A small dog is killed. Its legs are cut off and arranged in a vase.
His father killed the small dog. His father was a short man. His father was in his 30s but had white hair. His father had dark skin and many many dark freckles on his face. The way his freckles looked, it looked like someone had a mouth full of dark liquid and sputtered it all over his father's face. His father had white hair. His father killed the small dog he had brought home. He had found the dog on the side of a road at night. He was just ten at the time, but he and his friends had a car they would drive on dark roads. He and his friends had a car that they had painted matte black. The entire thing was black. They knocked out the headlights and spraypainted the cavities that the broken headlights left black. The entire car was matte black. At night, the boy and his friends would drive this car. They had a set of nightvision goggles. They used those to drive the car at night on dark roads. They could drive by other cars, and those other cars--rather, the people inside them--would have no idea that they drove by. It was one night, when they were driving this black car, that they found the small dog on the side of the road. When they found the dog, it became day for three minutes. It then went back to night. The dog had a compartment inside it that was full of wires and electronics. When they submerged some of the wires in sodapop, the wires sang and spoke to them. The wires sang of tropical islands--where it was easy to get your own tubers and fish. All you need to eat is tubers and fish. Find yourself the right berries. The right mushrooms. Have some wild pig every now and again. The tropical islands no longer existed. The wires stopped singing. The boys had their car taken away and had to spend some time in a dungeon. The one boy brought the dog home. His father told him he could not have the dog in the house. The dog could live on the roof, sure, but it could not live in the house and leave its dog smell all over everything--especially the couch. How about I put towels on the couch then, the boy said. It was that thing that he said--that thing about the couch and the towels--that enraged his father. His father took a pair of tin snips and cut off the dog's ears and tail. He plunged the tin snips into the dog's belly and scissored open the dog's belly. Inside this dog, they found a baby. The baby was the father's son. He recognized it right away. Now, you are a big brother, the father told the boy. The dog lay open and slowly started coming back together again. Its ears found its head and healed. Its tail found its ass and healed. Its legs all came back. The road at night. When it is dark. When a father's hair turns white, and you can't help but to look at all his freckles. The boy has dared friends of his to sneak into his father's room and connect his freckles with a marker. He tells these friends of his that if they connect all the freckles, then they will see a curse word spread across the father's face. The father wakes up. He turns on his shower and uses cold water because he wants to save on heat. He gets himself wet and then turns off the shower because he wants to save on water. He soaps himself up with soap he had made. His body tingles from the chilies he had put in the soap. He does not need hot water when he has chillies in his soap. He soaps himself up. He gets soap in his ears. He uses the soap on his hair. He runs his hands over his face. He knows he cannot open his eyes because then he would get soap laced with chillies in his eyes. He fumbles at the spigot and gets the water back on. He rinses himself off, and that is how he takes a shower. He makes sure that his son does the same thing, but his son wants to use hot water. His son does not want to turn the water off. His son does not want to use his soap because he doesn't like the way its oils smell. His son does not like the chillies, so he kills his son's dog. He takes it apart with tin snips. After some days, he takes the stiff legs of the dog and arranges them in a vase.
She saw some mound rising on the horizon.
She has a small nose and all her other facial features--her eyes and her lips and her mole--seem to want to be as close as they can be to that nose of hers. The result is that it looks like she's not using her face as much as she could. She is in a relationship with a man who already has children. He did not have these children with her. He had them with another woman, but that woman is dead. He had built a greenhouse out of salvaged windows. It was a great idea. The greenhouse worked great. They grew great vegetables, but what wasn't great was that she climbed on top of that greenhouse only to fall through it and cut major arteries on the interior of her elbow and thigh. She was dead. He was alive. His children were alive. The other woman with the small nose was alive. She was so alive that she climbed a mountain. At the top of this mountain, she found a wooden box, and in this wooden box was a handmade book, and in this book she saw that other people had written messages. These were banal messages--ones that said hello to people who climbed the mountain or ones that tried to say something about the mountain or the trees or a particular sunset. She took this journal with her. She ripped out all the banal things and replaced them with other banal things. She was in a relationship with a man who had two children. The woman the man had had the children with is dead. She first gave birth to a girl. This girl proved to be at least twice as strong as any other child her age. When she was five, she requested her own benchpress set. Her father told her she shouldn't start to lift just yet because it would stunt her growth. So she made her own bench set. She made the bench itself out of rough-hewn wood. She even nailed nails through it so that when she'd lie on the bench, the nails would pinch at her back. And she was five, mind you. She made her own weights out of old paint cans she'd fill with concrete. She'd workout and not ask her dad to spot her. Instead, she'd ask other men to spot her. Her mother often talked to these men. Her father would come home, see her mother talking to some man, and ask, "Who's this man?" Only the man would be a large man. The greenhouse. Oh, go tend to your squash and tomatoes. His daughter was naturally twice as strong as any child her age, but once she started lifting, it couldn't even be measured how strong she was. Her muscles did not bulge. She wasn't a bodybuilder, mind you. She was a weight lifter, not a bodybuilder. Her muscles did not bulge. Instead, they became incredibly dense. She trained the nerves in her body to withstand incredible weight. Any normal body would scream to get all the weight off it, but she slowly trained her body to accept large quantities of weight. And then her body didn't just accept the weight. It came to expect the weight. And she was just five, mind you. She was a five-year-old who had built her own masochistic weight bench and weights. She was a child who would recruit men to spot her. She was five. Then her mother got pregnant with another child. The girl was nervous about this child. She started to hate her mother. When the mother gave birth, the child went after the baby. Many people in the hospital had to hold this child back. She wouldn't stop coming after the baby, her brother. No one knew what to do because she was just a child. She was now six. They figured she would get tired. That she would accept her brother. But she never accepted her brother. She would come after him hard, screaming that she'd rip him to pieces. She came so hard. People had to hold her back. They had to take her someplace else far away. They had to lock her up, but she would break out and run back to where she thought her brother was. To kill him. She vowed she would never stop, and she never did. Her mother died by falling through that greenhouse. Her father had a new relationship with a woman with a small nose. She continued to lift weights. She continued to do this. She would bend nails for fun. She would bend screws because they bit into her fingers. She would blend up entire chickens with twelve ounces of warm water and drink that in squad cars. The police did not mind if she drank her shakes in their cars. The police didn't mind because they thought they'd have to call on her someday.
No comments:
Post a Comment