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.
END
CEREAL AFTER SEX 