Every year the cherry blossoms come and fall and they’re beyond anything I could ever say was beautiful until they’re gone and suddenly another year has slipped by and part of me wants to die again. I’m at a restaurant now. Every piece of dinnerware is cold to the touch - there’s fish I’ve never seen alive on my plate so for all I know this is just part of the simulation everyone keeps talking about, but she takes another bite and smiles and I’m content for now. Why am I here again? Why have I kept up? Why do I insist upon taking care of every single person that stumbles into my periphery? My friend’s mom told me all those years ago that it was always her son that got fucked by the world because one day he woke up and his body didn’t work anymore. That I was just as guilty. I remember the day I packed the car and never even looked in my rearview until they disappeared forever and I haven’t heard their voices since, even in my worst dreams. I remember how her face looked when she said it, even though it was on the phone and I saw nothing, I just knew. It haunts me like being awake does, like becoming conscious did. It brought me to the truth of the matter, the only truth, really:

I just want someone to sacrifice something, anything…for me.

A lost angel quietly observes a man walking downtown, that which can’t even conceive it without its permission, drawing in every excuse made for his contemptible behavior in the memories it watches as its wings touch air and it sighs the way they sigh sometimes. I see the angel, nod my head in acknowledgement because I’m not of man anymore at this point and we’re sort of here together. I’m drowning in commiseration in the next memory of time, when I was of them. It was one of the first times I’d realized I couldn’t do true wrong so I must not have free will and that they must but that fate course-corrects regularly on their behalf and that my fate was inevitably both different and nothing good but that it meant we weren’t really free and stuck on a road we couldn’t deviate from, some more or less than others. I remembered how I wanted to be translated into whatever was next, and I sat on an actual hill watching the last sunset, reviewing the end of all time, all the while deciding whether or not this would be it and that I would go home, exact a razor from dad’s old shaving tool, and meet my ancestors and hoped while the life spun out of me that the first question I’d ask if I remembered all this could be, “why was it like that for them, and like this for me?” and perhaps get an answer that finally made sense and whatever was next was well worth the cost.

Near the end, still one of them, instead of leaving that hill I found my way to the first garden once, you know, and that’s where we met. There were suddenly fruit trees that went on forever and I’d never seen the creatures hiding in the fauna in any book ever written or drawing ever drawn. This is how I know, why I know, that it’s all ongoing forever. It was then I saw them partake in the fruit, the first true act of freewill, the first time someone did bad and the last time bad was punished as far as I’m concerned. The taste, they said, was everything. There was dew everywhere and it all felt like warmth. They left that day as they couldn’t stay any longer and as they did I was carried back. She wrote a note on my hand as they passed that started the first fire and the blood within me was changed. Whatever it was, I could read that it said, in such soft, curvy pictures: “return to me” - and as it all went dark she shouted how to find the way back and it’s a lost trail of breadcrumbs from the first tale ever told, so here I am, again, not knowing.

The truth is, as a younger man I never thought I’d make it too far, so after thirty there wasn’t really much of a plan forward - each day uncharted territory and the fire was always roaring. I had an old man carve her drawings into my human skin as he squinted and remarked that today was a good day, all as a reminder that with each passing moment and every minor mistake glowing to alert the hive, that all freedom ended that first day and that my resentment of every man that wasn’t me, his hands dirty from his daily allotted allowance of evil that seemed unending held no bearing on the ongoings of the cosmos. I look at him - me, from afar, and remembering her voice, her call…that I am to head to the garden once more, the marks on my hand leading me…following a trail of butterflies left long before me.

There were friends to be had in every version of this but they’re like grains of sand now I see them fall too and I wonder how I’ll escape or is all of this a painting somewhere and we just can’t see it? I watch everything unfold all the time perhaps it’s right to be the narcissist here and the artist’s audience is using me but if that was so how would I be able to know…unless it’s true that I’ll never really get out? I long to be born elsewhere and finite and rest with the others that are asleep that I can’t reach anymore - not that I ever could. In one time I kept a book and I’d write everything I ever knew down in it and when I saw the beginning people they called me different things like it was me making it all so. Go further back, to nothing. It’s quiet now and good to sit and watch and think. I shouldn’t be here yet I know when I became and even the language is confusing. “When did it start, again?” Talking to angels (not men) won’t make much of anything clearer though they try their best.

I remember when it was so bad my eyes burned. After the red ashes pushed into my arm and then it happened again and there was even the time he flicked the butt at my face and the cherries floated, changing to something much darker so fast and touching my eyelids. The papers to free me stuffed behind the middle-most left shelf and there they’d stay until the end of time. They’re there now I’ve been told but haven’t checked. I was unleashed upon the world in adulthood and I didn’t know where I was or how to take a deep breath and the only feelings all desperate at best. I see myself when I was one of them and it’s still hard to watch even after thousands of times. I don’t know how this possibly ends well because I never did, and I remember thinking that too even before this distortion and perversion of life. I’m sitting in a car that will be mine eighteen years after the departure not wanting to walk through the front door each night and he was long gone and his ghost apparently had much better things to do than advise me to make good after all the incidents, I thought, but now I know why he never came. I wouldn’t wait for me either, so I don’t. Rifling around my old notes for hints of another like me to question. I find curves not like anything any me ever used and recognize coordinates in the careful writing, the thick lines so clear and bold. Make it quick, I suppose. One of an unending series of scenarios where the people of home believe their time is almost up, like every man that came before them…and every child that came to be and grew to adulthood without flickering out prematurely after.

“Good to see you again, I suppose.” We met once, in another version of all this. In that one the lights were on when we met and I signed the contract that had been waiting for me in that moment forever, God knows who wrote it, with Father’s favorite pen. It was exactly half a decade before I’d go on to lose it again and I used to get so upset just thinking about when I’d first lost it and Mother didn’t forgive me during her time. The year was at least when they had figured out electricity on a large scale so that narrows it down a bit. I am responsible for my choices and acknowledge the potential consequences, was the gist of the agreement - having been given a very different experience once I had fallen out of time and all things were at once and though I look this way, I no longer am, I think.

Though it was no longer because there was nothing in a straight line anymore, I knew of my first personally-accessible memory when I wasn’t this. I was little and thrown across a room, my room. It was neither good nor justified and I can see the walls and the bed frame and his expression. That face he made, knowing what I was to him, it was why I didn’t shed a tear during his death throes, nor his wake, nor his funeral despite organizing his last departure so Sister wouldn’t fret too much with the loss and the changes coming she wouldn’t even anticipate. I don’t think many people know what actual hatred feels like. When you have an enemy and it’s clear and won’t be going away. I did. It’s exhausting impending doom. I look at it now, foreign isn’t the right word but the right word doesn’t exist yet, I guess.

What was it that made me one of them before the shift, other than those memories? That almost-Faustian change that stripped away all the things but those thoughts and recollections, they stayed in a way that I know these were his moments, he the walking testament, and they made him whatever he was; it looks like a long game of connect the dots without a destination. They just peak out of the mass of moments I can see all at once of everything.

I still don’t know how I got here. I look at his other imprints but never in order. The Saturdays in the coffee shop with Father before haircuts and the yard work. The strange fellow with the dirty brown jacket, John, that the barista excitedly greeted as if they hadn’t seen each other in years (which was possible given how inconsistently she worked and how he just sort of wandered around) loudly proclaiming his thoughts about the proletariat having been handed a coffee and having not been part of the working class himself for many years. All while Father networked with someone he’d arranged to meet and he’d show up far too early, dragging him along and this was the building of the pieces of resentment as events unfolded dooming any chance of peace. Sunday mass, a meal at a chain restaurant, another opportunity for conflict. This would repeat until it was time to leave the nest.

I can no longer affect much though I am certain I can see it all. There are rules but also consequences everywhere. I live his life over and over and it’s different all around us. Sometimes the trees have pink blossoms. Other times they are barren, “…and it’s not what you’re thinking,” I tell the man with the young voice, it’s changed. And eventually I’ll discover what this all is and how to get out. At first I was certain I was a dead wanderer in Purgatory. But it’s more than that, and I remember when the offer came to him and then I am this across every thing that can ever be. Almost a ghost but everywhere.

This is how I came to see and know creation. How I take account for every berry plucked from the trees. How I can splash around in the Pacific with a dopesick friend he was forced to leave behind but for good this time after a few previous tries.

I can see them both and hear every conversation they’d ever had together and about each other. I know he’d have tears for that but not in his time. Perhaps it was all too painful and that’s how I ended up here. I know the answers but there are so many, you see. “I suppose I’ll see you again to sign the next one,” I tell the man with the young voice. He nods, tells me about all things, and we are both well on our way to nowhere.

So I know I seek The Garden. I see myself learning this for the first time as the inevitability of every time, and it folds again and again. To return to it, and to the fruit that will doom all men. It’s folding. And folding. We’re folding.

It’s so many years later, I think. I’m on a rooftop in a small chair with an unlit cigarette in my hand wondering why they decided the sky was what’s above. The people below scurry about and I know which ones won’t be released from the fire until the absolute end and they’re supposedly cleansed. Imagine beginning as an ant unto a snake unto lamb unto a cat unto a man and you’re a Buddhist, I suppose. Maybe a sea mammal or cephalopod before man but who’s counting? And then you’re before Him and becoming a star unsure how you got here. What happens when a star falls, they ask? We only know what we’ve been shown and it’s a trap, I say. It’s like fossils, a suggestion only from the first time, we couldn’t possibly know.

Have you seen the imprints of dope on the brain? Funny story, that’s a mockery of God’s gift and you can’t even see it. The senses meant to be overloaded to a point and you find yourself hunting for it on the streets at the expense of every decent thing that ever was. You should know you’re out for no good. I spent some time in a dope house, you see. It was so I’d understand them, He said. I still don’t, even worse, truth be told - I never will. I recall the house in Thousand Oaks now as a small child. I chewed on a Tylenol at Sherry’s house and my friend shit on the plastic slide out back. Our house - it was so small and we were always too close and it was after that that he got real mad at me all the time I suppose it was all the questions. I remember it all. The paint cans in the garage that had all the colors of our world stirred up. The old car that didn’t start sometimes. When my sister was born and everyone was concerned. I recall having a sister now, what a venture - she was all but forgotten before this moment because I can’t remember a damn thing, even my first name from the first time.

I know years later there was only violence. Not just at home from where I ran ran ran, but to where I moved right back to it. I could have been far far away and instead I was close by and ready for more. A man stood outside my house one night and I walked out, the sound of frogs clear in the night because of that pond (long gone) and told him he had no idea what he was getting himself into and smiled.

G was visiting from down south his Corvette blocked in, his breakdown not quite ready but certainly queued up and he had dreams of his own which was why he stood out there by the old mailbox some world war veteran posted years before. There were mosquitoes everywhere out in the front yard I’d wished they were the fireflies from my mom’s family’s cul-de-sac in the midwest and I remember catching them in jars and tasting crab apples for the first time. They were so bitter and the lights were gone so quickly.

The man, he left and wouldn’t come back for almost a year but I know it was him slamming through the back door my cat hiding in the closet and thank God they left him or I’d have hunted them for sport pretending they were the bad side of the family and I was back with the archangels and remembering my role which only ends poorly for man and the Nephalem.

I only know that the first time a gun was pointed at me I was smiling I was in a place where over was just fine. I also recall the first time I saw Stephen doped up and he still thinks I didn’t notice and that somehow impossibly he’d spared young me from it. Here I am recalling all the times and I wish these cigarettes I won’t ever light were an option come the end. It’s a long ways away but never as far away as they think and then it’s time.

The caterpillar can’t conceive its shift. Neither can they…us, I mean. We will bathe in fire even if it’s only for a short while to be purified into light itself and that’s inevitably awful. To be free from not flight what a change that would be. New limbs and a way to and fro requires sacrifice, you see.

You’ll think of seasickness if you recall anything and you’ll feel ridiculous. I can’t even be anymore. I know I’m here waiting for the end of the next time and it makes it all so quiet even in the storm. Would you run? I cried too when I saw how it ends and thought of Damiel and wondered how on Earth and this universe itself Wenders knew the ending in 1987, year of my birth they say. The whole world in color now and I can’t remember when it changed but it did and it’s appreciated I suppose. I’d hand her flowers, tell her how I’d watched cities rise and call it a day. But then that would be straightforward and nothing simple ever seems to bloom.

Call me by my name from either time and we’ll hope for the best, for some can avoid the lake and I hope to call that “us.”  The fruit from the tree that tells all curled within our fingers as I brush stray hairs from your face and all is right with all things. Every color worth each trouble so just smile, they say.

I feel the wind and my skin dances to the cold air. It’s almost time so I sit outside, the rain falling, and I watch the grid flicker and struggle - the evening beckoning. I know to stay here awhile, I think, thinking about how I’ll fix all this. The grass beneath my feet tender from the water - the mud a soup of all that came before us. I think about how I’ve told myself about what all my mistakes are and how I ought to avoid them as I wait for the signs but we both know I won’t remember and the loop will live on.

I’ll start out, “okay, try to remember…” so at least it’s said on the off chance it sticks and if I’m lucky it’ll close out then and there. One I can tell you about off the top of my head is that there are folks I just shouldn’t talk to that I talk to and it makes problems and I don’t know they seemed lonely too I guess. The trouble is, one day will be the last day we interact and I never want that to be right now.

Another woman about to fall through my hands (I know I’m not supposed to say it like that), so I hold the picture up, a young girl that would one day become my mother, her green eyes covered in blue. Trying to think, did she have this same problem? If so she got real good at hiding it but I suppose living out Groundhog Day is one way to avoid surprises on your way out. Maybe it was her that passed on the loop, this curse, this never knowing when I should know better. I get started on the letter knowing I’ll have to start over.

Cecilia,

Do I wait until it all passes or wrap myself in it and jump out into the deep, cold water with a large cut drawn over each eye, praying for sharks to tear me apart, this burial at sea?  Let them see the chaos, how badly I’ve wanted to die so many times. Show them every last secret I’d kept from everyone. I just can’t share all that, it won’t work, every question granular exposure, eclipsing every good, becoming bloated sea salt. I’ve seen the outcome of these truths. I’ve romanced every character there ever was worth loving, what they were during filming and would probably never touch upon again, the retroviral identity - that which we worship.

It’s a paralyzing combination of fear and anxiety about how things are and how they’ll be with a sort of seer's-gift-of-sight…I see the marks over my eyes as I watch my falling body from my father’s abandoned office. All the time wasted in a life barely lived. All the years I’ll forget. I’ve consumed too much, they say. They’ll tell stories about me, a scapegoat running through the field, marked up with red paint, his brother slaughtered. He will wander forever in forests turned into mazes - his brother in his thoughts and he runs and runs and runs.

I say I don’t care, but it’s the word “legacy” that haunts me. The term for old: deprecated. The term for what we leave behind as the old, deprecated creatures of this world. I thought I was the hero of this story and I won’t even make it to the end.

They’re all gone now and I can’t remember how I stop it. I have to remember. So I’ll be waiting here awhile…wish me luck.

I’m angry to be here, especially after the next short trip to the gas station where we pick up a pack of cigarettes and faces turn.  These fucks.  As we walk, they ask what I do and my friend spots for me: Roids.  Only roids.  Don’t ask him if he wants anything else.  I’m over a month out before I even start and I do anabolic steroids we say.  It’s the system, you see - to get along with folks like these, you’ve gotta be doing something illegal too, otherwise there’s no connection, no relation, you might was well be at a family reunion.  They ask G about what drugs he’s done, what’s the worst combo he’d ever set off and as they continue to snort and smoke their income, he gives them the list:  250mL of Sustanon and 250mL of Winstrol for the week, freshly injected that morning followed by forty milligrams of Oxy in liquid form, two-one milliliter shots to be exact, about a third of a gram of MDMA, three grams of weed and half a gram of hash.  #1 and #2 look up from the haze, stale smoke in the air, cigarettes ablaze and Oxy residue on their noses and in unison, as G describes the blackness before heading out to Las Vegas, his mother having found him foaming at the mouth on his kitchen floor, they iterate:  “Damn, you shouldn’t do shit like that.”  Their eyes go back down and that’s that.

They turn and look at me, take it all right and nod, they did a bunch of them too, steroids – even sold to most of the athletes and general gym rats in the area.  #1 does some Clen to lean out but can’t stop eating anyway so it does no good once he’s off.  #2, he lost everything that soccer and weights did for him once he stopped eating because of the Oxy.  It’s so good, he says, he does at least twenty pills per go and I know he doesn’t know because he’s barely getting started just now, nineteen pills in, his slur even worse and he’s falling asleep in his seat while he watches computer videos; to wake up to do more, to go back to sleep from sleep.  I’m not even joining in and I lose count before the end of the night, or morning because it’s the 21^st as of now.  Just before we head out for the long ride back we watch #2 get his dick sucked by some rich, white broad for a couple of pills that cost the two of them nothing beyond co-pay and monthly insurance.  “Oh, Doc, I got so much back pain this week.”  Imagine dragging that line out to at least a minute before the last syllable starts and that’s about right, he talks like he probably snorts, itching to make it last just a little longer, the syllables – like the individual granules, so sweet with their toxicity and as it ends he can’t help but go slow because he’s gotten to where he can’t even affect the choices anymore.  I’m hoarse with loud smiles cause he doesn’t even come in the video because after at least twenty pills it just aint happening and the girl didn’t want to do it and didn’t want #1 watching but really wanted the pills.  They knew this, his inability to finish, so they agreed on a time rather than a number of times and so there was no talk of whether or not she’d swallow.  

The dealers, worldwide, they laugh at their clients for paying what they pay but not everyone can grow, not everyone can manufacture or in their case, go through the steps to get ten-grand in pills every other week, all stored in a little suburban venue where the house is mostly glass – and just think, there’s already holes in the front from the neighbors’ games in the streets during the day.  That’s this neighborhood – children at play and a home pharmacy unit across the street, small gas station just around the corner.  Crooked doctors are the key to their stock, they say, showing us pictures of their stashes from throughout the years.  In one #1’s dad’s asleep in his chair with two jumbo bags of MJ in his lap, zip-locked and so ripe.  His mouth lay open like #2’s as he drifts in and out, between smokes and slurs.  

We return to the Orlando hotel in a haze and the whole while it’s a dream, #1’s talk of his mafia ties and the time they took him out to a lonesome cabin and waited and when he didn’t run they let him out, he passed the test, chronic liar, and then onto his brother’s arrest for all the computer hacking he does, it’s funny, since #1, the self-proclaimed “tight-lips” ended up getting busted and ratted on #2 so he fled the country and #1 can still be seen on various online chats, passed out in front of his computer camera, live streaming entertainment in the life of a dealer and while he was detained people would try to contact him but receive no response.  It seems the feds are on the other end waiting for someone to spill, like a door to the unknown at the end of a hall, as you’re on the way to the bathroom to shoot up or looking to scope out the cars in the garage in the event that you need to get out, fast, and suddenly you’re in Heaven or probably Hell and your dead relatives are talking to you and telling you they’ve seen every last dirty thing you’d ever done to yourself and all those whores and they’re just disgusted, even if they’re the ones spending all that time watching you.  At night I’d pray that #2 or some disgruntled white broad or her brother or boyfriend will appear and as he drools for the camera, his head explodes from the back forward and then everyone knows what they’ll be.

It’s a marvel, these two, holding so much over little white disks, their Holy Grails, the sensation turning schoolgirls into whores and rough men into pencil-necks - sorry desk-jockeys just making it through the day.  Maybe roids aren’t such a bad preventative to all this, to these sorts, like an attempt to even-out the universe with regard to all this.  I dropped the line and found a source within two weeks of getting home and a few weeks later the drugs for myself and G were set along with our post-cycle therapy equipment so that we wouldn’t have to worry about bitch-tits or becoming females, jump starting testosterone production like you would a car battery once the winter’s hit and it’s freezing outside and of all days for the damn thing to bitch out, this is the one, the acid’s molecules broken down into tiny atomic structures but they’re no longer jumping in a fast-track of entropy and not even threatening to an infant’s touch.  There’s only this anymore and it’s all carnival tricks anyway.

The fat man called 'Pa' stood there in front of Daniel as he sat on the old stool, thick of the river passing behind them.  Patches of clover remained untouched, growing in clumps about them.  No one would pick those things; this the garden.

Pa's fat belly pressed his overall straps, stretching with each breath and each word was a bit toward another snap.  On the way over, when he dragged him off to this pace, he saw the fat man’s ankles bending beneath him, the leaning tower from all those postcards.

“I’ll tell you this much:  Those pants of yours will rot straight off your behind by the time it’s up, that stool there just barely sticking outta the ground, like a wheel on its side.  Boy’ll be out each day with a bucket of fish from the long part of the river.  Grab the fish and relieve yourself in the bucket.  Sit back down and wait.  It’s all for you.  Reach for the passing stream when you’re thirsty.  Your face’ll grow long and we’ll need shears to recognize you.  There’ll be a night of snow.”  The trail took him back through the woods to the small house with the carved window, belly sloshing and testing those straps with each step.

Waves of uncaught fish swam along before him but he couldn’t reach.  One of the servants, a black mute, cut the field down early that morning.  The bare basin now, summer a week gone.  When the little boy came with his bucket, he asked how many days it’d be from then on.

“Ninety-nine I suspect.”  He was no choir boy.  “They paying me a quarter a day they said.  Gave me about half yesterday, said if I didn’t see it through, they’d take it all away and I’d get the switch.  Yesterday’s the first I worked off, catching all these fish while you lay there in bed with your head wrapped like the mummies from the market comics.  My math says it’s ninety-nine more days to go for you.”  The boy checked a polished watch from his work shirt’s front pocket.  He was covered in dirt and handed over the bucket.

“Well there young man, I thank you.  Helps me to draw lines in the soil or build a stack of clovers; even throw a blade or two into the stream each day while I watch the field grow so tall as I sit here, sinking.”  With a turn, the boy checked his watch again.

“Sir?”

“Yes, boy?”

“What’d you do for this predicament?”

“All by that girl.”

The boy grabbed the bucket before he could finish, rushing off through the woods, avoiding the switch.  The black mute’s head turn as he passed, turning back to take down a tree.  The bucket swung with the boy’s run, shards of grass sticking to the dents in the tin, swaying.  The field dyed orange when the sun fell behind him as his hands plunged into the bodies of the cold fish.  His thoughts turned to virginity when he took the first bite and his eyes closed tight.

“I don’t know the exact way it started.  I recall sneaking up to her bedroom late one night, the stars stuck in black places.  It was to be like that story of the long-haired girl; man came straight up her scalp.  I fell out the window when her Pa rushed up; scrambled and fell into the dark that holds the stars.

I aimed to surprise her, I know.  Kiss her awake with snowflake lips.  You know, just bring the winter months into her hands.  When I came to, I coulda swore that same dark witch from the book stood over me; thorn bush below struck and blinded me.  When she opened her black mouth to scream nothing came out.  They took me inside and patched me up, scarecrow man I am.”

When the boy ran back home, the bucket’s innards stretched the trees.  Fields finally starting to reach out for the sky.  The sun wiped dew from garden.  The boy didn’t come – two days waiting.

To sit by a field, some woods, along a basin, a river sprawled about.  To never swim or climb trees or even hide in the brush from the eyes everywhere.  Each day the house they lived in drew closer with the black mute’s work.  He could see the eyes of Pa staring out at him.  Waiting for a move, ragged chessboard of this garden.  When he stared back they’d wait a bit, those eyes and fade behind the fresh-drawn curtains.  They were so big, those eyes.  The kind that didn’t really have color, just big black rabbit holes set to small snow fields; impure blizzards.  They were the unset world; the balance back and forth; his pupils grew and shrunk as the day passed.  Pa?

He thought about theaters.  The folks sitting there without a peep, eating and watching the players, the hard work for a few cents.  Sprawled out to forget the day.  Sitting on the stool; sinking for his audience as parts of the world become giants, all along just wondering.

“Those two probably have a whole bunch of us out here.  Sitting on these milking stools, for what?  Some girl I met at market last week?  She let me kiss her cheek after I paid for her bag of oranges.  She brought me home and I sat at their kitchen table, it was so small.  Three old chairs pushed in with such care.  In the corner I saw a matching one in the corner, covered in dust, just some hand-marks stretching the wood.

“While I waited she cut up a few of those unmarred oranges.  No yellow rind; there was smoothness.  Perfect copies of stars.  The skin peeled off in a twister, squeezing the fruit.  Steel split the star and separated the universe.  I didn’t move.  As the halves split beneath the knife along the cutting board, I saw her move just right and knew I could sit there for the rest of my life.

Juice dripped onto the wooden board and sank right in like I’m doing in this garden.  Once the pieces came to rest on the board, she cut them again and the sky divided.  World after world, decay raising life; seeds sank to the floor and by then, the metal was tarnished.  The second coming – right there in the kitchen.  When it came to cool, she put them on a plate and brought out teacups with saucers.  The boil finished and she filled the cups, the steam caressing her face.  Mary, my Snow White.  There weren’t words the whole time, just tea and oranges.”

The boy was back, his face spotted in the deep of the fallen leaves.  Groves of bent oranges that crushed with each step.  He hung his head, coat stretched out - carrying two buckets and a couple of jugs.

“They paid me extra not to come and I took the switch trying to anyway.  I told them you’d get lonesome and hungry.  They said not to worry.  I brought you some fish I smoked earlier this week, that black taste.  Some bread and jam.  These jugs?  Whiskey and water.”  He took off his coat and handed it over.  They nodded as breath began to freeze.

“What’s your name anyway, boy?”

“Cassio, sir.  I hear them whisper yours some nights when the fireplace roars.  Daniel, right?”  There was another nod.

They sat together until the light fell.  It had been at least an hour and they felt the eyes on them.  Cassio set next to the bucket the whole time, not even noticing the smell, reclining against a few sticks, soiled by the mud.  When he was ready he sat up and grabbed the bucket.  He went walking.

“Tonight I take the switch again, but it’ll feel right.  I won’t miss again, not for no one’s money.”

When the stars passed the river slowed into glass.  It began to snow.  From the house he heard cries.  Not the boy’s, but Mary’s.  Her cries.  Pa groaned, it seemed.  After a few minutes it was all gone and the boy’s voice heightened to the choir as the switch painted strokes, screaming through the night wind.  There were no sobs from him.

It was his last, everything was so high and it was good.  He tossed frosted rocks atop the river, waiting for the sound of holes.

“These frozen things will never look like oranges, not when they’re perfect and round.  Not even when the orange is straight from the ice-box.  He saw the hot tea again, from his stool and watched his breath freeze again, the same dream that kissed Mary, a decade ago by now.  It reached out to no one, the cold.  The garden flowers, discolored and unnoticed were deep and long-withered.

The snow crowded the crown of his head, collecting, falling everywhere, holding the land.  When his eyes were opened the boy was holding his left shoulder, towering above him, holding a perfect orange in his hand.  There were no stains on his clothes or marks across him.

He was finally sitting on the snow, the powdered dreams becoming ice.  Each season guilty, reshaping the land into the beauty of its own desires, a discourse of canvas and spilt paint.  What’s left is forced into hibernation in wood or rock, sometimes taking heed of holes in the mud or in the ice along the stream.  This was the last night of life.

The black mute stepped out from the cut trees and with his hands, begged him to stay put.  He saw Mary and the fat man called Pa, he was holding her to him while they were clothed and Daniel knew they felt nothing of the cold, dead fish in their hands.

He didn’t say a word.  He lived those kitchen memories inside one last time.  Cassio’s orange split into pieces and fell to the ground, tarnished by the soiled snow; it wilted there.  He thought of the summer.

“This is what it is to be lonely.  This absolute zero of God’s winter, all of us frozen solid.  Here I am, here.  Waiting for this woman to rid me of this.  She won’t come.  They won’t come.  My wings agape.”

He stood up for the first night of his life.  Rubbed his hands together, took the wilted orange in hand and as he breathed life into it, he was off into the painted sky.  When he awoke in his easy-chair, graying hair covered his eyes, the world was still there, wilting and blooming.  Just spinning.

“Your eyes, they're pretty.”  My friend's daughter.  Walking around the mats with her brother waiting for their father – my friend, to finish.  Everyone was smiling too, they were working and panting and outside I could see the people walking and their breath stood in front of them through the fogged-up windows.  My name's Henry.

Behind me at the party there's a Japanese man hosting, he's twenty-six next week he says and he reminds me of my friend from Mississippi; dead over a year now and his kind face, I know, must be so different with the passing of the two spinning blades under the ground.  He's showing us his friend's picture, his wall decoration.  A painting, it took nine years.  Not the painting, but the things on it, the symbol; it wasn't very impressive but the words explaining it were.  The things he wrote on the canvas, his friend's work, came from when he was a boy, spray-painting on night walks, on the walls around the city.  He stopped when the cops snuck up on him one night and made him the District Attorney's assistant when he was all grown up so many years later.

There's tattoos on the arms of the Japanese man and he's showing us.  There's a portrait of his parents stretching along his left bicep and they're being pulled everywhere; like they ought to be escaping his flesh like they did from the work camp so many years back.  His name along his right triceps, his Dad wrote it on a piece of paper he says, not knowing it'd be stained there after the next trip to San Francisco; Love/Hate, upside-down to right-side-up - he traces it with his fingers.  Tonight he tells us about the paintings again and the trip to the city.

“I want a few for my neck.”  I checked my watch and to hear the gears click.  It might cost him his job, “But so what,” he says.

He talks a lot tonight and she and I are smiling back and forth across the room.  I see the night beyond the glow behind the sliding glass door and he reminds me about working for the state because he does too.  His friend, the artist, is there as well, in that tired place and it's okay if it's only during the day, for the money.  That purity and all come back for those couple of vacations and sick days, when there can really be life; hoping against the clock.  Sitting at these desks, the years pass and we fade in them.  “But it's okay, it's grown-up,” Mom and Dad say as I leave the house.

But that painting, the greens, they mark the house, walls so white – a rose extends off the canvas onto the wall, brushing it.  Growing life from the picture.  Across is another and it's all purples.  A face, his face and I see gold chains too; there they go, but he's not wearing them now.  He points back to his body, this time his right shoulder, the Japanese man, because he forgot to show it.  It’s a boar – for 1983.  He's a Scorpio as well he says and there it is, right below the boar.  Took eight, no, nine years.  Not the tattoo, that same green picture you’re looking at, Henry.  Know what it is yet?  “A caricature hiding a background hiding a life.”  That’s what comes for his birthdays instead of cakes and paper hats.  I wish I could see that day's party and when I look she's smiling at me again.

That big smile comes and she looks so pretty across the room and then I see that little girl in front of her and everything behind her goes away.  She might as well have called me one like her, a girl, because of my eyelashes and I think of the things Father said over and over.  Her brother is laughing in the corner, like him, from when I was a child.  My jacket is clinging to my neck and my friend is on top of me.  He's squeezing the collar and I try to move my hand, slapping against the ground until the girl disappears.

I watched a film later that night when I woke up.  With every scene I checked the time to see my watch was ticking.  Their mouths and sounds didn't seem to fit quite right and when I asked, my friend said, “In Italy, they broke the films with their laws.”  I wanted to know if Christ was why they made the laws that broke everything.  Afterward, when I slept, I saw them; the men in their robes around a table, delicate model of the world sprawled across with every detail beyond them, even down to the freckles of children they didn't know, holding their crucifixes as close as they could, breaking everything with their long canes.  The city was torn to pieces because of the crosses buried in the sand that they wouldn't forget.  I, myself couldn't forget the time either.  Perhaps I was no better but at least, I thought, I knew it was passing.

There's a smile across the room at the party and now it's forging a picture, one for the walls.  The table with the foods flooding the room in a rain.  I cut a melon in the kitchen that they'd bought from the market in the city for half off; shearing the meat from the rind, still icy, I wondered about the pink chunks covering those black seeds like amniotic fluid.  As I sorted them, a boy in the living room started to choke and there I am on the mat again, my friend on top of me.  No, false alarm.  He cried and while the others tried to console him, I rolled my eyes from the kitchen sink. When he saw  he decided he'd just go to bed.  He started to pass me and I watched him change through the running water and it poured outside.

The Japanese man’s friend's baby's smile covers hers for a moment, the one across the room.  When he passes, he makes zooming noises so that his boy can be a super hero for just a little while and now, he's like God letting them make the miracles for The Bible.  Here, just for tonight, then the dream can pass in a few years.

I made my way to the café after work with a different friend on the phone, it was Friday, not even a week after the party.  He's at a club but he hates those girls yet he grinds against them every weekend.  He said I should try some cologne and take them to a real bar instead of that café or just the house.

“They don't want to hear you,” he said.  “Just to test you a while.”  I wanted to know the time so I saw to it.  “You're a funny man but you mentioned that tattoo guy from last night, right?  The one so high? Think for a second Henry, how he wasn't himself.  They wanted him, right?”

“I guess.”

The girls around him, the Japanese man, looking at his pictures.  He sat next to one and put his hand on hers.  On her head as well.  She looked at him and it was love.  I think she even let him hold her bottom, his hand slid across; neither one of them turned red when the others noticed.

I can't do it without a movie there.  So I asked one of the girls from the café, “What have you seen this week?”  She doesn't see much.  Works with the Japanese man at the state though.  He touched her hand once I'm sure, his tattoo prints still painted like that nine-year tag; all along her palms - she must have held onto his arm for too long, had to have gone to a film for that kind of stain, the liar.

When I came back to the café next week I sat next to another girl.  Not with a smile like the one from across me that night but she looked nice enough.  “My name's Henry.”  I checked the two spinning blades to see if I was going too fast, my friend said I might be, I wasn't, I don't think.  “Yours?”

She didn't like the book in my hand.  I came back again in the week after, I left her sitting there at the table and then my friend's daughter came in with her dad.  He was holding her hand before I checked my watch and then they were at the table with me but her feet didn't reach the ground.  They didn't have booster seats, but that would only make things worse I figured.

“No luck?”  He asked me.  She said, “You have pretty eyes,” again, pointing with her index finger and I remember it being so small.  That night I sat in my room with the film I bought on, the glow the only light because the doors and windows were closed and covered.  I wondered about the girls and why it wasn't working like all the films.  I even tried watching the ones where it hadn't been working and they went from there.

I remembered that smile.  I decided to call her because we talked at the party for some time; a while actually and smiling is always good I'm told.  That’s what the number was for, I think now.  When we talked we were both smiling over the phone and the checking of my watch, it was okay.  I thought about the crosses sticking out in the desert.

I smelled the things growing outside on my way to the café and the neighbor, mowing his lawn,  waved to me.  They all knew it was okay.  It was the smell of the growing things, except they noticed it too.  My suit still had its creases but I didn't wear a tie.  The café was empty and she'd be there soon but it'd be a wait, I know.  I was two hours early; I checked to make sure the clock above the register was right and I got the table good and ready.

I ordered her drink and went to the Cinnamon Shop next door to buy a book for the table.  Some music for my car, the guy said, it will help seal the deal.  I didn't know so I checked my watch and I bought it.  I made sure I was ready.  Thirty minutes till now and I wasn't too sure.  I wanted to leave but I remembered my first girl and the days we had under the trees, the growing air.

The doors opened and it was then that I wanted my skin to hold ink and that it'd rub off when she held my arm to make her mine.  That permanent press - they come like the finger notches on my watch, the things that make the things we have ours.  I wondered why the first had gone at that moment and I waited for the smile but saw the desert when the doors opened and it wasn’t her.

My suit's crease was going away and I sat there even after the man up front went off to his break and came to sit with me.  I told him the cup across from me was for her and that she must be running late.  He commented that it looked real cold.  The time came a few times as he talked to me and told me that I should give the cup to one of the other girls and try my luck.  I told him that that makes no sense, that my friend has a method, a means; his way, now mine.  That that was what I had for that; for her,  for that smile - that I only wanted to see that smile today, this week and so on.

The doors opened and I checked my watch, but they were already closing.  I'll call her I think, but only after I wait a few days, my friend said, otherwise I'll come on too strong.  If I wait, it'll work fine and I won't have to give the cup to the blind girl and her dog again.  She sat down at the same table as me once, not knowing I was there; it was many weeks ago when I was mourning.  She apologized and felt my face, saying that she was certain I had pretty eyes.  I didn't even know what to say.  I just waited for her to know me but I left and the cups were hers.

When I came back the week after I heard her ask the man up front that I was talking to about me.  He said he'd speak to me for her and he winked.  That was another day that the smiles didn't come.  I just sat there with the cup in my hands to remind me of warmth before I left for the gym with my bag over my shoulder.  I remember her, my first one, lost in the trees with my knife in her hands up to her neck like the jacket wrapped around my own today while the little girl, replacing her, looks upon me with her brother and when the neck started to cut that's when I checked my watch; squeezed it so tight with my eyes wide-open that by the time she left my fingers painted the sides.  It ticks and I go with Christ, he's etched into the face; blades taking his eyes.  I want to see it each day as I do the smile, not coming.  He hangs from the cross but from him there's no smile, just Anno Domini until the doors open in the café and I go back out to the desert, the party shone in my eyes and there are no shadows but for the spinning blades and crosses hanging in the sand.

Coffee and chewing gum, the staple crops of everlasting salvation, extend the patience of man just enough for the complete appeasement of God’s ego.

Her gaze lies behind the priest’s comb-over, he’s flattered and unknowing.  She’s a tank of a man, laying waste to the South.  Her robes are the skins of fallen enemies, their weak-willed women as well.

A baby cries, cringes erupting.

“Little brats like that shouldn’t even be brought here.  They’re all doomed to Purgatory anyway.  Would-be miscarriages God ought not even bother to have granted life to anyway…lucky for them, God and the fallen angel are bored and give us a chance to play for them.”

Rosy cheeks wither.

“I am become man, perhaps death too.  I sense God’s shudders, frightened by his own creation.  I am his fatherless son, his rival, his harvester of the flesh crops.  I sully my hands to complete his grace.  I, bringer of floods, bringer of the plagues.”

The priest continues to prod as he sings praises in God’s name, not knowing what she is.  Mass will end and she’ll be on her knees, all the while wishing she was still a man, strong enough to tear his man-parts off and hand them to God with a scowl, scolding the Creator for this cretin’s existence, his heart, soul and body the foul, stale dirt of Earth.  There are plums and cherries everywhere, succulent and juicy - skin and blood brought from harvest. Mission accomplished.

Since her start he wished to wilt that perfect circle of roses.  Her baptism the drowning of twisted roots, communion and wine the inebriation, and her confirmation the lubrication he couldn’t bring about himself; his wrinkled, flab-riddled body with those dangling things.  She wanted it and he saw that she received.  Through marriage he’d wash his hands of her and through death the circle of this divine comedy would find its end.

For now he enjoys his partaking in the wonders of this darling twelve year-old, a few hours from thirteen; such a cute girl.  Pigtails and freckles accentuate his joy; those bare girl-parts make it all the more wonderful.

On her knees, dehydration follows his rummaging pleasure; three, four, five, six times now he’s gone over his threshold; to alert him of her painful thirst would only heighten his desire to deny her water and rest. Says she’s so good.  She can stop only when he’s ready to make her bleed.  Over now please, she’d beg if she were less of a man.

“No, want to be a man, be a man.”

She’s growing.  Will be seven-feet-tall soon, razor teeth filling her blackened mouth – filed them down herself on some lonely desert night.  Her breasts harden and seep inward, stomach tightens, bones thicken and girl-parts push out for several miles.  Legs and arms, caked in wet muscle-batter, start to dry.  God’ll be sorry.  She’s invincible now.  A he now.  Can’t be hurt as a he, ever, no matter what.  God approaches.  Takes a slight step back, a miscalculation.

“New mission.  If you’re willing.  Remove the man-parts of the soiled man-priest.  Bite and tear them from the meeting of his thighs.  Swallow them and you’ll never be a girl again.  Only a man; thirteen years of age.  He must know what he’ll never feel again.”  He awaits approval.

A nod, never dying, “Yes.”  Words make him a her again.  God floats away in a cloud from the sun.  Ascending everything.

Eyes open, he wants to penetrate her body so badly.  His favorite girl.  Always.  Hopes she never ages!  Knows that she wants it, bad.  Bad girl.

Mouth opens, and lets them go in as far as possible, both parts.  Grins into his eyes and the mouth closes forever, reconciliation beginning.  Twists and turns, tearing.  Cheap cologne turns to the acid stenches.  Blood drips from the sides of the mouth.  Swallowing the trophy, just how he likes it.

He whimpers.  No more girls.  No more man-parts.  There’s a smile for the man to be.  Never a virgin, now one more chance.  Penance begins for the both of them.  Amen.

I can’t anymore, the dope, remember where I got the stuff or how it even felt when it was in me it’s been so long just that it was too good for humankind and was most definitely the fruit of The Garden we’d lost. The screams of the years before formed raised lines along my skin that you can touch and know forming patterns a woman might use to recognize me if she liked me enough and was blind and in need I suppose - they call them scars but I can’t quite agree because they’re so much more useful than the word allows.

We counted the blossoms together from my room in my home for the summer all those years ago again and again, Grandma and I. We went to the store, talked to people, and I was set to want junk anyway. I am stranded in this time loop, staring in at myself the window very clear despite it having shattered when Father pushed my uncle through the glass before I was ever a thought, knowing that I’m doomed to lie in bed begging for the stuff when that caramel woman leaves and no matter how I warn myself, how I shake the world around my body to bless it…there’s just no stopping it.

It’s a nexus you see, coming to want junk is a critical moment in a river of moments that will later provide for the movement of the known universe. I’ve almost figured it out but have no means to return with the knowledge. I’ll recycle over and over - perishing means this starts again.

Lifetime upon lifetime soil in the arborist of The Tree’s hands, he laughs hysterically at my blood unfolding before him in strands, waiting near his shovel and pail, the perfect moment upon us.

The dope looks so good beyond the glass.

I can only breathe so much these days and now I’m surrounded, hands of every ghost I ever knew dragging me to the floor. I see Cecilia again - her hair becomes silver before my eyes. Every conversation the last yet here we are - the leaves changing shape before me. It’ll be autumn soon, the colors will bend and not one habit will have changed.

I thinks it’s a meat grinder, where we are right now because this is all that’s left of me. We pass through it again and again as the cosmos are just the imprint of repeat, this the punishment for missing enlightenment when it’s right there screaming at us through the ripples of a hand-dug pond, the dance of a bonfire’s flame in the wind at night - it’s everywhere and I don’t see a thing. That I can’t even see where I am in this suffocating fog and neither can you, even with the damn siren behind us pointing me along the path to finally waking outside of all this. She’s grown old waiting too. I’ll smile a toothless grin God knows how many times, knowing I’m stuck here because I just can’t seem to get it right before the end - every star in the night sky the sketch of a failure and I’m born again.

I’ve been here before. Over and over I know. A familiar door I know to open. The old fridge outside full of carved deer carcass - this is the Midwest after all. The sound of the night’s watch - frogs and owls and trees and whatnot by the ponds fed by an ancient creek. This has all been. Cigarette lighter above the icebox, never used but for igniting the loose fabric of the universe. Our calling the icebox “the icebox.” Why are we here and why does this all feel like a repeat?

I wonder about that sometimes. Is the cosmos just us again and again? My eyes close and my fingertips reach for everything that ever was each night when we drift, becoming a wrench in time. I don’t know what’s left for us at the picnic of dead Gods but it probably ain’t much, I told the girl sitting with me at the coffee shop - her hair strands of gold spun into humanity. I’m almost certain she isn’t really human but what does that matter I suppose? She didn’t have much to say after that so we drank in peace. I’ll get us another, if you want, she said; the doves above her hips clear as day. I’ve been here before and she’s either a siren sent to distract me away or a savior set to release me - I remember it all so clearly and either way this secret, crux of the universe - is no more.

It changes everything.

I am samurai. The firefly’s tail screams along my blade, rallying against the night and it’s only the warm sake against my lips that keeps me calm amongst the wicked. They stand along the river, waiting for my flinch, as that will mark the end of us all - watching for our halos. Until that moment, I’ll enjoy the sound of water spreading down the mountainside, blessing the rocks below with perfect harmony...

…and with perfect timing my right hand slides down the last one's collar, my elbow wrenching up, the line a katana's killing blow, as one sword bests another. The mountain snow chills the steel into ice, and it glides through him, his life cut from him. He struggles in vain to escape, but the hold has taken a life of its own, writing his destiny, his ending, and he quietly slips into a peace that he will not remember.

Out of the calm for just a moment there’s her long, braided hair and I’m counting the strands along my fingertips, but I always wake before our eyes meet, so I imagine what they’d be. I know the shape, the color, the texture even. She’s a dream that I simply do not know. No matter how I turn her eyes will never meet mine - just before they do the dream will come to an end again, and I’ll finally hit the ground beneath the old, stained window from which I was thrown, from what seems like so long ago, years even. There’s nostalgia in the car rides I never really had, frustration in the dreams that weren’t. I will fall and bleed and the world will continue despite the outcome. I don’t dare forget to tell her that I think I love her and will come back for her as another dream starts, a brand new car sliding into a tree on Christmas morning, tossing us through sheets of glass into the snow, and here I am sitting straight up in this dream bed, wanting only to return, to get just one good peek at those eyes that have avoided me for eons, lost in this gallery of longing.   

I could hang from this cross across centuries, generations spending their first and final breaths passing the totem upon which I was nailed. Reared and retired upon every last grimace. They say Christ was a message more so than a man - that suffering is masturbation at best and complete futility at worst because here we are, that's why I was sent. Every good deed I ever did, every promise I ever made and kept, yet here we are, scraping the bare minimum of empathy as not one person would stop to help me down no matter what good I did them or theirs across so many lifetimes, no matter how much I hurt.

I think about those sacrifices with every wounded breath as the next one comes upon his fate, that those breaths of sacrifice, of scared and somewhat sacred tension will turn to relief as he is delivered like all before him. That's a pattern, you see - like all those before him that turned their back upon a dying man too poor to shave or stop men from nailing him to wood. They deserve what's coming.

Depends on what you consider “going wrong,” I guess.  I started out all right. It hit the fan when I was twenty-three and I couldn’t stay the same. We’re always changing and life is movement and all that, but this was a rapid mutation, shifting species toward the dawn of a new sentience. The only woman I ever loved, her silhouette burned into the walls of my home, her outline in my bed. My fingers traced her body and I wanted to die. Popping opiates en masse to kill the fire in me, the heat death overloading my nervous system, neurons stretching out as a wick lines the innards of a candle, disappearing with the flame’s last breath. I won’t even be a memory. Who am I kidding? Every last one of us lost in time. Since then I left home for a new haven where the buildings are bright and marble and the people live in towers. Stink of the sewers all around us, there are no pedestrians there, only furies. I lost my brother to insanity and my father’s cancer took him back to God. I was left here to rot in the prison slums of the universe.

Day after day and I look to film. It's far beyond artificial, unacceptably so at this point. I stare into the eyes of people I don’t know, as though their stories are my own. I empathize with the pain of their families outside of the world concocted for massive currency. There’s a degree of resentment inside me because I don’t believe that many of the people I’ll meet, know, and love will ever empathize with me, with this wretched frustration. As I’ve aged I’ve become enamored with the sensations, those prickles of warmth at the universal human notions that lie beneath these societies, what we allege to value on celluloid streamers. That relationships can survive all of this awful wrenching between folks, that you can strike me and perhaps one day we’ll be friends again, beyond turning the other cheek, that I won’t be Linda Pugach’s ghost in this instance of flesh.  I just can’t do it, story after story, the evil wizard and his tech, some twisted scepter, the colored faces of victims everywhere shifting as the everymen (and women) enter, assured that justice will take place on behalf of their officials and the scepter is adopted, absorbed like wasps into the fig tree’s fruit and passed onto the world many seasons later, rebranded by a jester wielding his streamlined wand, his king secretly nodding in approval as he unleashes one last plague on his people.

Why all this, then?

From then on I rose from white fire again and again, an epic poet’s dream-protagonist at war never to return home. The same days of tragedy lived on repeat. I’ll pass after a sharp mental decline - deviated brain; tragic sort of thing. Perhaps they’ll scatter my ashes along the path taken in a twisted symbolic ritual.  Prints of Time planted on every body, twisting left and right pinned beneath celestial hands. A career spent in front of cameras so the entirety of this bloodline can see every line spoken and formed so selectively, the mass unaware of any pain. I can barely speak in public, often stumbling over my own feet. I’m afraid if I don’t start recording now, they’ll lose me. It’s a marketplace, you see, everything in front of us: all for sale.

The siren Cecilia told me, having handed me a shining gold piece: We were there together once, the cameras were rolling and we spoke to everyone though we were locked onto one-another, you proclaimed your love for me despite the fact that we are all apes in uniform, from your winter coat to my lingerie. “A marketplace,” it was the first time you’d said that and it was one of the few things you felt bore repeating. You said that you wanted to reset into a golden age of life and live it as dreams are dreamt. So I sent you here for an instant, where the day is always the same, the kind of thing you contemplate, envisioning the future from goal to goal - awaiting each delivery. This is the critical piece, the last thing you ever needed. No sitting at your dinner table thinking about the generations lost to defaulted infrastructure, whereupon a nearby youth explains her immediate-apparently-imminent destiny, not yet affected by bureaucratic restriction and you want to scream that it was always a lie, but your colorful mask is as resilient as her certainty, the warmed lentils and rice eaten in a softened peace, and you can only feel how quickly things are moving, your soul exhausted from the ride she has only just started.

I don’t need this. It’s been barbed wire between my teeth for years now, I bit down and with time the bleeding got so out of control I was waiting to take up Cecilia’s offer from my earliest days, the coin in my hand the toll to get out. How simple the changes seem to everyman, I think, a man thrown from one end of this life to another. "When did we speak last," I’d ask, “perhaps it was the life before this one?”

Eventually the two lives would merge so firmly that memories from one or the other would become entirely indistinguishable, I’d call the man-angel before me Michael once again and his visions would merge with my own as our paths fused into near-indiscriminate facsimiles.  I see it all, everything, hint of the great plan before us all, pieces of a great many worlds’ blueprints. The lies of that puppet-jester hopping before me, the colors of all matter evaporating before that scepter, altered to the mad king’s liking and he sees me, sees my seeing. You asked, “why all this, then?”

For the answers.

It pricks a bit, an event that I manage to record because it’s substantial and generally awful. I recall the first girlfriend and subsequent split once the venom had settled into the creases of the earth upon which we stood. The first steps of university well-aware I had no idea what I was doing and worse yet, why I was doing it. The first night out a week after my twenty-first, my stomach and faculties in (what I thought was) ruin. The sickness I feel every time I remember this problem before it flutters off elsewhere to fester and I go back about my business. You’d have to be ill, to be this far along the edge without falling off. I just want to feel something sometimes.

I’ve written these words hundreds, thousands of times even, probably more. They only started to connect once the songs I listened to in my car on drives to and from my girlfriend’s home in my senior year of high school before we tried to kill each other started making my eyes water so many years later, the old caves long-abandoned. That’s day after day I’ve wished away, boxes I just had to check. At some point the progression bites you in the ass and you’re on the infamous downward slope, I can even imagine wanting to get some surgery or treatment over with unaware that that would be the end of me as I mock the daytime television playing in the pre-op station as our numbers are called one at a time and I’m wheeled in my hair having lost its color several administrations ago. That’s every generation’s same struggle, right, that their youth slips away and so much of life is spent revisiting, dreaming? It’s really simple, no one wants to check up on a guy pushing fifty that’s pursuing girls with “teen” at the end of their age. I figure it’s all about what’s relatable and none of these things have ever been relatable no matter how well I grafted words from my skin to the page - the order, the rhythm, it didn’t seem to matter, the memories just had to sit in oak barrels and age, though this wine...this wine will likely taste a lot like piss.

Public service announcement: wherever you’re reading this, wherever it ended up, the words before this were all a prologue for this moment, this moment is what this was written for. I’m already old in my early thirties, I won’t acknowledge that a smartphone is a thing, and in my memories no matter how recent - the phone has a cord even if it really didn’t for most of my life, even in some of the most formative years. Think about every moment planned out that went nowhere, are those the things we think about on our deathbeds and regret as opposed to going the free spirit route? If you’re “fortunate” enough to live out your days you too may own a deathbed. It might be the one you pick out with your wife at the wholesale outlet on a Saturday around the end of winter when the cherry blossoms bloom and the streets of the house where I did my last two years of mandatory public education are littered with pink corpses that are all too perfect. If climate change takes anything I’d prefer it take everything useful before those cherry trees because at least they were nice to look at from my window as I longed to escape to another room with a window and a worse view. I remember moving into a literal ghetto and the freedom was a massive upgrade.

Do you remember your first meal as a free adult? I had a breakfast sandwich from Denny’s around midnight and it was glorious; every bit of it. I never tasted better food, even today. Is this all this is? The brief transference of rights to a life of personal responsibility that magically ends upon the reckoning of tragic incompetence followed by a steep decline and large quantities of the sweets no kid ever wanted in their Halloween bag? No wonder I wanted out when I was sixteen, it was much more obvious, how twisted and rotten the carrot at the end of the stick was. Glass half empty and all that, call a spade a spade. “What do you actually want?” I ask myself over and over again. To this day I couldn’t tell you, not because it’s some big secret, but because I never know anymore. It’s changed hundreds of times, thousands maybe, like the words on the page that couldn’t resonate on my best days.

I was in the store with her, not the first girlfriend, this one actually mattered, she was ordering some rice and beans for a cookout and she grabbed me a cold soda. She always spoke the language in the carnes and because I was a guerro the clerk assumed I didn’t understand anything and usually a man, given her warmth, he’d say something disparaging about dating a guerro (because she smiled at him for too long so she must be for sale). They never lasted long, those clerks. We left together. She’d joke if I wore sunglasses and a hoodie that I looked like Ted Kazinsky - because all us white folks look the same. I loved her. Buried bodies in the middle of the night type of love. To where I’ve written her years later to apologize without a word back. She erased herself from planet Earth as far as I’m concerned but is still very much alive, something I admit I’ve done a number of times myself and recanted for a variety of short-sighted reasons all related to chasing money.

She used to play this one song and said it was about me - it was in English. I can’t remember the name or words anymore as I’ve effectively cut the memory from my brain. I’ve heard it once or twice since those days with her and both times I fell ill. The first time was at a small gas station that only took cash near the place I’d buy fresh eggs from a family with backyard chickens and I began to feel like I was being taken to God. It was my nervous system peeling away and ditching my body like an old suit after a funeral, my cells splitting apart but nothing new forming. Sacramento had been the first pocket to experience the heat death of the universe (much earlier than expected). I can’t remember what happened the second time I heard it.

Cecilia, I’ve moved on too. I have only survived with the want to apologize and accept that I may never be able to give it in person. Need this be the apology, this moment, so be it, I’m sorry. I wonder what hurts more, the rejection or seeing someone you lost and their having no memory of you because you were in fact that insignificant? Someone somewhere can surely answer and I wish they would so I could hurry up and avoid diving further into this mess. “Yes, Idiot, it’s way worse to have a former S.O. go all amnesia without head trauma on you, get over yourself and get a life dude, she didn’t like you that much.” The end.

Back to that song.

I called you sweet thing and we listened to that song on the beach in the Marina in and it was cold, far from where you’d called home and I loved your Mother’s home it was the kind of place I’d raise children too even as people marched the streets. Your caramel skin, your dark hair...it was all so comforting to me as we got into my father’s car and we’d taken off, my mother driving like a drunkard. Do you remember? As my sister stumbled the sun hit and on the ride home you were attached to my right arm, my hands at the wheel and I can’t even remember how you got home after if it was because of work or what. My eyes, to this day, water when I hear the notes of that song about the sunlight and I revel in jealousy. They were so young on the cover of the album we looked at it together and it was the easiest way to describe you ten years ago, “sweet thing.” It was ten years ago I felt these things in my blood, my entire body on fire from the inside out and the situation as such, I’d wish it had burned up in the wreckage of “us” because to this day I’d personally rather have burned up in a fire, my skin turned to ash for future generations to caution against and my bones left behind for my family to sort through than survive what was. Every moment after that last moment was a shot to the chest, Cecilia. Every flower that bloomed from that day onward was spitting in my face. I watch the city from my window and can only wonder how much longer it will survive without us. We the fuel of the sun, the universe can obviously do quite well without us, please just...take my hand because I’m scared that I don’t matter. Once we’ve populated galaxy upon galaxy, will any of us really be significant or is it the executive story of the turtle on a post? I just want to cry until I’m dried out and a scarecrow on a fence near the water scaring off the birds that pick at what matters. Perhaps then my existence is more than a boy on a beach holding a woman that couldn’t ever be mine, but probably not.

WELCOME, SO I GUESS I’M ALIVE…AN INTRODUCTION TO ME:

Enoch once told me that Eve, loving Adam, led him from the garden. That paradise was propped up on stilts overlooking Hell. A living flame stood waiting at the gates, watching them march into the rainfall.  The serpent came upon Eve, flowers in her hair and it spoke, that there were agents everywhere, that Lord God’s shadow cast along all but the Tree of Knowledge, that the fruit’s dew struck the ground and gold blossomed. She held the wisdom of kingdoms she’d never see in her hands returned to the only man there ever was and together they partook and it was fire.

Thus the child, pondering, where did I come from? No one came to answer. His olive skin the greatest mystery. He would grow up to kiss the lips of a dead Irish girl, retreating to the mountaintops, reddened snow trails stretching like highways, his sword stained, the blue arc of ice plied through bodies - quenching them, demoncoals in his eyes infected by the lowest pits of the underworld. Those fires burnt the fingertips of the Cherubim guarding the garden once.

And the world below, apes dressed one-another in suits of sheep’s wool. Implants placed throughout the body. Breasts. Rear ends. New hearts. Surgical mimicry merely outpatient. Genetic alterations on the fly. Cellular nanomachines riding nerves to the occipital and temporal lobes like a cowboy on a broken horse, identifying criminals with facial recon piping alerts to the boys in blue in vans along the streets of San Francisco...for the few folks that manage to leave the databank they’re just walking intel, paying the rent on their brand name exo's. They’ll print up new bodies at the sight of a sunburn, a rogue freckle, whiteheads.  Scars will end with the last of the generations that weren’t raised to dismay the bodies they were born to and then death will die as database dumps ghost the willing population piece by piece, every last grain of rice harvested and the animals long gone.

Subscribe now