She doesn’t like the way my skin

smells.

Says the vacuum tubes make me smell like ozone. And I tell her she is too delicate.

She’s liable to split

open and fracture. There in the bed

with the pillows and blankets, it’s dark when I turned to feel for her.

Her hair

is in my face like spiderwebs.

When I touch her

elbow, it just slides away.

So I reach my arm around and I find another

elbow. But it’s facing the wrong way.

Bending opposite

of the other.

 

Her knee

falls across mine.

It feels like a strike

from a meat tenderizer.

Makes me gasp from the pain up my leg. But I can feel that it is her knee from the size

and the weight.

Her small cut teeth and her fragrant hair on the back of my

neck pinches so hard it

draws blood. I cannot reach the lamp on the end

table.

 

 

Her hand on my chest,

pushes me away, backward

into the knees and elbows and bites.

Her fingernails

on my shoulders scratch me, digging in to draw deep red furrows.

 

I can feel her eyelashes on my cheek, blinking against my face like the first time. FDM

In the courtyard where the weed had grown wild, the rain was drumming on stone. Paulo had waited for Mother Superior to leave her office overlooking the gates for lunch and midday prayer. Now we all pressed our faces to the glass. We waited to see if he would make the train, the way he had outlined in the cafeteria when he went stockpiling our cartons of milk and sandwiches. Like a shot, Paolo broke out across the grounds at the gate. He slipped in the trucking road and all of those cartons spilled out from the bag. But Paolo did not stop to look back. I watched Paolo run so long that Paolo did not look like Paolo anymore–just another shape in the field beyond the trucking road that bristled and sparkled while the wind blew through it. FDM

America Is For Sale. Take her purple mountains carved with the faces, now unrecognizable. We don’t need them anymore. America is for sale. See that hazy Pacific Coast, flocked with animals and evergreens. We got the land at a bargain. We can sell it low. America is for Sale. Those deep woods of our southern heartlands: see the place where Blues was born from suffering and pain. We have extracted the heart so the lands are first come-first serve. If you pass this up, you pass on a bargain. America is On Sale. These fly-over-states: our rust belts, and dust bowls. We are too tired now to work them, so we could bundle them all together and give you a slush price. Did you hear that? America is for sale! Our Capitol too. See the monuments for reflection, the unmarked graves. See the Chambers that used to rattle with fervent progress, when we cared. Once they were a proud people. Buy a ticket. America is for sale and every one must go. FDM

Listen you goons, I am trying to tell you how this works. I have crafted for you a storyline for you all to immerse yourselves in. This one is my design. It’s called “Kaos”. With a ‘K’. It is not Dungeons and Dragons. Imagine a world wracked by nuclear fallout, strange fifth dimensional beasts and roving bands of raiders. The three of you are going to be trying to survive harsh nuclear winters, skin cracking sun of wasteland deserts, and hordes of mutant freakoids. You roll this dice for initiative, then after that you can do whatever: fight, fuck, or walk away.
Well how do I walk away?
Where are you gonna go, Lou? You got cowshit in your ears? This is a wasteland.
Whoeven says that?
Says what?
Guys, keep it down, Molly is upstairs. Phil, You gotta be outside of combat and then you roll a dice. Whatsamatter you never played Monopoly before?
Who even says ‘cowshit in your ears’?
Oh please this isn’t anything like Monopoly. This is some satanic shit right here that I am looking at.
Phillip, thinks everything is demonic since he tried burning a Ouija board once and found it again beneath his bed.

In the room beneath the bare electric bulb with the men on their stools holding their steins, they stop and are still because they can hear Molly at the top of the stairs. Molly will hold this memory in her mind. The one in which her father crossed the concrete room to hoist her into his arms. She will remember the way the world shook while he bounced her on his leg, and the men all fought around the billiards table. Her small fingers on the gridded map sketched on graph paper. Dice rolls. Loud laughter. And her father, stern and familiar, brought their wild tempers into line. How happy they all were together for a while. FDM

See this city of men,
that moves its rhythms diurnally
away from my stars:
third on the right and straight on into the sun.

I laugh while looking
down upon those silly fools: men in hats,
and cars
and home loans.

Look at their gruesome prickly faces and long legs in slacks.
They forgot about time.
They always crumple like paper,
bent up at the end.
It will never happen to me.

I will keep my course
and laugh,
and never love
or know what it is to have a birthday, one year older and another year lost.
All of my years will cling to me
like flight feathers.

And in the night, I will come to their nurseries and take the lost ones. I will show them the principle constellations, third on the right and straight on until morning.FDM

In the car back from the party, they ride far apart from one another. She is bitting down on either cheek. She can no longer stomach the way he makes random observations of people on the sidewalks, or the ironic shirts he orders online, or the conversation he is having with the Uber driver when they ask her opinion. She says, “I don’t like either one.” In the morning she leaves before he is awake. That lie becomes the last words she will ever impart to him. She prefers Lennon, she tells herself later, in line beneath the harsh white light at an all-night pharmacy near the beach. Who the fuck else, but John Lennon? She is so close to the beach that she can hear the surf clap at the shore. She can taste it.FDM

Henry Ryan flips through the script in 1947 while he is thinking of a boy in 1925, he clears his throat again so that the director has to look up at him. Miller does, finally, look up. Talk through this with me, would you? Ryan says. If he is being ‘vibrated’ with such tremendous force wouldn’t he just die? Ryan asks with sincerity. A thing like that, it wouldn’t send you back in time. It would just scramble you into fluffy eggs, would it not? He sees Miller sigh but knows Miller is going to answer because Ryan is the studio’s golden boy. Even after the long nights drinking, waking up in stranger’s homes, the studio knows Henry Ryan is a box office draw. Conceptually, yes. Miller agrees. But not in this picture.

In 1925 under a hard sun that beats on the boy and the dirt football field equally without shadow, the boy has a choice to make. Coach Drew, a long-gaunt man with snow-white eyebrows is telling him that he has been accepted on a full ride to Brown for the way he runs plays, for his leadership, and dedication to the sport. And the news makes his father proud; a rough man like Drew, who works a bad delivery job on days when there’s anything for him to deliver.

Miller is not like Drew or his father, he would never guess that Ryan could throw a perfect spiral at one point, or run countless yards without getting tired. He is talking about concepts, naming names like Einstein, and Picasso, but none of it clicks for Ryan. And then Miller puts out his fist straight out in front of him. Elbow locked. Okay Ryan, draw me a perfect picture of that fist. And Ryan gets hot because he thinks it’s a gag. I aint been drinking, if that’s what you mean, Ryan says. But Miller shakes his head. If you really drew a picture of my hand it would not be accurate. Because you can only draw it from your point in space. And I can only draw it from mine. To render this smooth hand perfectly, you would have to do it from every possible perspective, yours mine, that page over there by the water cooler. It would look disarranged, and messy. Maybe even spiky. Because we exist from many countless perspectives. This is a picture about that, Ryan. All the alternate possibilities accessed through vibrations. Do you get my meaning?

In 1947, Ryan is awake in the early morning, thinking of the choice he made as a boy. His hips are bad and it pains him to get between bus stops to campus. He lives modestly and coaches football, though he has never really loved the sport the way some who followed his career expect that he might have. Out on the field that has green grass now and chalk lines on its endzones, Ryan thinks of how proud his old man was for choosing the way he did. There was a man who believed in putting selfish things aside and doing what was most practical. After the school day is out, and Ryan has some time to himself, he goes to a picture show. In the dark, he allows himself to dream fantastically about time and choices.

FDM.

When it was very dark in Garret’s room, and Love Line was on the radio, we had finally stopped laughing a while. He said: let’s go look for a crime. And I understood what he meant. The two of us had bonded over the pulp culture of X-men films and Spider-Man comics that were left to the sensitive outcasts of our age group: teenaged boys who did not have cars or girlfriends. I followed his footsteps in the deep dark of his family home and listened to the security system beeping while he turned it off so that we would be able to get in again without his mother knowing. Garret wore glasses and a retainer. He had many toys, one of which was a small bat of smooth wood. He held it now like a billy-club. I don’t remember what I had to arm myself with. Probably nothing. 

Outside, his gated community was the sickly Tang-orange of city street lights. We strained our hearing as if there would be a sudden sound of screaming to chase or police sirens wailing an alarm, like in those great movies. But I worried we would get in trouble. I never had been in trouble, not really, and I knew Garret had not either. Then Garret stopped right where he was. Do you see that, he asked me. Look quick. Look over there.

We had come to the very bottom of a t-section in the streets of Studio Estates. About a block up was a big white wolf dog sitting tranquil at the intersection’s stop sign staring in our direction. It did not have any master or any other obvious reason for being there. Garret and I laughed a little together. Then we went back to his room and we went to sleep. Neither of us saw the dog again.

There were many things like that that would happen around Garret. Another time while we were in the midst of a spirited game of big-tag (in which you are too old to play tag so the stakes are upped by recruiting a large group of high schoolers), he stepped on a voodoo doll that had been discarded in my apartment’s laundry room. Garret received an allergy to shellfish he had never had before that. And, yet another time when we were both older, we performed chaos magic over a bottle of Jack Daniels under his mother’s dim garage light. Within a few months, he had met the woman he was going to marry, at a collegiate open house. Just like that. Thunderstruck.

There were starts and stops to our friendship. But I remember that shroud of great coincidence that seemed to surround him. He was always running into those people from his past, introducing me to an old dentist at the supermarket checkout, or an old classmate while we two were waiting in line for a film in a new town.

And sometimes I wonder if we will ever run into one another, years from now, at some seance or spiritual retreat in Nepal, at the base of a mountain, where we are both softer, and kinder too. Maybe then we will have more answers for one another.

FDM

We were at Le Studio in the Laurentian mountains before she burned up into nothing. It was a tranquil cottage surrounded by woods so green it all looked and felt like a screensaver. Bowie and Summers walked like seventy-foot ghosts in the dark and Donna and I were doing everything, in every position rather than vocalist and lead guitar. The recording wing remained untouched. We made no sounds that we wanted recorded. Except when Arthur was in from his morning and mid-afternoon walks, a sandy-haired drummer with a long beard and skinny willowy arms. Then we were all friendly and chattering fools. Poor bastard, I thought. Married five years and how many lead guitarists had Donna flaunted at him? I must have been some kind of devil in his mind. Even so, I watched Donna closely, who was especially friendly with him. Her almond eyes smiling beneath her gypsy bangs and full cheeks. Her lips all red and pursed at him. Even still wearing his ring with the others, all collected on those long piano fingers. Oh Donna.

I first had a theory, and then a lame excuse. I pronounced, one morning after Arthur returned from walking, that I was going to get ingredients for poutine: to pick up some cheese curds and that gravy stuff. We had potatoes in the pantry, left for us there by Ross, our band manager, and that begged for something to be done. There was also a pistol in the pantry, perhaps for moose. As a result, I would have to go for a while. And it stung at me, those high-pitched noises of excitement, they made in the rustic dining room together, to see me go. Some bandmates. Treacherous sluts. That was what made me decide.

Not far down the road, there was a little shop run by a humorless old man who only played Bach. He sold the gravy stuff and also plenty of odds and ends that anyone in those mountains might need for survival. Of course, it was a travesty, that me, lead guitarist, would have to go for the stuff myself but he didn’t think anything of it. Beside the hanging pickaxes display and around the corner from the milk freezer, was pesticides. He scrutinized me when I bought the box of rat poison and the gravy stuff. And I set to memorizing his face, in case he became a ‘loose-end that needed tying’. I had seen a lot of murder in movies and television. It was always some mundane clown that would get you in the end.

I made sure I was back early in time to hear that tell-tale bed frame. But when I walked into the house of wood and glass enwrapped in that secret mountain forest by evergreens, Donna and Arthur were fully composed. They were surprised to see me back so soon and with lunch.

I served them around that modest dining-room table. Arthur made a funny look toward the pantry where, like a fool, I had left the box of rat poison. But rather than run for the pistol or slap the fork from her hand, he only held off eating. His eyes were all glassy but full of an old storm. Something there not involving me but centered intimately on Donna who ate. Arthur and I watched Donna eat and smile around those wet, shining chunks of potato in her mouth and at the edges of her lips. Until half delirious, she fell from her chair and kicked and whined. She promised us both that we were her ‘boys’. When she was screaming and gasping I could almost ‘feel’ her becoming a legend. Arthur could too. 

Still, I expected more fight from Arthur, that little freak. I expected he’d come for me in the night. But we drifted toward the studio the next morning and he got the rig going, and played back her vocals so we could both hear her melancholy howls at those notes she couldn’t quite reach. But Damn she wanted to. Then, in that holy space of Persian rugs and foam walls, Arthur got on his kit and nodded at me while he set the last tempo for us. And I found something in those string riffs I had never known before Donna.

FDM

It was Stephanie’s dumb idea but when we started we could not stop. We took turns sprinting down those big luxurious streets from Apple Wood Lane to Jefferson Place. Passed all of those wood-chip lawns and waving American flags, as if it still meant the same thing as it did when we were girls here. The windows were lighting up and our neighbors came out onto their lawns, looking severe at the spectacle: one of those crazy girls being chased down by some animal on two legs. Around ten, a security guard with a smooth young face drove by and rolled down his window at us. But when he recognized whose girls we were, he nodded solemnly and kept driving. Stephanie cackled at him. When I asked her if she wanted to stop, she would say, just one more round. Through the mask’s cut-outs, I could see her. She was rosy-cheeked and sweaty and heartbroken. I gave her Dad’s Doctor Zaius mask and we went again.

 

When it was my turn to be chased, I liked to start out in a jog. Then, when my arms and legs were hot and my skin felt tight, I would go faster. I liked to glance over my shoulder and see that wild shape picking up speed behind me: Stephanie wearing that rubber simian face and that golden hair flowing wild, her arms pumping in her green windbreaker and those white Addidas sneakers beating the black pavement. Whenever I did it that way, something deep in the pit of me, something that had been inert at his service, would bloom and go nuts and I’d start screaming with laughter and running as far and as fast as I could. And Stephanie would stay so close behind, barking and screaming, until it felt like we were sisters again.

FDM.