Very little was disappointing. I would degrade myself--but in a way I could tolerate. The road smelled pink. My prescience had left me. My mother has never been called stocky. Though I strained through the morning's exercises, come afternoon, I had a glaze on my face that betrayed my keeping a ten year old secret. I had set chokers on trees. A dangerous job--but I needed the money to put a downpayment on a swimming pool. I wanted to swim with my animals and smell chlorine. The house was on the side of a hillside. It took us days to clean the property. We took days. I had crookback and defacement. I was mutilated, unmackly. I was wrong to look at, but I did such an excellent job. Have me fold a napkin, and, without doubt, I will hide some little present in the creases. He did not understand the meaning of waves. He was not ready to launder his clothes. He had just broken with her, after all, and he wanted to wear what he had worn through it. A canker could have been pleasant. He had yellowish liquid to put on and numb his canker. He had no way of describing the way it tasted. Bricks that are slick.
My body disembodied. Not because of violence--because of discouragement. I sit on a chair that, I myself, had refinished and re-upholstered. Little brass nails. A hammer. Stretching. I had caned a chair. I had done some needlepoint of a parrot. I went to her parents' house because she had invited me to a party. The idea was to press people against the walls and slide down. Writhe on the ground. She showed me the dresses she had been working on in her basement. Then a drive. Some dancing. She asked if she could kiss me, but I wondered what kind of permission would have slid across a room so quick. The drive took us to a building that had once been above ground. On stilts. I became sick from the breakfast she had made me. We had agreed upon an exchange. She would make breakfast, and I would burn our clothes. We had committed a robbery in them. I showed her a river and some rocks on which I had slipped. I showed her a horse that had thrown me and a beautiful woman with an amazingly raised mole on her chin. Her brother did not like me. He did not like that I asked him how he had developed such a strong grip. Once, on the bark of a dog, I saw her brother. He had an odd shadow on his head, and, only later, he told me that he had painted it on. He wanted to be a bit more obscure than I am. Well, look no further than this bucket.
She had a depression on her head. A dent. My grandfather did not know that I was in his room with him. He had a blanket about him. He was tying rope about his waist. He combed his hair and wrote something on a notecard. He had a pen. In private, he often called me The Waif. He said my eyes had nothing but dopey trombones in them. We went to watch kickboxing and were told about a man in shorts. I could hardly concentrate because a woman had a child that I thought I recognized. I had never seen her before, but I was certain that I had seen her child. I could not tell what sex the thing was, but I knew that sex had produced it. The child was wicked and godless. It did not watch kickboxing. Instead, it looked at me. The mother, I knew, was in a relationship with one of the men fighting. Looking at her face, I couldn't tell which man she wanted to win. I had heard about new knots being tied. I knew how to look in the encyclopedia and find the knots in K. I knew how to tie all those. And I had borrowed books from the library, so I knew how to tie knots. But many new ones have been invented. Certain people are innovators and the rest take their shoes off and cool their ankles in a water fountain.
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