The buvette was too dark to see inside. The floor smelled musty--as did all the tables. A tree grew in it. She was waspish. She had not bathed in several days, and she made sure to tell this to all of us. The floss in the mouth. He never dried his hair after he got out of the shower. He would dry off his whole body, but not his hair. He would stand in front of me. Red up his face. He said I could borrow his bike. Dilatory. Time dilated. This is when I was not intelligent enough. I had a difficult time putting three sentences together. He could not write a paragraph. He did not have an easy style--something that could be called journalism. He wore leggings that had gold thread up their sides. His father had considered jumping off. His father made a list of what he wanted and then waited for it. His father walks with his toes pointed out. When his father was young, he had spent a lot of time waiting for his siblings. He would sit on the roots of trees and eat persimmons. His father ate salvage mushrooms and canned pineapple. The man ate rice and beans and told his wife that he didn't like the smell she left on the couch. He trimmed his eyebrows too short often. He would end up next to a small cage full of too many green birds.
It was not drama. It was pageantry. I heard a sneck, so I looked up. Saw him holding a homemade weapon to my neck. I was to put gas in the van while he palmed the weapon. I was part of a performance. I was to sit and read while my friend played drums hooked up to waving amplification. Many of the people in the audience laughed at me--and not because I was reading something that was meant to be funny. They laughed at my pretension. The pretense of it. She was not talented when it came to writing. She did not write much, and what she wrote was not cohesive in the least. She was not one to touch a hot bit of metal. She heated up a knife on the electric coils of the stove. She heated it up and held it against her leg to leave a line of a mark. A roar. A rout. A rut. She was exceedingly snide as she ate dinner in the window. Just the other night, she had eaten with another person who had never driven a car into a river. Windows are down. She had an awful tattoo of a bird. She had an ounce of metal she kept in her pocket. The blind man was not aware of the tattoos he gave, but they were much sought after. Usually, the tattoo artist is the one who moves the metal pen. But this other tattoo artist refused to move the pen. He just held it, and it was up to his subjects to move under it. The people had to squirm themselves under him. He just held.
She passed me the snips because I wanted to cut something off. Essex, who could not say certain words because of injuries done to his mouth, asked aloud what kind of tree that was. The tree, which did not exist outside that one block of property near the defunct train, smelled to awful to stand under--even if you were desperate for shade. A little inane. A little insipid. I like most the writing he does after he has done something. I do not like what he writes when he just stews. He writes too thinly about the abstract. We found a can underneath the floor. I attached myself to the wall. We got the wrong bolts first and had to go back to the store. Before I died, I wanted to see a rib of mine outside my body. I wanted to have it until it yellowed. I wanted to scrape out some of my own yellow poppies and put them in my mouth since all I saw were wires. There were wires, sure, but what if I shot a flower into the sky with a rubberband. My mother had to put the rubberbands she got for our business under lock and key. My father put a nice bruise into my mother. Internal bleeding. The giving of a bizarre disease.
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