She does that thing where she bites his lip and pulls at it as they come up for air, and Colin can feel a sweet tension at the base of his spine. His hands run down her flanks. He hooks his thumbs under the hem of her blouse.
“You sure you want to do that?” she whispers. It’s dark, but her voice is warm.
“Yeah,” says Colin, “Sure.” He pulls it off, then unsnaps her bra. As the rhythm of her breathing quickens, he leans down–but instead of nipples, she has hideous lamprey-mouths! That suck out his eyes!
Holy shit!
Wen’s charge is two walls. The interior is twelve feet high, made of reinforced cinder blocks, to support a large geodesic dome; it has doors in each side. The exterior and more recent, constructed in the wake of terrorist attacks, is Quikrete and razor wire. It is taller, and has only a single gate.
Inside these walls, under the dome, is a third wall, or a segment of one: 7.8 meters high, 12.6 meters long, and ancient. Once it held back barbarians. It could be seen from space.
Now, only just, it holds back entropy from its encroach onto glory past.
Thursday, January 6, 2005
Jonah hears the rain start outside. His wrists burn. He’s holding the old fountain pen wrapped in two towels. He no longer cares for quality of letters, or the decrepitude of the house where he’s barricaded himself: he’s on the last page.
It’s not until the first drop lands, near the top of that page, that he finds out the roof leaks.
“So that’s it?” Jonah growls. He forces the window open and scrambles out onto the roof. “Come at me, then!” he shrieks to the sky. “COME AT ME!”
The rain musses his hair a bit, then leaves him alone.
Wednesday, January 5, 2005
One day, when he’s ten, before he develops his stutter, the boy who will be the Cold Man walks bravely up to the crazy man in the park. The man’s snapping pictures of families, humming to himself. The boy taps him on the shoulder.
“You always keep the lens cap on,” he says bluntly. “Is that because you’re crazy?”
The man blinks at him and, too slowly, smiles. “No,” he says. “It’s because cameras can capture other things than light.”
The boy sees that the man’s irises are a perfect silver, and that, like coins, their rims are stamped with words.
“No idea,” laughs the vocalist, who answers to MISTER wang. “We thought Dial-A-Candy would sell, but #1 on BigChampagne for five years straight? No idea.”
“It’s the fans, really,” adds percussionist mister WANG. “Tricks like turning the disc over to hear the secret album helped bump sales, but the Methodists have done the most.”
“There’s one guy who buys a thousand copies monthly,” says MISTER wang, “and plants them. Says he wants to grow music trees. Maybe he will!”
Rhythm Method’s plans for the new year include possibly recording a new EP, and vacationing in Paraguay, which they purchased last year.
He carried no life insurance; he scorned it as “betting on when you’re going to die.” He finally drew up a legal will, at her pleading, but it references a safety-deposit box at a bank that no longer exists.
Joe’s only system of organization was piles, and piles of piles. In the days following his death, she worked with a terrible dull urgency to bring order to it, to find what needed to be found. She’s still working. It must be done; it won’t be done soon.
What Joan has to do, now, is make sense of a life in pieces.
Friday, December 31, 2004
He struck out from home at sixteen alone, hitching, as he often did for the first half of his life. He dyed his forelocks white-blond (his little sister told us, the admiration still in her voice) and drove a muscle car, which got stolen. He loved water; he joined the Coast Guard.
He always returned to Kentucky. He was a son of Kentucky, and the Kellys who settled its Kelly Ridge.
His fishing buddy Jimmy described a bridge over the Kentucky River where Joe would go, on hot days. Eighty feet at least, he said, from the surface; and Joe dove.
Thursday, December 30, 2004
Hell, my mother has absently mentioned, is her husband’s visitation. It’s hours of standing when she wants to lie down, anywhere, forever. It’s a line out the door. It’s the endless upkeep of her bravest face while people, so many people, tell her exactly the same things.
Dante had Virgil when he walked into Hell for love. Orpheus failed to bring back Eurydice, and it cost him his mind.
How do you stay human when you have twice walked into Hell, guideless? How do you learn to be yourself again, when you have twice walked out, and your love stayed behind?
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Joe’s business card says “Joe Wood, Builder.”
The first house Joe built for himself was a refurbished two-room schoolhouse. I’ve seen it only in pictures. The second stands unfinished at Kelly Ridge, on land settled by his ancestors–built, after his first marriage ended, by a man intent on being single forever.
The third is my mother’s apartment in Richmond, which he finished a month ago, just in time for their first anniversary. It’s so beautiful. To walk into it is to know its beauty, and understand that one man built it perfectly, with his hands, for the woman he loved.
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
The only response to “I’m sorry” is “thank you,” because “I’m sorry” is such a flimsy response to death. So is a casserole, or a hug–do you really think that what she needs, right now, is another hug?
But of course such gifts are not really for the grieving.
This is the only appropriate gift for a widow: a minute of your life. A minute you would have spent breathing and loving, with your eyes open, warm. A minute from your long and many days, to bring your death that much closer, and let the two of them say goodbye.
Monday, December 27, 2004