I look at the lights cloistered to the ceiling. The white is clean, bright, and sanitizing. My mind is drifting from one port to the next. I pull in, I pull out. The joy escapes me. What is my maniacal menace? I step through the portal of time. I am absorbed by a periwinkle haze. The flowers pull me through. Wooden shoes fly in the air like spaceships. Dutch aliens probe the dusk and dawn. Stone lions stare, those eyes of chrysanthemum penetrate. Restless. Ambient. Wheelful. Woebegone stylus. Headful. Heartful. Hurtful. A hot sun reflected off the walkway. Fish fight in the windows the aromatics of the girls like scented arrows on soap shop day I’m cold on a hot day. Popcorn porn. We are aliens. Aliens are us. Just look at people, really look at them. It’s not hard to see if you really look. It’s the shape of the head that gives it away. The shiny skin, too. The slipperiness. The eyes, the nose, the mouth. Everything.
The morning field was wet with green, the fences were warbled, the old barn rested crooked on its wooden limbs. An alien figure was bent in the yard. He was wearing blue work clothes, tan boots, and a bandana around his neck. He toiled in the damp earth with a small hand-held spade. We wondered what he was digging for. We looked away for just a few seconds, and there he was, pressed against the back window and peering in.
Soon there came a light tapping on the glass and he held something up and pointed. It was an old coffee can. “Worms,” came the voice, muffled by the clear barrier. “I was digging for worms. I felt a vibration in the air, the source of it being your minds, and perhaps you were concerned I was in the yard, that I was going to do something bad. But I assure you, I was not doing anything bad. I was merely digging for worms. I’m going fishing.”
He came around to the front of the cottage and stepped up onto the porch, a sheet of nearly summer green behind him. He knocked on the door, his large, pale face grinning on the other side of the inset glass panels. He was abnormally tall, and that odd head was so round and gleaming.
“What does he want?” I said to her.
She looked up from her book. “Go see.”
I went to the door and opened it only about four inches. He tried to push his face through the gap. “I was just digging for worms,” he said again, and he held out the open coffee can for me to look. “See.”
I peered inside and saw the creatures wriggling there. The smell of the dirt was strong. “Where are you going fishing?” I asked him.
He moved his head in a direction over his shoulder. “There’s a creek right over there.”
There was a silver sliver of a stream on the other side of the road. White rocks glistened in the sun, gray boughs weighted with plump green leaves hung over the trickle of water.
“Doesn’t look deep enough to fish in,” I said.
“I go farther down, and it is… What’s it like in there?”
“It’s private. Very private.”
“And we’d like to keep it that way,” she snuck in from the comfort of a leather recliner. “If you don’t mind.”
He stepped back from the door, turned around and looked up at the sky. “Well, I suppose I better head off before it starts to storm.”
“Fine then,” I said. “Good luck with the fishing.”
I closed the door and waited while he walked off the porch.
“What a weirdo,” she said.
I kept my eye on him as he walked across the road and struck a path alongside the creek.
“He doesn’t have a fishing pole,” I said, finally realizing it.
“How’s he going to fish then?”
“He’s not going fishing,” I answered her. “He’s up to something entirely different. He wants in here for some reason.”
“Stop it.”
The strange man with the coffee can of wriggling worms and dirt leaned against the trunk of a weathered old tree and his gaze fell upon the cottage occupied by the couple from the city. He didn’t care for the man at all, he thought he was cold and rude. The woman was beautiful. He knew that, felt that, had something for her now. His gaze shifted to the sky, and he looked for the lights. They would be harder to see in the blaze of day, gray clouds in pockets, a soft breeze. His large hand swept over the smoothness of his head. He looked down at his pants, his tan boots. It was nearly the first day of summer, and he felt like he wanted to snatch up some token of love.
The sun had fallen and scraped its knee. The darkness flowed in like ink and cast an all anew eeriness on the cottage. The windows were many, the light inside orangish-yellow, white, silver; the darkness outside was very dark, witch black. A light on a pole that sat in a field across the road flexed itself from orange to fire white to nothing. It repeated the pattern as if it were some signal, some ghost voice from beyond.
“Why does that light keep going out?” I asked her as we rocked on the porch.
A storm thundered in the distance. The sky illuminated for a moment. “Pulsations, I suppose,” is all she said, and she went back to her book.
The intermittent light from the lamp on the pole reflected in a pool of rainwater on the road. The distant thunder rolled like a bowling alley. Fireflies blossomed fluorescent green then dimmed as they danced in the night air of nearly summer. I looked up the road and into a broken grove of trees where a white light grew. “Is that someone’s headlights?” I wanted to know.
She set her book in her lap. “I’m trying to read,” she said. But then she clicked off the little clip-on light and closed her book completely. “Listen to those frogs. I bet there are people in the world who would come out here and not even know what that sound was.”
“You know, I never heard an owl my entire life until about eight years ago.”
“That’s just so interesting,” she said, and then she went back to her book.
The couple had no idea the odd stranger had been lurking just a few paces away, breathing and listening, controlling the lamp on the post in the field with his thoughts. “Off, on, rub out, rub on…” he whispered to himself as he made it happen. He made a movement with his hand and the lights in the broken grove up the road swelled and faded, swelled and faded. Something was waiting.
Then he threw the coffee can of immortal worms into the air as hard as he could, and it skittered across the roadway. The metal clanged against the cracked asphalt until it rolled through a puddle, and then finally stopped with a slurred hush.
My heart rattled in my chest like a stovepipe explosion. “What the hell was that?”
“The wind must have rolled a paint bucket across the road,” is what she said.
“A paint bucket?”
“A metal paint bucket.”
“You’re crazy.”
“If you’re going to be all nervous and disruptive, go back inside.”
“Wow. Really?”
No reply. I went inside for an evening coffee. The Keurig had incontinence. I proceeded to get an orange from the refrigerator. When I went to slice it, I forced the knife too hard, and the serrated edge went into my misplaced finger. “Mother fucker!” I yelled, and the orange and the knife went tumbling to the floor. The blood began to seep out. I sucked on it like a lonely vampire before running it under cold water at the kitchen sink.
She must have heard me because the cottage door opened. “What happened?”
“I cut myself. This knife is dangerous.” I waved it around in the air.
“Put pressure on it,” she said as she went into one of the cabinets to dig out the first aid kit. She undid a bandage and wrapped it around my finger.
“It’s a pretty serious injury,” I said. “Do you think I’ll lose my finger?”
“The way you yelled; I thought you did.”
There was a thump out on the front porch. A board creaked from some sort of pressure bearing down on it.
Both our heads snapped in that direction.
She moved toward the door.
“What are you doing? You can’t go out there.”
“I forgot my book. I’ll be right back.”
I watched her walk away. She went through the door. She barely closed it behind her, but then something suddenly sucked it shut tightly. There was a mechanical hiss and vibration.
I went after her, yanked the door open and stepped out onto the porch. She was gone, a red taillight haloed by an ivory glow ascending to the heavens.
In the bangs of midnight glitter the soft song of a rain long traveled reaches high and then falls across the plains and the monstrous valleys and the cities that bloom with fever and the people there all tremble in the wake of an acid fish freefall, the tempest looms, the clouds stir, the sky pummels itself, the small man down there beyond a pane of glass sits and wonders if life is even real.
Across the velvet troposphere the stars and planets all align, heartbeats on Earth are often helpless, the mad ones ushering in the demise of decency and honesty and honor, catapulted clowns in shackles take to town hall podiums and do nothing but spit.
The grit of the wild west, orange blossoms and glass, wooden houses, long yawns of prairie butt up against mountain muscles, the chivalry of the star people, red-handled scissors cut away the clouds of construction, the blue sky like birth, like boy, like soft love against the hard stone of the world, 26 letters for endless thoughts.
Periwinkle pencils tilt like men, scratching incoherent, do not drift from beauty, what words come next, questions accumulate like barn hexes in Witchland, Hollyrock, cold cock, chimes, chants, the Broadway groovies, the downtown floosies, diabetic testing supply salesmen getting hit by cars in the aftermath of a bank robbery, too high, much too high, where’s that waiter with the water!?
“Turquoise turtles tell me where you are. I don’t want to walk around in this world without you, my love. I will fight to find you on the other side. I don’t fit in this world without you. My space with you is everything.“
The turquoise turtles swim through space, a necklace of you around their amphibious throats, liquid stars, quasar cigars, men and girls in bars, the women, the boys, we are all each other’s toys.
She is beautiful on a space sofa, that cushioned ass.
The ambient drive of a midnight cockatoo tail.
A tale of breathlessness, a tale of wind in the face on a warm summer day.
Vanishing, all vanishing like liquid ghost meat…
The librarian brushes his hair at the checkout counter when he thinks no one is looking. It’s a big bush of rust-colored wire, tangerine-flavored spun sugar really, and he must force the black apparatus through. His eyes shift at a glide to the side to forever abide… Asking “I wonder if anyone is watching me?”
His name is Troy and he used to be a mannequin but now he’s a real living boy. There’s a female librarian clerk on the other side of the round counter. She sits at a computer and inputs information. She makes him nervous because he is the beast, and she is the beauty. “I wonder if she likes my hair?” he asks himself in inner monologue speak.
At lunch in the park, the female librarian clerk, her name being Beth Combs, snickers in unison with her friend. “What do you think of his hair? Isn’t it weird.”
“It’s like he’s never done a single thing with it since the day he was born,” the friend answers. How does he not realize he looks ridiculous?” They both laugh out loud.
Troy doesn’t know how they talk about him behind his back. He eats a Launchable Luncheable in the breakroom all by himself… Crackers, meat, cheese. He wonders if he himself is cracking, if he were to be snapped in half would the crumbs of himself scatter on the wind of the chilly library air conditioning.
A hurried woman sneezes. Troy shelves books with a raging erection. He looks like a younger, orange-speckled version of Gene Simmons from KISS. He wants to Detroit Rock City his member across the entire void of the world. He enjoys the musty smell of books left long untouched. Voices bellow throughout the place and he just wants to scream: “Shut up! It’s a fucking library!” Bruzz, bruzz, bruzz… the noise is like a chainsaw on a chalkboard. “Shut up!!”
He sneaks off to a hidden corner of the library and talks to his grandmother on his phone and smiles. He whispers into the receiver, “I think she really likes my hair. I think I’m going to ask her out, but I think I’ll bring her a dozen roses first. That will for sure knock her socks off.”
The next day before his shift, Troy stopped off at the florist shop. “I’d like your finest dozen roses,” he told the big man behind the counter.
“Oh, my my. Someone must be in love,” the florist said.
Troy shifted nervously. He never really thought about love and now he was most likely in the midst of it. “Well… I need to ask her out first,” he said with a nervous chuckle.
The florist presented him with a full bouquet of plump red roses. “She’ll drop dead over these,” he said.
Troy looked at him funny. “I hope not.”
“Okay,” and he figured in his head as he looked toward the ceiling. “That will be 112 dollars.”
Troy’s head nearly exploded. “One-hundred and twelve dollars!?”
“That’s what I said… Flowers aren’t cheap, and having a lady friend is costly. In more ways than one.” The big florist winked at him. “Everything has gone up, I’m afraid.”
Troy grumbled as he dug his wallet out and reluctantly handed over the money. “Here you go.”
“Good luck, young man. Come back and tell me how it went. I own this place. Name’s Ralph.”
“Ralph Furley?”
“No. Does this look like Santa Monica to you?”
Troy laughed to himself. “Guess not. Thanks, Ralph.”
Troy sat in the parking lot of the library and did some deep breathing exercises to try and calm himself. “This is crazy, this is crazy,” he repeated. For a moment he thought that he might chicken out and throw the flowers in the restroom trash can. He glanced at himself in the rear-view mirror. He practiced smiling. He petted his head. “At least my hair looks good,” he said to himself. He took one last deep breath and got out of the car. He forced himself to march straight to the front doors and into the library. He proudly held the bouquet of roses out in front of him.
Her eyes widened when she saw him coming in her direction. She looked first at his hair, then the bunch of roses. “Oh, no,” she muttered to herself.
“Hi, Beth,” Troy nervously said, and he thrust the bouquet in her direction. “These are for you.”
She nearly fell forward when she got up to take them from him. “Thanks,” is all she could muster.
“Would you be interested in falling in love?”
“Troy?” she said, and she looked around and people were staring, people like patrons and co-workers, small children, mocking teens. “Can we talk about this in private?” She was mortified.
That’s when Troy got down on both knees, clasped his hands together as if in prayer, and looked up at her. “Please go out with me. Please. I’m begging you. I’ll die without your love.”
“Get up, Troy.” She tried to laugh but started to cry, and then she hurried off to the breakroom in milk utter embarrassment.
When Troy moped into the breakroom, Beth’s face was sour, her arms folded, her jaw clenched so tightly she thought her teeth would be ground to dust. “Hey,” he said.
“Was that some sort of prank?” Beth wanted to know. “Because if it was, it was a horrible thing to do.”
Troy managed to raise his head and look at her. “No… I just wanted to go out with you.”
She pushed the bouquet of roses in his direction. “I’m sorry, but I can’t accept these… And I don’t want to go out with you.”
He ached inside as he took the flowers from her. “Why?”
Her eyes went to the top of his head. “It’s your hair. It’s just so… It grosses me out. I just imagine things living up in there. You really need a haircut, a good haircut. I can’t be seen out in public with someone with hair like that.”
“So, if I get a haircut, then you’ll go out with me?”
“No, Troy. I’m not interested in you like that. I have much higher standards.”
“Okay,” he mumbled, and he turned away from her and walked out of the breakroom. He rushed by his conveniently positioned boss and blurted out, “I quit!” and he kept on walking until he was all the way out in the parking lot. He slammed the bouquet of roses down onto the grimy asphalt, red petals splintered, thorns scraped against Troy’s broken world.
He fell to his knees and looked up at the roaring blue sky and its ship of clouds. He screamed like an animal. “Oh, heartbreak has me now!” he bellowed. “I’ve been slain by the arrow of love, the bowman a she-devil!”
Several people stopped and looked at him. “I’m all right,” he said to the gathering crowd. “I’m just in a great deal of emotional pain.” Troy stood up and brushed off his dirty knees. He turned and started to walk away. A car pulled into the space where the roses were gasping toward their final breath, a black tire pressing down and forever sealing them into the scrapbook of bad memories.
CEREAL AFTER SEX 