Ransom Notes from God

We were late in getting back to Marcel's and that was my fault and did that make you angry? No don't answer. You and me we both know I kept you waiting. We blew on our mugs of microwaved tea and whittled bananas into our cornflakes and the weatherman said True blue skies all day, alllllll day long, friends and neighbors, with just a smidge of fog in the evening, and a nice fresh breeze coming in from the west while thrusting his hips like a drunkard god as if it was he himself magicianing the wind down on us all from the west, friends and neighbors, all day, allllll day long, him and his dandelion haircut. But you shook your head and kept your eyes in your bowl and said you knew better than that, because you smelled all the clouds swelling up like chef's blisters and the thunder clearing its throat from not too far away and I know, I know, I should have listened. That was dumb I know. I know better than that.

So even when you were all set for Marcel's, all primed, all propped up broad and lofty like a mainsail against the window in your Irish linen shirt and good waiter's shoes and talc, I was still flipping furniture for my sneakers. You know you could have gone on ahead. Before it started coming down, I mean, I would have caught up I'm pretty sure, you could have gone on ahead, you and me we both know you don't handle storms so good and you know for a fact there was no chance I'd have an umbrella for the both or even the one of us. I can't hold onto them. They end up at the bank or bus stop or grocery store. I like to donate them to chance, I like to think. Three dozen umbrellas at least that I've paid for or been given as gifts or dragged from the shed crooked and leathery like fossilized bats and I can't use a single one, none, they're all in hiding. That gets on your nerves I know. Even when you joke about it it gets on your nerves I know.

Once it started coming down, I mean really coming down outside, you just kept waiting by the pictureframe window next to the front door, in your linen and shoes and talc not saying a word not a single one and all propped up broad and lofty like Custer's flag. You could have gone on ahead. Outside the windchimes and lawnchairs were throwing tantrums and I could hear it the whole time, me trying very hard not to look at you, trying to unpretzel my fingers to knot up my laces keeping my head low and all doubled up over my feet like I'd been gutwounded.

Some of your neighbors the ones with the uncut lawn, the ones who called the cops on themselves when they found sneaky little gremlins of pot growing in their morning glories and baby's breath, I ran into them the other night at the gas-n-go. Their kids are both talking now. These neighbors they helped me turn down my cigarettes by offering to pay for them and they asked what your violin case was doing out with the rest of the junk on garbage day, Tuesday, no maybe it was the Tuesday before last, they weren't so sure, and I'm not going to lie, that kind of made me scared for you. For you, and at you. Not of you but at you, there's a difference there I think, say it out loud and it hits your teeth harder and cocks your tongue like a Winchester. I'm not scared of you, but for you. I'm not scared of you, but at you. The violin case though terrifies me.

I know it was my fault we were late in getting back and that made you angry, but you didn't say anything, not a single word not a single one and I should have listened. I know. When they come in the truck early early Tuesday morning and stop and wonder at themselves who in the hell would throw out something like that, it's perfectly nice, except for the case being leather and getting rained on like that, when you hear them you can just keep on walking there's no need to turn around. That's just me back in the fog, telling you not to worry, it's alright, go on ahead with a chamomile hand at the ache of your back because you and me we both know you don't handle storms so good.

But that must be a trick of the fog because the whole time all I'm thinking is no wait, hey stop, come back, hey hey what's the rush? wait wait wait wait for me and pulling and ripping and mauling at your shirttail like it's what's taking you from me.

Secrets About Washerwomen

The last time I hummed was while riding the bus in the balmy mouth of May, tucked between an Italian man and fleecy schoolchildren. I stood as steady as I was able, elbow cocked outward and upward in the appropriate capital "L." My chin was tucked in polite contemplation. Sweat and cigarsmoke and laundry detergent made the skin above my nose crease.

The driver had the radio turned to a local station, something that's become something else by now, and a song came on that had played at my brother's wedding. I had been maybe six at the time (had shredded my dress in the church hedges) (had smeared it with mud, like warpaint, while chasing after garden things) and as a young and selfish thing had completely ignored my brother and his bride. I couldn't even say the color of the bouquet. The sound, though - the wedding band, playing that song, the boys from the nearby highschool with their untrimmed guitarstrings dangling like the snaggled beards of medicinemen - that stayed, somehow. It came crawling out after twenty year's incubation creaky and thick and unsummoned.

I don't hum but I can feel the want of it rolling warmly from its sleeping place; or not quite the want of it, though maybe. More the want that was behind it. I can feel it like tremors through a telephone wire while I'm stitching my work slacks, or peeling potatoes, or hammering new limbs onto the coffeetable. Not only the wedding song but other songs too. Sometimes it feels wrenching and unnatural. Hot honey poured onto a Greek god's harp melted down into an ointment ore.

Sometimes it is the pinprick of pizzicato. One day, a full choir.

In the indecisive days of winter when the spring brings a limbo of itself, maybe-yes-warm-mostly-no days, seashore days, it is wrenching and rending enough to double me over with its morphine mourning and glittering gutter. It's those days that I drop my knives, or bowls, or French china, and take the kitchensink as a kickstand.

Afterwards I write one of my letters to myself. If there's time. These all end with Stay remorseless, Stay in love, though none are ever signed.

This morning I stood barefoot, on the wooden porch, to force my blisters to breathe. I ate two mangoes without mercy. Their sugars took root in my face and hands like warpaint.

It is 9:32 in the morning

and Bryce is a small and anxious thing. He is out of cigarettes. He is simmering. He is sizzling like New York neon with his colorblind hands and his mongoose mouth and he is a dozen hungry things on the inside: (1) a stripmall mannequin stripped eunuchly nude, hauled out to the grinning curb on garbage day (4) a custard yellow stray, a Labrador bitch with sagging tits and a French-braid zigzag of heartworms (8) an acrobat with polio. Bryce gets up and moves around the livingroom because the stillness would sterilize him.

Ellie was by earlier and said: that is, said with her mouth while her face said Just stop it, stop it would you?: that She would be back later that night, baby, don't eat yourself up too bad okay?/Yeah okay./And take a nodder if you can't settle. Just stop it okay. Okay?/Yeahokay./but that's a lie, both of them: that is, what was said by both of them is untrue and didn't happen. It is 9:33 in the morning and Bryce itches all over.

He is out of cigarettes and cannot remember where he has hidden the nodders, not that they would help much: they are only feathery teases of iceberg gunpowder and they would not help much. A little. Not much. He wants instead to snort fat lines of circus-colored paint, six meters long, six miles long, off of ladies' caramel cream thighs, he wants to leave his vanilla cobweb breath on their makeup mirrors. He wants his skin to take on the taste and texture of a welcome mat. He wants blindfolds, and he wants sedatives. He wants tightrope walkers, dozens of tightrope walkers, staggering and swaying on his cat's-cradle spine, and he wants to huff genielamps of napalm and crackerjack ammonia and let their popgun fumes crawl up and around like soldier scarabs in the tender tissues of his nose and mouth and throat: eat them: burn them: fuck them raw.

And Ellie: he wants Ellie too, because Ellie: knows where to find steel wool and candlewax, Ellie: knows how to bite and twist and gnash with pliers, and Ellie: can straddle his face or suck him off or pin his arms under her knees and giggle while she wiggles and wobbles the crunchy tube of his throat between her thumb and middlefinger, or ignore him, or shove his cock into a bottle of liquid nitrogen.

Any of them, all of them. Bryce doesn't know-- he isn't the one to ask. Bryce can't make Ellie's decisions.

Once when he was twelve he jerked off in his grandmother's bathroom, ignoring the cotton-candy doilies and August-piss potpourri and naked porcelain Cupids and thinking about a vigorous detention with his teacher. And even though Bryce took every pain of Christ to leave no trace, and he didn't, not a single smudge or smell of a young boy's biology, even though he left it as clean as a goddamn clinic when he was done, there was a cheaply meaty swarm of guilt that swelled up in him for days, forever, especially at night: like the mustardy throats of frogs. It filled him with ill and strangeness. It made Bryce feel like he was way up high in a hot air balloon, just him, and it was almost sort of nice, sort of exhilerating: rawly, like he was a grape that had been peeled in someone's teeth and was now supple and infantile to the whole world. Nice in a way that made him think maybe there was a sunset up there with him, a lovely bruisey gutted jellybean sunset that he had all to himself up there, up in that hot air balloon.

But also hypodermic and murderous in the way that he knew it was made to crash: was poisoned: was going to cannibalize itself against the ground soon very soon. Not immediately, but immaculately: wholesomely. Two years later at his grandmother's funeral the balloon was all that Bryce could think about.

A car gargles foggily by and he looks up and out, buzzing like a honeycomb, sticking to himself, but it isn't Ellie: isn't there like she said she would be.

It is 9:34 in the morning and Bryce is a small, anxious thing

((It took a disappointingly brief amount of time for this to turn from "rough portrait of apprehension and masochism, both sexual and emotional" to "smutty SAW fanfic."

Upon rereading, I'm blisteringly reminded of Nine Inch Nails's "Closer"!))