WHAT IT IS

A boy went camping with his friend, his friend's mother, and his friend's mother's boyfriend because his father was in jail for just one more day and his mother was enjoying her medication for her broken limbs a bit too much. That morning, the boy didn't have to wake up at 6AM for school as he usually did. Instead, he woke up when he woke up to a house that, at first, scared him since he thought it was empty. But it wasn't empty. His friend's mother was in the kitchen smoking a brown cigarette, and she was the one who told him that there would be no school today, his father was in jail, his mother was in the hospital, and, yes, there would be no school today because they were going camping.

They went camping at the beach, near a Navy base, and early the next morning, the boy saw a helicopter drop many men laden with black sacks into the ocean. The young boyfriend, the night before, made them all laugh. The night before, his genitals had shown out of his short swimtrunks. When he saw everyone was looking at his genitals, he picked some of his scrotum out, stretched it between fingers, and yelled, "Bat wings!" The boy could never imagine his father doing such a thing, and he certainly couldn't see his mother thinking it was funny.

In the morning, after the helicopter, the young boyfriend made the two boys breakfast: Ramen noodles with soy sauce and five eggs broken into it. When the boys got into the ocean after breakfast, and once the water started lifting them up and down in circles, up and down in circles, they both vomited. Small gray fish nibbled at the Ramen bits they erupted. When they had eaten the Ramen noodles, they had enjoyed slurping them because they were so long and curly. But, in the water, with the fish nibbling them, the noodles were no longer long. They were just bits--less than a centimeter--and gray.

The boys swim in the water all day. They push off the sandy bottom of the ocean to catch waves with their bodies. One of the boys has skin that becomes dark with the day. The other has skin that gets terrible red. They swim in the water for so long that they both chafe between their legs. They get what the young boyfriend calls "Ball rash," and the young boyfriend laughs at the way the two boys have to waddle around and cup themselves.

One of the boys--the one with the sunburn and the dad in jail for just one day--wonders if the men with the black sacks are still underwater. He never saw the helicopter come back to pick them up, so he worries he'll feel someone grab his ankle, pull him underwater, put him in a black sack, and carry him to some other place. And then someone does grab his ankle. It's the young boyfriend.

5 MWE: The despot gave us his synopsis

She was soaking. She soaked. She dropped her book in the bath. She took a bath and dropped her book in the bath when she was taking a bath. She left her book out in the sun because she got it wet in the bath. The book dried. Its pages crackled afterward. Its pages were a bit wavy afterward. She was in the bath. She soaked. She was soaking. A nemesis is not just an enemy. It is someone that you can't defeat. She was scared of her nemesis. When they were children, they planted beans together. They sat and shelled peas for hours together. Sugar snap peas. Sugarsnap peas. Sugar snappeas. He took a swig. He swigged from the bottle. It's always a bottle that's being swigged. He swigged from a cup? Is that even possible? Can one poison another if that other person ate oats and oil earlier in the day? She had to lay her hand flat when she fed the horses carrot bits. Her grandparents showed her slides of the two of them riding ostriches. Her grandmother had recently dyed her hair. Her grandfather had recently died.

The water bug had pinchers on its backside. The rain barrel was full. It had rained last night. The thunder had shaken the house. The house was made of cardboard and zinc. The house could withstand water, waves, lava, dust, and waterbugs. The waterbugs were in the rain barrel. The barrel got tipped over. When the thunder shook the house, it gave off a strange smell outside. To describe the smell would take away its mystery. The night had been warm and orange. The rain barrel came from across the street. Even though the water bug floated in the water in the rain barrel, it, the water bug, could not remember ever hearing thunder or the house shaking. All it could remember was being put in a jar by a girl. The girl had tried to celebrate her great grandfather's birthday but failed because she could not sing or light candles or dance or wear small purple roses in her hair. Her mother spent most of the morning plucking Japanese beetles off the roses with chopsticks. Once she removed a beetle, she would place it on a brick and then use another brick to squash it. She did this over and again until she created quite the paste.

The tourists would leave the ocean kayaks too close to the shore. The ocean would take the kayaks, pull them out to the breakers, and then send them down the beach. If this happened, then someone from the hotel would have to go to retrieve them. Or the tourists would paddle far out past the breakers and become too tired to paddle back in. If this happened, then someone from the shore would release a creature to swim out and eat the tourists. The tourists might fall out of the kayaks and hit their heads on the reef. They might step out of the kayak, step on the reef, and have a morey eel bite their foot. They might put a foot down on the reef and stand on a poisonous sea urchin. You can eat the inside of an urchin--the sea kind. Not the kind that's a child and in Charles Dickens. He shaved his legs. He waxed his lip. He shaved the hair off his toes. He trimmed his toenails and fed them to birds. He invented a material that would allow him to breathe underwater. He waved underwater to all of us. We were eating at a restaurant that, for one of its walls, had a gigantic aquarium. A large tank. Sometimes, divers would appear in this tank and perform tricks. Or divers would have to fight each other toward some kind of death. Or animals were released on them.

THE FIRST TIME HE SAW MR. KILGALLON HE FELL MADLY IN LOVE WITH HIM

1.
Yesterday it was the Boston Marathon, with crowds gathered, police ready, the runners covered with suntan oils, many limbering up, even wheelchair participants checking their equipment like careful auto mechanics with their tools of all sorts.

It was their tailored hell, with piglets squalling, nuns aflame, horses rolling in bushes of thorns, children blowing over the mouths of green bottles, demolition derby cars painted with scripture.

2.
Hesitant but not uncertain, and drawing from libraries all of her knowledge, she walked into the room for her comprehensive examination, with a feeling that was certainly not calm, because there would always be the unknown.

Nauseated and intermittently retching, and attempting to remember the names of all his mother's friends, he fell down the stairs that led up to his apartment and into a garden bed.

3.
Once or twice the siren, obscured by the sudden explosion, echoed but with a dreadful parody of itself sounded with a noise like a banshee.

Five thousand times the hummingbirds, driven insane by the smell of molasses, pecked the eyes out of rabbits and cats.

WHAT IT IS

The carpet had wax in it from the other night. The other night, they had lit many candles in a sad attempt at being romantic. Some of the candles guttered--a garish pink one, a wine-purple one--and dripped wax onto the carpet. Last year, too, they had dripped wax onto the carpet by accident, but they were lucky because they had had a rabbit, and somehow the rabbit ate all the wax off the carpet perfectly. It was astonishing how the rabbit ate the wax and left the carpet looking perfectly clean. There was not even a stain when the rabbit finished because the rabbit must have actually trimmed the carpet when it ate the wax. Since the rabbit did what it did, they didn't have to worry about the landlord taking some money out of their deposit to clean their carpets after a night of trying to be romantic in the way that most people are romantic.

But this was a different year--they had no rabbit--and there was wax on the floor again. She was screaming at him. Veins stood out of her neck. A vein stood out of the middle of her forehead. When she screamed, she cried and produced incredible amounts of snot. In between screams, and in between sobs, she would gather snot from under her lip and off her chin. She would cup the snot in her palm in order to wipe it on him. She wiped it on him. An entire wad. Her name was Sycamore, and that was his name, too. Sycamore. I was glad all at the top and I sang.

She was screaming, sobbing, crying, wiping snot, and there was a baby left mostly unattended on the couch. Just an hour earlier, the baby was not unattended at all because Sycamore and Sycamore were talking to him and playing with his feet. They made him laugh many times. That was an hour earlier, before Sycamore became angry with Sycamore. Sycamore screamed, and the baby sat on the couch and picked at its toes. The baby did not belong to either Sycamore. It belonged to another woman who was off working and needed help. That morning, she had told them not to let the baby pick its toes. It had a problem with picking its toes. The baby also had a dark bruise above one eyebrow. The bruise was raised. It was what one might call a "mouse." The baby looked embarrassed to be there, but it certainly couldn't really be embarrassed.

Sycamore said he wanted to leave and tried to leave, but Sycamore threw herself at the only door the apartment had and wouldn't let him leave. He tried to open the door with Sycamore angled against it. He got the door open a crack--outside, it smelled like semen because of a vile tree--but then the door slammed closed again, and he felt terrible about even trying to force open the door with Sycamore there and the baby there. He thought about how, just yesterday, they laughed because of the semen tree. He had tried to find out what kind it was and found it was something with "pear" in its name, though he never saw any pears on it. Sycamore spat on him. She wiped her nose on him. The baby nearly fell off the couch but caught itself. The baby would grow up to be a terrific person.

5MWE: Her ticklish skin made her spry

Boring. If you are bored, you are boring. My grandmother told me that, which bored me. I would wait for her to leave on her errands before I went to snoop through her bathroom and bedroom. I looked for wooden boxes. I looked for smells. That's what I looked for. Never a dull moment is what I heard when I eavesdropped. Never a dull moment. It was a dull moment. She tried to convince her husband to eat the beets she had boiled. He did not want to eat them. He would not eat them, so she took the beet water--it was still a deep redpurple--and poured it over his head. The windowsill tasted of licorice ever since she had laid many ropes of licorice in its spidery hideaways, which never failed to drown all comers simply by convincing them that, yes, the bombs had been dropped even though it was a balmy Sunday. More dresses could have been supplied to the ugly prom-goers, but they never hatched in the nursery. The ribald damnation was on time for every match, whereas the dowager slept on the roof of the house like Snoopy. As Snoopy did in the failed event.

He always slept on his stomach. He couldn't sleep on his back. It must have been the way his mother lay him down when he was a baby. She must have always lay him down on his stomach, so he got used to sleeping on his stomach, and now that he's much older, he can't help but to continue to do what he did when he was a baby. His wife, however, wants him to sleep on his back. She wants him to sleep on his back because she sleeps on her back, and she wants him to do what she does. If he does what she does--she reasons--then they will do more things together. As it is now, they do not do enough together, she thinks. She thinks that, and she says it. She wants him to sleep on his back. He tries to sleep on his back but doesn't have much luck. She wants him to sleep on his back. Most nights, he starts out sleeping on his back, but then, sometime in the night, he rolls onto his stomach. His wife wakes him up late at night. She is angry that he's on his stomach. But I tried to sleep on my back, he tells her. I must have fallen asleep on my back, he tells her, but I cannot help that I move to my stomach in the night. One night. There comes a night in which she wakes up late and finds her husband sleeping on his stomach. She rolls him onto his back, and he doesn't wake up, though he seems to stir. He begins to surface out of his sleep. He is on his back. She takes two long needles and plunges them through his eyelids and into his eyes. She still holds onto the ends of these needles. She takes these ends and jerks them around so that she rips apart his eyes. He wakes up but cannot open his eyes. There is much shock in him.

The hackles on a dog. The organism is alive. We thought it was dead. The fraud wears yellow pants. When the toady promised to pull me out of the river, I didn't believe him. Her heart quaked. He grew his beard so long he could tie it around his neck. He said it was a natural defense. He grew his beard so long he could tie it around his neck. It was so long. It was thick. If someone were to try to cut his throat, it wouldn't work because of his beard. If someone were to try to hang him by his neck, it wouldn't work because his beard would serve as a buffer--a pillow--against the noose, the anondyne necklace. My grandmother must have used ether as an anesthetic. She must have killed my father's python. Built a fine lover in the very old cathedral next to the new vagabond mercurial fantasy in the doggerel forewarned fisticuffs dangerous this time of year if you don't lull it to breach the breach we shared the fact that we breached together. To get her. To get him. Togethim. We were finally togethim.

WHAT IT IS

A concrete floor that's always damp. The small room under The Big Blue Building. He tries to bring a mattress into the small room by himself. He had found the mattress on the bank of a stream. The mattress is a heavy queen because it has water in it still, and it buckles unexpectedly as he tries to cram it into his small room that smells of the damp. He has no one to help him. He knows no one in the town. There are young people living in The Big Blue Building, but he is too shy to speak with them, and, anyway, the man who told him he could live in The Big Blue Building said that he couldn't let anyone know he was living there because he was living there free. He wasn't sure if the man who told him he could live in the Building even owned the Building. The young people work at a nearby mountain and are from some other country. At the mountain, they operate machines that grab people by the heads and lift them up to the top of the mountain. Or they work in stores, selling rocks and hallucinogenic weeds. Or the the most talented of them work as trainers who teach people how to run and roll down the mountain fast without getting too injured. He drags the mattress into the small room and is pleased to have a bed where once he had a nest of comforters and attic insulation. He lies on the bed and looks at the various things that are in his room. There is an industrial ice machine that no one uses and that he doesn't know how to turn off. Every day, he has to empty buckets of ice out. There is a pile of old cash registers full of money. There is a cage full of bottles of liquor and a refrigerator that smells horrible when he opens it. There is a toilet with no privacy. There is a sink covered with plaster and dripping with tar. The young people must be home from the mountain because he can hear them tromping around above him. They are probably making pasta. He works at the grocery store in town and has often sold them jars of whatever tomato sauce is on sale and cartons and cartons of pasta. It seems they eat only pasta. He isn't sure if they know that he lives in the small concrete room that's below them. They certainly have never recognized him at the grocery store. They've never said hello. They've never crawled under The Big Blue Building to knock on his door and ask if he'd like to come up and have some of their pasta. He wonders what would happen if he ate the toilet piece by piece. He wonders what would have happened, if, as a baby, he had fallen into a bucket of roofing tar or paint. They eat pasta, and he eats tunafish and mustard on crackers. Sometimes, at the grocery store, he works at the registers. He often makes incorrect change, so, whenever he works the register, he makes sure to have a pocketful of quarters and dollars in case he gets the sense that he messed up making change. If he gets such a sense, he sneaks into his drawer a few dollars or quarters just to be safe. His boss, Oregula, used to give him back his change if he went over, but now she doesn't do that anymore. In fact, she's been having him on the registers more and more, and he thinks the reason is that she wants his money, his overage.

THE FIRST TIME HE SAW MR. KILGALLON HE FELL MADLY IN LOVE WITH HIM

1.
Great was his care of them.

Horrendous was her laugh in the basement.

2.
The big thing, exciting yet frightening, was to talk to her, say what he hoped to do.

The difficult part, impossible but fascinating, was to gulp down the oatmeal, taste its secrets.

3.
He had never been hungrier, and he filled his mouth with wine, faintly tarry-tasting from the leather bag, and swallowed.

They were disoriented, and they couldn't see the spinning disks, quietly humming on dowels, so despaired.

4.
Soon afterwards they retired, Mama in her big oak bed on one side of the room, Emilio and Rosy in their boxes full of straw and sheepskins on the other side of the room.

We left the cinderblock bunker, Dafa to his submarine, Paga and Marsho to their poison swings.

5.
On stormy nights, when the tide was out, the bay of Fougere, fifty feet below the house, resembled and immense black pit, from which arose mutterings and sighs as if the sands down there had been alive and complaining.

At closing time, when the mushy heads can no longer eat their powders, the people in the little village, two miles away from the Powdery, flashed their inside lights off and on.