She said to herself: Thanks for renting a space in this life. Despite the scrofulous and desiccate in life you stayed around to witness the swirling swallows above, and their reflected pantomime in the water below—a whirlwind of life all about you. Now get some sleep and start all over again tomorrow. Your boulder always awaits you.
“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. … One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
The smoke trees blared their summer green. There was deliberation in her fibrillation. Her heart fluttered like an insensate butterfly—heliotropic, yet abjured to the sun. The world is my pistil, she said—a fluttering cavorting beastie—a moment of proboscis licking nectar drinking. She was forever cofounded by synecdoche and metonymy; and what was metric or metronomic. To the regular clatter of unceasing chatter, the voices in her head crescendoed into a din of metal machine music—and in a mere 23 hours she was home in the northern city again, apparently having brought the southern clime with her. Days of 90-degree weather gerrymandered her senses into discrete ultra-heterodox salamander shapes. Her olfactory was a red eft. Her haptic a hell-bender. No one was offended and no one complained. She would get to the decompression over the coming days. For now there was only exhaustion and an empty psychic tank to refill—and an unstable budgie to contend with.
“This day, in which sad prayers come spilling out of his hands, is too hot.”
It seemed to her she was always leaving, or someone was leaving her. Her father disappeared one day when she was ten. Her mother disappeared into a fog of alcohol and mental illness the next year—and now it was her turn to leave her hometown for the last time.
She vowed to never return to the southern city or the moribund southern state. She’d had enough of the oppressive memories, ghosts tugging at her, and retrograde autocrats. She was off.
In the rear view she spotted the rag and bone man kicking the St. Jude statue again, a fitting sight in the high-key sunrise that limned the horizon line in golden-red and turquoise. The bay, a vacant dying sea, would soon flood the shoreline.
“This will all be underwater soon,” the man screamed at her exhaust.
“Good riddance,” she said to the strains of the Butthole Surfers “Moving to Florida.”
“Bye-bye,” she hissed, turned the stereo up and drove north.
“Healing this uncivil war, especially within our own families, is not about changing our minds or even our hearts but first creating a space where we can meet unarmed. Here, an opening can occur. We are not abandoning our principles, but expanding our points of view.”
— Terry Tempest Williams / 7 April 2021, The Boston Globe
She understands nothing. She tries, squint-eyed, to turn her brain over. Without spark, the ignition doesn’t catch.
She sees herself, monochromatic, on the screen of her childhood 1974 Panasonic TV. Her father talks globular in this most rectilinear city. Her father, a sick man, made connections obliquely— and spoke in harsh transient bursts.
These hyperphantasic memories consume her from all dimensions. She needs raiment for the soul but finds defenestrated appliances and tatters in desolate mounds in their stead. She walks a bray of winces in piles of miles of monticular hunger.
Nothing for the stomach and nothing for the next life. She quanders in squandered lines of obtuseness. A sign up ahead reads:
“Squelch and Skronk, $2.99/lb. Best deal in South Florida!”
She makes a beeline for the whole ball of wax — a hive of astute astringency on loan—from a god lost in this corner of the universe …
She’s lost in the reticular coldness of the attenuating picture—a cathode ray tube snow (fuzz from her childhood, circa 1974)—a muzz of voices echoing from the exhaust vent above her head. She’s one with the toilet seat now, one with her pins and needles thighs, and uncomfortably prescient.
That man from the sewer, the St. Jude statue kicker, outside her hotel room door—which is disquietingly close to the bathroom door—for hadn’t she last night passed one door where she swore she heard a fugue of wet untethered flatulence, and walking by another door heard wretched retching and moans?
Why did the man outside her door continue saying “Every day and in every way, I feel better, better, and better!” And just what was that infuriating accent?
She understood nothing.
“Shit!” Her hamstrings cramping, she limps away from the toilet—“Why have I woken up so stupid?”
She steps to the door and looks through the peephole and in one fluid motion bangs on the door: “get away hog man, get back to hog land, hog man! Get away!”
A wide-eyed sunburnt face turns mutton chop and exits viewfinder left — revealing grandmother strabismus, carnival-lipped, mouth agape, shocks of tight red curls (something akin to afro puffs, she thinks) staring into her left peephole pupil, and trailing: “Wake up to the word. Control your mind, and the world will follow.”
She saw the outline of his legs seared into the hotel corridor wall. He was braying down the hall toward reception.
She trembled and added a codicil to her note for the next guest:
“don’t stay on the ground floor of the Temptation Inn in this southern city again …”
and …
“Why did I come? How in the hell did I end up here?”
She spotted him kicking the St. Jude statue installed outside the Melkite Church on the corner. It was the same dirty and desultory man who approached her the day before.
The sky was a swirl of hazy cross-oceanic Saharan dust again. The humidity clung to her exposed skin like a hot anole’s tongue.
She wanted nothing more than to avoid him and his rants above all else. She cut down a little used access road between the two luxury bayside buildings. When she stopped and turned to insure he hadn’t seen and followed her, she fell into an underworld through the loose manhole cover she stepped on—the world ascended out of her sight into an absolute darkness which welcomed her with a jolting fetid thud. All was black and remained in oblivion for a full minute.
The smell hit her first and then the warmth of the liquid she sat in—she dry heaved and gripped her stomach until she recovered, and only then she saw the faint bioluminescence seemingly arrayed in perfect geometric shapes along the curved walls. She realized she was in the sewer.
Then she heard his voice echoing from above and beyond her line of sight—the high key dust light streaming in from the gaping maw she fell through.
In an instant his face and torso filled that vacant space, and his cackle echoed down to her and filled the dark in the sewer.
“Ah, missy,” he said. “Welcome to my town. Welcome to my home.”
He jumped into the darkness with her.
“I climb knowing the only way down is by falling. Police paved a concrete square to catch me, men wait with high-powered hoses to spray what’s left of my body down.”
— Natalie Scenters-Zapico / “The Trick Is to Pretend”
Someone said to her: “Are your avocados in the oven?”
To which she said: “Excuse me. Do I know you?”
“You are very angry, aren’t you?”
“Again, do I know you, sir?”
He moved about her in a drunken semi-circle and professed: “I am a visionary, missy. I see things you can’t imagine. Hexagons. Bike routes to heaven. Heathen paths to perdition and desolation.” He adjusted the rope he wore as a belt and riled himself up for a jeremiad, but she turned and walked away.
Clarity would wait another day. Another day in the southern city. Clear as a cross-oceanic Saharan dust storm—which are becoming regular fixtures of this anthropogenic age.
“We’re seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.”
— Elizabeth Kolbert / The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
A reverential moment passed unheeded— Post-diluvian effluvium— Forced to move aphantasic Wire weevil wonder wye Tilak-covered blind third eye
She rages wild at seeing A world bereft of meaning Muddle-mucking in the south Trapped so near the grinder’s mouth Wire weevil wonder wye
Why?
“just as part of me fears that if you love me for my cleanliness i will grow filthy if you admire my elegant clothes i’ll start wearing shirts with sailboats on them”
