the Reliant sounded pretty tremendous. Real lusty. Way better than anytime I'd helped with the tune-up. I watched from the mailbox trying to figure out how Chrysler could fit a hemi into that.

Real tremendous. Real cavalry sounds. Hi-ho Silver kind of stuff. You can get some heroic sounds, out of even a Plymouth Reliant. I guess if the mood so takes you. I guess if you're wanting to mow somebody down enough.

[. . .]

Aubrie (née Ivy)
. . .and she reached in down, to the absolute bottom, and pulled--pulled hard, from her heels, like she was dragging a child from a well--and came up with Abe's black work slacks and white work shirt and Lucky brand jeans and a creamy green blouse that must have been a girlfriend's.

The button on the jeans seared a perfect coin of whiteness and awakeness on the side of her thumb and Abigail dropped it, clutching the slacks and the blouse to her chest tightly, as if they would try to wriggle away, like living things, which they might have, hell, who knew? God, but they were certainly warm enough.

[. . .]

Fisherman
. . .and Benji sat and thought, for not too long, about how not so different at all she was from Laura. Not at all. He decided she was not different, at all, from Laura, not at all, from the past Laura at least. The old Laura. That is, the young Laura.

The Laura on their honeymoon thirty-five years ago--thirty-six, next week--in Bora Bora, Laura who baffled room service at breakfast by ordering ice cubes for her milk. The Laura who, smiling at him, mischievous, I know a secret, secret, do you want to hear?, slunk from her slip like a Queen of the Nile. The Laura who came twice underneath him with her eyes closed.

Laura with blonde ringlets painted on her cheeks and struggling neck, Laura with her face shining slick and turbulent, like she was puzzling out some terrible decision, or like fighting in a thunderstorm, like oceanwater, Laura with her heels like cowboy spurs in his kidneys and her teeth welded to his collarbone so tight so hungry he could almost count the ridges of her molars, her bite so tight they were almost conjoined, her fingernails cultivating cornfields from the skin of his back, Laura with her eyes closed.

The sobbing Laura, leaking Laura, the salt-of-the-earth the apple-of-his-eye Laura, who came twice, underneath him, with her eyes closed, in Bora Bora.

Yes. Yes, he decided. They were not at all different.

And as Benji sat, thinking this, something tender, and warm, pooled upwards in him, something that was not pity. Not really. Not pity, not really--he would have let the girl go, had it been pity--but it was something like it, and with this something, so tender, this something warm, curled in his chest like a napping tabby, Benji leaned gently forwards and pressed a kiss to her forehead. He blanketed her body with his own. He pressed a kiss--and another--against her cheek. Her jaw, this time, and then another where her eyebrow met the bridge of her nose. Benji kissed away where his sweat had fallen and dotted her skin.

He laid heavier on her, then.

He laid heavier and it brought their chests to meeting, like another kind of kiss, a more honest kind. The tufts of his chest hair brushed against her undeveloped breasts with its own heat. Their skin was clammy but clean. Clean-feeling, like after a long bath.

Benji made certain their bodies lined up, just so. He wanted the warm, tender, something in his chest, newborn-babbling in his chest, Benji wanted it to be felt by another. He wanted someone else to feel the napping tabby curled up so soft and living in him.

"Do you feel it?" His whisper ricocheted back into his mouth--messy, moist, sauna swamp moss--against the soft-boiled slope of her cheekbone. Of her earlobe. The downy hairs of her neck; they shivered against his breath. "Can you feel it?"

The sleepy tabby purred, tender and warm, in his chest; he went quiet so she could hear. His chest so warm against hers. His heart, babbling away, in happy, Morse gibberish, so tender, and warm, there in his chest; tender and warm, the flesh of his chest; his chest against hers, tender and warm, very warm, very warm in comparison, hers; in comparison to hers; hers cold, cold, so very cold already; only two and a half days and already decomposing.

[. . .]

H.M.
+
C.T
. . . me and Heidi, holed away under the neighbor's tin duckboat, molding up around each other like clay. My shoulders banged off the sides. I still had a boy's shoulders and hands, and nonexistent rabbit ass, but there mercilessly naked and sweating under the duckboat over Heidi I felt giant. I felt enormous. Giant. There was a big, tin, tupperware top to the alpha and omega and the here and everafter, trying to keep inside everything. Keep it inside. Keep it safe. But it all would flip and bangle away to flounder-smelling sheet metal and float away in the swamp if I did so much as sit back on my heels to breathe. Breathing.

We could hardly breathe, under there.

I didn't care though because I was giant. I wasn't worried about air. I had bear paws in the dirt. I was an ogre. Bear paws like catcher's mitts. The zipper of my jeans was chewing up the my thighs just above my scrawny chicken knees just under my Dolphins boxers but I didn't care. I couldn't hardly breathe but I didn't care. Those aren't things you notice.

"Claude. Claude, wait, stop."

Heidi is one of those people who has a certain sound. And when she makes it, you have to listen. Just a tiny, curving sigh, clear and glassy, but flimsy, too. Like a fly wing. And when she makes that sound she has all of your attention by the throat.

"Claude," it was dark but we could still see each other a little, "You're squooshing my hair."

One of her butterfly barrettes had come loose and was sticking out of the mud and chewing into my palm. I couldn't see it, not something that tiny in the dark. Even when I picked my hand up, trying to see it, I banged my elbow against the side of the boat, but I could feel it, Heidi's butterfly barrette, and it was like I shrank backwards past 100,000 rooms of evolution into something small and wet.

[. . .]

The Cocaine Letters
. . .heart just goes pop! like a gravy balloon. Like a big zit. Two dollars per nostril down here. You believe that. Two fucking bucks? Dos, little broth mijo! 2!!!! Cheaper than a bottle of Yoohoo. A guy down here can pop his heart like a gravy balloon, for cheaper than rope, if that's what he's wanting.

Ivy
The men in the kitchen had on denim workshorts cut off at the knees and white socks and brown boots and sweat and nothing else. And some had sunburns, too, but nothing else. Ivy could smell them all the way from the staircase.

Her mother served peach tea and lemonade and ice water in mismatched glasses that glittered from their own cold, for which the men thanked her, some making grateful shows of sighing and smacking their lips at the taste. One said something that might have been about beer, as a joke, and the others grinned and shoved his shoulder and her mother made a joke back, and they laughed.

The men lined up peacefully along the counter where her mother had laid out one loaf each of white, wheat and rye; jars of Hellman's mayonnaise and French's mustard; chopped onion, and lettuce and sliced tomato; bloated wedges of pickle; leftover barbecue chicken, from the night before, trimmed; a crowded tray of cold cuts rolled into fancy little tubes--like her mother liked to prepare them, all the time, even in Ivy's sack lunches--rolled unseemingly in the shape of snapdragons. On the stove sat packs of Keebler cookies. One of the men picked up the cookies and made to sit at the table, looking very serious--as a joke--while the other men grinned and shoved him to the back of the line. Her mother said something about beer, and then something else about no middle ground, and they laughed.

Her mother's offer of her own seat at the table was refused good-naturedly. So it was she, and four of them, and her husband--just returned from the pharmacy--at the kitchen table talking of things other than the yard.

So you're from Cincinnati.
When you say your wife was due?
This one--right here, see it?--fell off a motorcycle. The one on my leg was a sick dog in the neighborhood.

The rest of the men simply stood along the counters, mostly quiet. Strings showed in their necks and jaws as they chewed. They hunched as they chewed and kept their plates close to their mouths, catching crumbs. They were like the dogs at Uncle Reggie's, not in a mean way, not bad--only because Ivy could not tell them apart.

She could smell them all the way from the staircase.

The smell of them--of the sweat of their skin, and the burn of their skin (the burn in their skin, in their muscles; the smell of the work, their work, of the effort of them)--would swarm back to her. Years later, freshman year, university. Her roommate would peel away the silver film on the mouth of a can of Folgers for an all-nighter of biology and the smell of it, the smell, would come at her like a cudgel. The smell would slide all over her, snug, and oiled, all over, would slither on like a raincoat. The men in the kitchen had the smell of uncooked coffee and snug, oiled metal.

H.M.
+
C.T
. . .I didn't like the dolls. I didn't like the idea, and I didn't like Heidi climbing up so high. But I still helped hang them up. I helped. I had a part, too. So I helped.

Even if I only had to because her uncle told her bullshit ghost stories. Supterstition. A person buried in a swamp turning to an alligator, even babies, bullshit story, and telling her that dolls would make sure a person remembered they were a person and what people looked like but you know? These things happen.

Aubrie (née Ivy)
. . .she reached behind herself, watching herself, in the laundromat's bathroom mirror, watching and feeling the white work shirt's material pulled taut against her ribs, like a loom, a bare half inch of air between the cotton and the valley of her spine. She was tight inside it, tight enough to be inside it, reaching behind her to feel it all, all, reaching back so far around her like a straightjacket.

"Warm." She sighed, and it sounded both relieved and bewildered. "God. God, they're so warm."

I would never

have recovered; never; would never have Renaissanced from the bottlenecked burn ward in Belgium
-- l'Hopital Saint Dunstan -- have been resuscitated from the ten-patient room with the oil-painting view of the bearskin rugs of the neighboring fields of wheat; fruity booms of whooping cough. From nurses' sterling voices in starling clockwork chorus: "--quartered apples, steamed asparagus, braised mutton for lunch," from war widows, their steady saline bleating from the waiting room -- too goddamn many clocks -- thousand thread-count sheets with thorny warning smells of live, but panicked meat; the mineral bouquet of peroxide, cotton swabs, cotton masks, iodine -- flamboyant trickles, and rich whorls, of brassy caramel-sauce urine on vanilla-bean tile: leaked steamy and fevered from pulpy bladders boiled thin from inflammation, from infection, from incisions, boiled away, cooked down into infertile bloodless mash not unlike the Eucharist after three seconds in saliva.

I would never have recovered, had the veteran done so.

The nurses wheeled him in post-op. Unconscious, and prone, but tomcattish and box-bodied. Soldier's shoulders have a means of visibility even under pounds of blankets. He was not a small man, but still heavied and vulnerable from anesthesia, curled babyish, a petulant cheek pillow-squashed under a cashew beard. (only temporarily, two weeks at the most, he was told when he awoke -- only until the soldier ward in Brussels could catch its breath.) His injuries were enviable. His legs, only, mostly: calves and hams, clipped Achilles, portions of oxish ass and back. Four meters north of a kettlecorn landmine. One of six of formerly twelve. Clapping hands and thunderbolts distressed him.

He was singular, in the ward, in having neither headdress, nor helmet, nor halter, nor kerchief, nor cowl nor bridle nor bonnet nor boa nor ballgag of plaster and gauze and medicinal lard about his jaw nor neck nor eyes. His legs, mostly. And those would smooth up pinkly soon. Each and all of us, there, bedridden -- yes, and the veteran, too -- but only the veteran to talk with the veteran. The rest of us inert. Insensate, in other places; or invalid: legless, cauterized, etherized, or unwilling, only the veteran for the veteran. He was too whole to be there.

He was mostly healthy and his appetite reflected that: breakfasts of cold cuts, porridge, butter and black currant jam, toasted rye, a pitcher of cream he would sip from directly and unmanneredly. Then followed two cigarettes, self-rolled, with ballroom choreography, from assertively Turkish tobacco kept in a braided buckskin pouch on his bedside table. Always, for the nurses -- while they cracked the window for him to chute his smoke, teasing This is the burn ward, you know, removing so tenderly the tacky bandages like peeling a peach, unperturbed by the smell, commending his hardiness when he winced, noting and surveying the cookedness of his legs -- for them the veteran would give intensive reports of the prior night's dreams. Never had he had them before, never, but since his first night in the ward he claimed a gauntlet of bittersome nightmares: Enemy airstrikes, massacred friends, German troops that swallowed bullets and shells out of air, like lobbed grapes; a whole forest of mustard gas around and inside his home, his very own home, in Eysines. He told his stories with his hands. He spoke, too, of course, but the story was mostly in his hands: moving florid, eager, clear as calligraphy, like mimes and magicians try, like salesmen would kill to -- cutting deft through bare air, across eunuch proximity -- collaring tight sailor's knots to any hold in his listeners; pulling them in. A true soldier. Rare and pitied is the soldier unsublime at telling stories.

The truthful one, perhaps, even rarer; and so while the veteran's nightmares were smoothed by cashmere sympathies of any seasoned bedside manner, the nurses could weigh them only as heavily as children's.

There were visitors for him, at first. Often. Never family or wives, no, always much more splendid things: postures curt, polished, like phoenix statues; august, certain, decisive things; courtly Anglo armor, badge-mosaicked Bishops and Rooks, checkerboard chests, uniforms trim and iced and piped like display pastries. How was he healing? How long would it take? Was the pain very bad? (pocketchange compliments on his service, here, typically; his healthy complexion, at the least; collection plate wishes for his swift return.) Dupuis and Cantes were already up, already high-chinned on a train back to Bruges -- they had never seemed more heartful -- and a horse doctor from Münster had salvaged all of Chevalier's arm, all, even his fingers, and thumb. Although Roux was now deaf. Why, he hadn't already finished his breakfast, had he? But he had hardly touched his ham! (the veteran, himself, would ask of any vacant beds in Brussels.)

Something about hospitals: there are no calendars. No calendars. Not in view of patients, anyway. None. Mondays, Mays, and the 21sts of June are all artifacts, stiff, yellowed, chalky pottery in the dirt. Glass-cased museum things -- mythical things -- thunderbirds, minotaurs, fairy mounds, maybe. As dusty and distant as your favorite bedtime story. You can expect to know the date, so long as you expect it whispered in your ear by Oberon. Unless seated in the waiting room, or the receptionist's desk, or otherwise the shallower wards kept for patients of imminently anticipated dismissal, you will see no calendars.

Clocks? Yes. Yes, oh my, oh plenty of clocks. Clocks on walls and bedside tables, wrists of nurses. Clocks over each and every exit and entry. If Pagans make their luck by nailing horseshoes over doorways, in hospitals they nail clocks. If your blacksmith neighbors tacks up Christmas wreaths, then your doctor neighbor will tack up a clock. If the Hebrews slathered theirs with lamb's blood then their shaman must have tried with a sundial. I have a theory: Big Ben, and Father Time -- during sabbaticals, post-lunch siestas, or simply days when business may run slow -- intermittently seek, find, and fuck one another in hospital broom closets and bathrooms the world over, by avenue of precisely juxtaposing their pulpy distended pendulums at just-such an angle, one that allowed for amorous tantrummings at a perfectly rhythmic clattering counterpoint until either of the two fruitfully, inexplicably -- miraculously! -- strikes estrus. A Virgin Marty, if you would.

Hospital clocks -- should they be, in fact, be some breed of otherworldly tryst-affirming lovechildren -- would then at least have a semblance of reasoning for their steady and unceasing and incessant descent from the five-meter plaster heavens. Like fucking manna.

(something about clocks: they teach you of, and keep you on your schedules: pilltime, bathtime, bedtime, breakfast.)

(something about calendars: they tell how long you have had these schedules.)

Without a calendar I could never know precisely when, but at some point, cold cuts quietly vanished from the veteran's breakfast. The rye toast, next. The butter after that. The black currant jam. The cigarettes -- singularly -- were doubled.

Simply residual stress, tightens the stomach, he explained, when the nurses expressed concern, Perfectly normal. It meant he was healing well, he said. It had happened before, in Warsaw: enemy sniper had picked and nicked at his ribs, like Easter ham, he told them. (the jacket he had worn then was kept close, by his bed; he held it up for their inspection like a schoolboy with a rainbow trout: a bomber's jacket -- cotton -- bullet-peppered thickly at the ribs, just as he had said; blood-salted. gunmetal, in color.) He told them he had healed quite well then. No trouble.

Of much greater concern, the veteran insisted, were the nightmares: His father's skull, crumbling like a single peppercorn beneath the hoof of a six-legged Thoroughbred; his brother new and dewy carrion in the neighbors' onion patch; his wife: oh so sweet-skinned and vanilla-young and veiled at the altar, Zinfadel blush, doelike demure, Noël lips even in the midriff of spring -- then her, turning to him, terrible smile, propositioning his mouth with schoolgirl's plaits of shark teeth.

Stress, said the veteran. He spilled Turkish crumbs on his chest as he rolled his fifth cigarette.

If the ward in Brussels had wanted to catch its breath, then it seemed to have choked to death: there was no more talk of it. But at some point the topic had become a foreign one regardless. Irrelevant, too abstract; intangible. Immaterial to the things of much deeper distraction to the veteran: Packs of black dogs with smoking fur and human hands that left no tracks in mud or snow, horizon to horizon of enemy soldiers with bald pudding faces, rubbing elbow to elbow with allied soldiers with bald pudding faces, bloody coffee, crucifixion, monsoons of sulphur, doors that opened only into ogres' mouths, dirty and docile and watchful children that said nothing as they were sardined crackingly into furnaces and boilerrooms like far too much laundry, boa constrictors, army ants, neckties that turned to eels, brass buttons that turned to fat jungle spiders, floods of pitch, red-eyed oxen, snow composed of thistle and alkaline, rifles melting mudlike in his arms into purple, screaming, humid newborns, his own funeral procession with six pallbearing Satans.

When he began to refuse even porridge, the nurses spoonfed him.

What might they know of hags, he asked, witches? Banshees? Sleep things? Night things? Le croque-mitaine? He said often, when he jerked awake, he could not talk or move, and his eyes opened only a little -- just a little, just enough to see her next to him, reaching scabby and hideous -- though he could feel the evil force of her pushing down on his chest. Paralyzing him, he said. Like an elephant's foot.

The nurses told him gently no, no, that was simply one of his medicines; it kept him still at night, so that his legs could heal faster.

At this the veteran whipped his head backwards and away, mooing Nooooooo, didn't they understand? Did they not hear these stories, here in Belgium? That was what hags and banshees did: they waited until you were asleep, and then came, and magicked you to the feeble deadweight of the day of your birth; helpless.

Then, said the veteran, his storyteller's hands in flowery full-mast, porridge dribbling his beard, then, they pull your mouth open, wide open, with their scabby devil's hands. He yanked mulish at his beard, like it wasn't playing fair. And that is when they make you eat the dreams. The nightmares. Piece, by. Piece.

He fed himself terrible, invisible things, morsels of monster. He watched their faces forreactions with corrosive urgency.

Yes, the nurses said, yes, of course, they knew quite well. One pinched a beak out of a napkin and plucked the porridge from his beard.

He asked to be flipped over, at bedtime. Flipped fully, on his stomach. He explained that the banshee could not sit on his chest, then; perhaps that way he could breathe and then move, he explained. The nurses gave no response other than to oblige, shrugging to each other faintly; if nothing else, changing bandages at breakfast would be simpler.

Something about bandages: they crossbreed with the ones our own bodies make. And so they stick together, unnatural -- inbred -- and they hate us for it, they wish to punish us; this is why when we pull one bandage from another, they bite and pluck and sting (though, in fairness, this part, with the biting -- your body's hatred of you -- most every, all of us, most each of us all know). Removal, then, takes a very tender and wary technique -- wary, moreso than a safecracker, moreso like some shape or shade of aimless, desperate wood-thing, lost and needing, rolling their dice on an iced lake; patience; precision; like husking hand grenades, maybe; lip pinched in teeth to keep quiet against sour vinegar pricks of stirred-up scab -- wary technique that I, myself, had practiced and pigeonholed, invested in, and heavily, terribly heavily -- perhaps something like an elephant's foot.

Peeling peaches is no trial.

Something about my injury: It was my legs, mostly. Everything else, too, of course, including speech, and an unsound, unsteady head -- the last two, in which they gave wafer-thin chances of possible recovery. But my legs mostly. The both of them, on my arrival: chewed, baked red, couch leathery, cracked and black and dragonish, like Christmas roasts: Long-Term Patient: Near-guaranteed permanence of mutism. Near-guaranteed instability. Near-guaranteed invalidity. Invalidity. Incapacitation.

Two meters of air between two beds is a fantastic dream -- a hellish dream, when you are an invalid.

"Bed to bed" would not fit at all -- something more like Sun to Moon. Fantastic. Hellish. And more importantly: impossible. Impossible, but, for me -- me? -- we? we -- for us, the two of us; us; it was only time. Time, we needed; mostly. Us two: me, and the veteran; him. The veteran heavied and vulnerable with sleep, unconscious, prone, corkboard butterfly helpless, curled babyish and candlelight fragile with little shriveled dead skins of dried porridge still stuck in his uncropped purgatory beard -- feeble thing -- foul, healthy thing -- and his legs, mostly, his enviable injuries, smoothing pinkly like a peach, him and his unnatural, unfair, inhuman wholeness, unbelonging in there, the bastard -- the child -- the veteran; him.

It was him, then. It was the veteran all along. Not time; not "us;" most certainly not me: Moon, drunk by sun: perhaps like a pitcher of cream.

The veteran pulled me to him -- reached out florid, picturebook hands, magician's hands, hangman's hands, tying sailor's knots with urgent, corrosive tightness -- and he pulled me to him.

He did. All him.

Only half unwrapped, my arm, only half -- took over twenty minutes, at the absolute quickest, on all the goddamned clocks -- and with that, that uselessness, that hand, how could I have pulled him to me? Pulled him away? Pulled anything, much less pulled away? Impossible. Not with that thing. Sour pricks of open scabs, stubborn puffs of gauze, swollen skin red and wrathful like a mother hen. New skin, somewhere underneath, unready pink.

That hand could not have pulled. The veteran's, only: the veteran's, who saved me. The veteran the candlelight. The veteran who rescued me, from the burn ward in Belgium, the veteran the sun; my martyr. The veteran I stroked tenderly, so gently, from scalp to nape to mouth with my banshee's hand.

"Your mother's eyes," (his ear looked so soft and fine, so fetal, inches from my teeth, tearable, a sliver of pear) "self-stitched shut, like a scarecrow, with the strings of her violin. Her skin is split and cracked like dead, thirsty dirt, the crows have already found her, she is meaty-yellow with blisters; cysts. Your children are three-eyed wolves."

He was only partly awake, enough so to see the hag's hand. Even if his eyes were closed, though, he could feel it; could feel its texture, its intent. His whimpers were hot against my fingers as I tapped his lips to feed him.

"They are down, at the foot of your bed. You cannot move. They swallow you whole."

Until my release--upon proof of my mobility, and soundness, and speech--(until the veteran's transfer to the battle-trauma ward; in Brussels)--I made these visits to him. Nightly. It became easier, with time.

things I stole:

-one (1) purple stuffed dolphin, from a neighborhood girl, from her bedroom during a birthday sleepover

- one (1) copy of The Berenstain Bears: In the Dark, from Ms. Emerson's second grade homeroom

- a pencil sharpener from the school bookstore, made of buttery soft plastic, shaped like a dog with a human smile

- the library's biketire roll of Scotch tape [I was trying to fix the pencil sharpener.]

- packs of spearmint gum from my mother's brakeless Mercury Tracer

- a half-empty tin of Altoid mints from my mother's brakeless Mercury Tracer

- a pouch of fine-cut Grizzly chewing tobacco from my mother's brakeless Mercury Tracer

- fake pearl earrings, from my mother

- Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones, from the school library

- a box of apple juice from an unwatched crate in the cafeteria

- $2.45 in quarters and dimes scattered on my father's nightstand, next to his silver reading glasses, right by his hypothermia-blue Bic lighter, close to his splayed-down copy of something or other by Mario Puzo, his caved-in pack of Marlboro Lights

- My father's hypothermia-blue Bic lighter

- three (3) Lisa Frank pencils from the girl who sat in front of me, who would cry during thunderstorms

- five (5) of her erasers, mango-colored hearts, blimp lips, a butterfly. [They were those cheap chalky rocky ones that would leave big skidmarks all over your paper. So you'd try to erase those, too, but of course that was always a stupid plan, I tore one of my spelling tests in half.]

- the $10 bill Mrs. Dalesandro left on her desk

- at least two (2) dozen (12) No. 2 pencils, from the boy who sat on my left, whose father was a cop, who said his father had shot fifty men as dead as doorknobs, who threatened that he would get his father to come and shoot you, too, right between the eyes, if you didn't hand over the kickball, or give him a turn with the Bop-It, stop being so mean to him in Battleship. [Mrs. Dalesandro thought he was the one who stole the ten bucks, I still don't know why. He was suspended for a week. At some point in the middle of that I was called to the whiteboard, me and two other kids, we were gutting the class's math curve, they called us up to the whiteboard to fill in less-than greater-than problems. And at some point in the middle between me unsnapping the marker with its fruity sulphur smell and Mrs. Dalesandro telling me "Well, that was a very good try!", at some point between these things I remember coming to the uncomforting conclusion that I guess it must have been God. God did it, for justice, is what happened.]

- at least two [too] hundred [fuckin' many] sheets of loose-leaf paper from the boy who sat on my left, whose father scared me, who I hated because his father scared me, the boy I frequently and happily crucified at length for stuttering over his 'p's and 'k's and 'm's, the boy I'd bait on the playground with the kickball or Bop-It, who would threaten and follow, exhausted, asthmatic, whose inhaler was a regular hostage of mine and others, who would finally unwrap his throat into some animal sound between a sob and a bark and would lunge, who was slow, whose pinkies and thumbs I'd snatch up stupid and cruel and steer and torque and twist like I was cranking a jack-in-the-box.

- a Durex condom from my uncle's wallet

- Twix, Reese's Pieces, Bubble Yum, orange Tic-Tacs from gas stations; and books of matches, crude postcards, lighter fluid, M&M's, air-fresheners shaped like pine trees and Hawaiian leis that all had the identical scent of boiled sugar and ozone, Mello Yello, Fun Dip, a German shepherd bobblehead, a pair of sunglasses that bulged outwards oily and fat like horsefly eyes that I broke on the basketball court within an hour of taking, highlighters, a Harley Davidson bandana, keychains with tiny stuffed animals, notecards, batteries, mints, pens, gum, caffeine pills and powders packaged lush and thickly bright ike foreign explosives. [One of the clerks was very visibly a burn victim. She would always smile and wave when I came in, and when I left.]

- a plastic red jug of gasoline, about half-full, and a bottle of lawnmower oil, from a stranger's driveway

- a crowbar from a nearby construction site

- a cheap switchblade, 8'' long, with initials "G.P." in permanent marker, from a nearby construction site

- most of a hummingbird, from a neighborhood cat, that was incapable of dying for eighty minutes but could scream quite well for seventy

- at least twenty 2x4s from a nearby construction site

- a box of baking soda and bottle of air freshener from a grocery store, to remove the smoke smell from clothing

- packs of spearmint gum from my mother's Jeep Grand Cherokee

- a .38 caliber bullet from my mother's desk

- a .38 caliber from my mother's closet [for twenty minutes.]

- a Camel cigarette, from my stepfather. [When they had songwriter friends over, for moonshine and Stouffer's lasagna, I ducked out to the backyard and tucked down by a healthy little murmur of honeysuckle. I cupped my hand protectively over the lighter and cracked it, biting down uncertainly on the filter in an attempt to hold it steady, with terrible clumsiness but hey, it was lit, and with that accomplished I took a moment to collect myself. I briefly wondered if the little firefly glow was visible from anywhere. I shrugged the anxiety aside, though, and then shrugged quite literally: I let my neck roll very slowly to the side and drank my chin upwards, and backwards - artful - in my sincerest rendition of a Soviet femme fatale; I set myself. I steadied. Then I pulled, hard and deep, dragging on the fragile back of the Camel with the granite grimace of the dignified damned, pulling hard with organic, untempered, magnificent cowboy bravado, pulling deep, before exuberantly puking every fucking pint of my fucking guts up from their putrid fucking roots, all over the ground and grass and healthy fucking murmur of fucking honeysuckle. I opened up like a septic Mount Vesuvius. I have no idea where it all came from. There was a very generous pile of turkey sandwich and fruit punch Gatorade already waiting for my knees when I finally doubled over, a little less femme fatale and bit more epileptic leapfrog, for all the world and neighborhood to hear bawling and squirming in my own stomach acid salad like a basset hound that had nosed into the drain cleaner. My family, as far as I know, still thinks this was food poisoning.]

- inestimable CDs I didn't want, and DVDs I didn't watch, from electronic stores

- an adjustable hinged knee brace from Academy Sports

- a violin

- one (1) Polaroid picture of my mother [a teen, tired, crossing mudflats alone. She's wearing overalls twice her size and age that are caked and flaking brown, she's tucked the bottoms into her already-overrun boots with dim and pilgrim optimism. Her hair is a different color than I know it to be. It's lighter, much lighter, more brown, not quite my brown but almost, noosed up loose on the back of her neck, wonderfully wind-chewed. She is mid-stride and her hand is half-mast against the sun as she squints into the camera. At first glance, when I was younger, this was where the photo ended for me - girl in boots, freckled and acned, in the middle of chores, maybe, too much sun and no smile in sight because of it. I see her a little better now. At first glance I overlooked the defensive dip of her chin, the bite-stripped fingernails, the tiny swells of tendon in the ribs of her jaw that meant her teeth were vaulted shut. I overlooked her hand raised - not just to block the sun - but also bunching up and inwards, coiling, withdrawing, fermenting very gradually into the blueprints of a fist. She is staring into the camera from only ten yards but at least fourteen years away], one that I stole from her mother.

See also:

Let's be matadors next time. Let's press proud and out with our ashtray hips like castle battlements, let's dress up every day like Chinese fireworks, let's have our thighs and hips unzipped by near misses. We could have dirt in our eyes all the time. The bull would come at us heavy dark and dumb, like cough syrup, exactly precisely just the way we want him to. Just close enough. See by the time he gets to us his head is stuck down low by his feet like he's dropped pocket change, by then his neck muscles are too tired and too wet to be too useful. The picadors take care of that. If he comes at us a wrong way that we don't like all we got to do is snatch at the lollipop banderillos stuck sticky in his neck and untied sides, we'll jerk backwards from our hips and elbows like we're starting a lawnmower, we'll... (no? Matadors can't do that? Well why, who says?... oh then.)

Or monks, too-- we could be monks, if you want. We could pull and preen at blackbird robes, and panhandle on Easter and Christmas and bless babies and shave our heads. We'd sleep but for only five hours a night-- we'd light skinny wax candles between our toes to use as alarm clocks. (we could meditate carefully each and every morning on the glassblower blisters, we'd bust them and scrub them with cedar chips and horsehair to make them worse. we'd show off the damage to the world like dueling scars.) We could move to Munich. Or Tibet, or Damascus, Mississippi for all I care, we would never drink again, we'd sleep with our hands above the covers each and every night for five hours with a candle burning, no spider ever need fear since we'd never smash them we'd always pick them up in paper towels before releasing them tenderly out in the wild, we'd pick them up so soft and easy like they were newborn nitroglycerin, we--

... no? Oh then.

How about marksmen? We could be marksmen. From what I've heard the real secret with rifles is you got to squeeze the trigger, squeeze it, don't pull. I heard that from a marksman I'm pretty sure. Or maybe it was you? Oh then well instead you can choose. Architects? Acrobats? Pharmacists? Palm-readers? Let's you and me be the same things next time.

We'd be less dangerous that way, that way we could see each other an eye for an eye. Remember you the Punjabi peasant raising sesame and guava and spotted goats, remember how things didn't work so well for us then. If I were a peasant too, maybe it would have worked. I would think peasants get on much better with peasants than with cobras.

And even if sometimes it was okay, even with you the cottonswab tabby half-dead with comfortable living and me, I was a bale of sunlight that time, even then it was smooth sailing but what did we get out of it? It was alright but what else? It was us but it was nothing. It was smooth sailing, but too comfortable, and we didn't get a thing and even worse we didn't even know it. (we were better off, I think, with me the actual sailor, and you the beartrap coral.)

Let's you and me be the same things next time, I don't care what, you can choose. Just make us the same. Let's be unzipped at the hips or barefoot or bedridden, or harelips or lepers or roadkill so long as we both got it bad exactly precisely the same way. We'd be safer that way. Then we'd know. And once we know then we can turn different from each other, but better this time, better because we could go simpler, much simpler, so simple-- then let's try you a mouth and me an ear.

Who the hell is Ezra Pound?

April is the time I get uprooted the most, I become clipped and restless, I try on bad habits like I'm buying new shoes. It's lively but anxious. Mostly it's the watery sandy-itchiness that gets back in the tic-tac-toed scar tissue of my baaaaaad knee (think: handlebar moustache! waggly eyebrows! eggshell waifs gagged and bound to traintracks!) I guess because it's thawing out?; I guess it likes winter better than I do. In winter it's pretty polite, it only gets creaky and whiny the day before snow.

(though in my head, when I'm thinking about it I mean, sitting in class or terrible-colored bathrooms or at redlights, I can't help pushing a pencil eraser/fingertip/coffee cup down through the denim into the bubbly numb gap in the cartilage, where the surgeon worked, [two of them actually], in my head I see it looking not much at all like a thing that would creak but instead very squirmy, pocket-linty, like gristle trimmings on a salaryman's dinner plate.) Up til April though it's pretty well-behaved.

This year in the middle of researching Civil War medicine was when it hit room temperature. I tried folding and propping it at any possible agreeable angle in the library and ended up kicking the shit out of some poor guy's ankles. ("Oh-- fuck, sorry man.") I'll be honest: the impact was refreshing. The research paper had come aground way sooner than I'd have liked and there's no doubt it showed in my shoulders and eyebrows. It did warm things, hate to say, for the cavewoman in me, taking it out on a stranger like that. That must have showed too since he stuffed his bag a couple minutes later and took off for another spot on the other side of the bookshelves.

(I'll be honest: I liked that it got me the table for myself.)

There was an unforeseen abundance of roughly six hundred goddamn pages dedicated to amputation alone, since apparently there were (are?) different (kinds?)(techniques?)(styles?) (fuck.) One very informatively called the flap method was preferred by the Union army because it involved less blood loss, required less bandages, and could apparently be performed in as little as two minutes. A kind of sleeve was tailored from the skin several inches below the necessary point of removal, then split twice down the sides; one of the assistants would hold these out of the way while another one bullied the main artery shut and while the surgeon surgeoned. Then the sleeve would be folded over very neatly, quite like the chromosomes had lined up thirty years previous with that exact intent in mind, buttoning up the drooling pocket where two minutes earlier had been potential for musket-loading and letter-writing and apple-peeling, and poker-playing and lover-loving and grudging masturbation, but through the alchemy of ether and salmon-shaped bonesaws could become a pink nub and delirious meat. The sleeve would be folded up very neatly, like a fortune cookie.

"... but when performed poorly, the cleft bone in these amputations would continue to grow, and in time begin to protrude through the stump."

Up til this point I'd been enjoying pretzel sticks.

For all my talk of taking instinct over intellect*, this picture of a very individual and physical mutiny is pretty horrifying. I can't find any particular roots for the fear though. Invasions of the Bodysnatchers was not one of the movies I bandited out of bed to eavesdrop on from the hallway, (I still haven't seen it actually, or even got much a handle on the plot, beyond the involvement of bodies and their otherworldly abduction by means of perhaps snatching), I've never had a seizure or sleepwalked or anything like that. The closest it gets would probably be the scene in Alice in Wonderland I once had a nightmare about, the one where she found that her shoulders were nowhere to be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was an immense length of neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a sea of green leaves that lay far below her.

'What CAN all that green stuff be?' said Alice. 'And where HAVE my shoulders got to? And oh, my poor hands, how is it I can't see you?' She was moving them about as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow, except a little shaking among the distant green leaves. For all she knows she could be spoonfeeding heroin to the white kitten.

When I was younger I was much better seduced by the Hatter and Cheshire Cat (who wasn't?), but I've come to find Alice more and more interesting, I think because I like her the least. I think because Alice is an invader. She talks very politely with the Pigeon and Mock Turtle, but she HAS tasted eggs, certainly,' said Alice, who was a very truthful child; 'but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.'

'I don't believe it,' said the Pigeon; 'but if they do, why then they're a kind of serpent, that's all I can say.' She's invaded the nest, and she's talking with her food; Alice is a cannibal and doesn't even notice. And that something as animal and primitively simple as breakfast could be usurped around into something destructive even by accident gets at me as not even a notch beneath horrifying. ("Oh-- fuck, sorry man.")

([These are the things that get into my head in April.])

I'd like to think April's cruel with good intentions-- that it thaws the cavewoman out just so I've got time to recivilize her by the end of July. I'd like to think there's some other better method though; I'd like to find, just above her head, some necessary point of removal; I'd like to eschew any offer of ether and hold up my hand in request to whoever may be standing there watching and say 'bonesaw'

[*see: "sour grapes"]

You murdered me on horseback

of that I am certain, though if while I was the courier soldier or the barebacked jailbreaker or the drunkard jockey with the colic heart there is no telling. The horses could, if they could.

You might have watched the fog downhill as carefully as a deafling for the gold flutter of buttons on a blue coat. You may have already known, but still overlooked, that you would almost certainly hear the horse first. You may have hidden in a treeline of pine or breathy cypress. You cut camp with a bowie knife. You had no pot for boiling snow; you had left your wool blanket for the fevering Georgian boy with six sisters; you damned yourself bitterly for both of these things. You shined the newborn leather of your suckling boots whenever movement was necessary. You crunched seeds of raw coffee, one at a time, with such desperate care and veneration that in your mouth they became an almost butter. You left the meal of them in the lining of your cheeks to ring them with feeling. Your fire was ailing and smokeless but warm enough for baking wild eggs in the ashes; this saved you; your hunger would have smothered your need for quiet to instead snipe overhead at fat squirrels or potshot careless foxes; you would never have found blackbird and jackdaw nests if your boyhood was not spent burgling orchards. I came to you at last, the third morning, with some message of some importance; your parchment skin and knobby meating of your spine had become witchdoctor's toys. You had polished holes into your boots. Your arm and the butt of your Whitworth struck no familiar harmonies; the wood of the rifle made no place for the cords of your shoulder; both croaked and rebelled from the cold.

I came to you with the senile blue frown of my cap pulled low to my nose and fogging from the mouth, the thoroughbred gutting uphill over branches and fogging from the mouth. You watched through your brass scope and it welded a ring of snow around your eye. Your knuckle curled around the tongue of the Whitworth while you breathed in the maybe pine or cypress; you curled low and light your quiet body like the pages of a burnt bible; your thumb snapped back the hammer and you saw the horse's ears twist around like lips with the sudden taste of medicine; you braced your aching arm for the rifle's coming kick; you squeezed and shut your eyes; you opened them and watched me claw and heave backwards, you watched me slither into snow, you saw the gold buttons flutter and scatter and spark like a smashed oil lantern. The horse gutted uphill, fogging from the mouth, and carried past you, without us.

tribe

The first thing we did we made sure Hammy couldn't make it there, you can't give much anything to Hammy, he's one of those whimpery simpery leaky types who the doc must have forgot to cut his cord. Munga gave him bad directions, though - took care of that.

I got off with almost a whole pack of Lucky Strikes from the apartment nextdoor. When he came over to fuck the babysitter Mr. Rizzo left his door unlocked, so I just ducked right in and took them up off his coffeetable, it was half under a stack of poem books but it only took me a couple minutes to romance it out. But when I did I knocked over the Chinese takeout box sitting there as an ashtray, it looked like at least, it spilled Black and Mild wrappers and sweet and sour sauce all over but the place still looked mostly the same so I'm not worried. We used Kittychop's lighter and smoked them in the clubhouse.

I told how there was a couple switchblades out on the coffeetable too, a very shivery-good Mexican picklock long as my hand, and maybe a trapdoor stiletto I thought that it was, and Irv said I should have taken one of those too. Kittychop said forget that, I should have taken the both, so the one couldn't turn around at me later to try and get the first one back. Munga said fuck that, weren't good smokes good enough? and that the both of them, Irv and Kittychop, needed to stop thinking like spiccing sandmonkey kleptos before they got the turn-out-your-pockets out there somewhere. They were probably wondering what klepto meant so they didn't say anything. Munga the brains of us, he knows things like that. When we ask too much about what he means with some of what he says he professors up some other thing to say we don't know, like mongoloid philistine zipperheads or nigger-noggin bourgeoisie. Sure wish I'd taken that Mexican picklock.

Tut doesn't talk much since his head doesn't line up very right. When he was younger he tried clearing out for his aunt's place in the suburbs and got as far as his fire escape when he fell and busted his jaw in three spots, it healed up all wrong. Next to Munga he's probably the smartest of us. Once what he did was steal a bunch of Colt 45 from the grocery store, what he did was take some clear packing tape and one of those cardboard 12-pack boxes of Coca-Cola, and two six packs of Colt 45, then Tut tore open the box of Coke and took out all the cans and tore off the plastic on the 45s and piled the cans in there and taped it all up. Irv and me were there with him. We almost got caught. Tut went up to go buy the Coke box, since if he slunk around too long he'd get suspicious. So me and Irv slid in behind him nice and tidy to hide up the cans. We had just started hiding them behind the Wheaties boxes and granola when someone came up around the aisle, but me and Irv still had armsful of the stuff. So Irv shoved me over with his free hand at the end of the aisle, right there were some big Hefty garbage bins or something like that to hide up behind. Irv shoved a hand over my mouth and whispered nice and icy if I give us away he will snap my fucking neck like a candycane. Don't think for a second I take that sort of thing. I shoved his hand off and whispered fuck you, zipperhead, before I run your twiggy dick through a bandsaw. Irv took one of the cans and came down like he was playing Whack-a-Mole with it right in my eye and holy shit did that hurt. I dropped all my Coke and grabbed for his ears, I ended up only getting his shirt and the side of his hair but I still managed to headbutt the shape out of his nose. And then believe me we were into it.

The guy at the end of the aisle comes up, he's the manager it turns out, and sees me and Irv going de la Hoya all over each other. We stop, and we all look at each other. He stood there looking at the cans of Coke rolling on the floor and us two looking up at him and he said "What the hell are you kids doing?" and had us put the cans back in the soda aisle. Then he told us to go home. We met up with Tut two corners down and drank some of the 45s on the way to the clubhouse.

Tut's been doing research and figured out how to do tattoos himself, he's got his dad's calligraphy pen grinded up to a point and India ink. Kittychop said he will trade a pair of panties he stole from some blonde fox's laundry for a picture of the Playboy bunny on his arm. Tut snorts because we all know Kittychop just stole them from his sister but Tut draws it for him anyway. Irv got some Popov vodka from somewhere and we all have some to keep the sting down. And to disinfect, Munga says, while Tut is drawing him up a big roaring lion on his back. I don't know if maybe Munga was moving around too much or if maybe Tut just wasn't as good with a pen as his dad, or what, but it didn't look like any lion I've ever seen.