ice cream tamer

Like blackberry jam.

I met him somewhere between where you are and where I am. It was dark, the stars stark and sudden, our breath colored with cold. Or maybe it was day, bright in the park, the grasses scurrying under our feet, joggers moving along the spider web of sidewalks. He does not look like they say, neither skeletal nor hooded, neither scythe-wielding nor ominously tall. More like Joe Black really, bearded, unassuming, awfully handsome and quiet and gray.

We talked easily of our occupations, me relating the minutia of mail delivery, him detailing the depths of death. I told him about the constant flow of mail in letters and magazines and furniture catalogs; he told me about the incessant demand for death among the old and young and up-and-coming.

I like to park the truck and walk as much as I can, I said. Look people in the eye when I give them their mail. I like to leave the scene before someone finds them, he said. I hate to see mothers approaching baby strollers, sons finding fathers, the ambulance driver at the scene of his wife’s car accident. But the act itself was glorious, he said. Sublime. Just as the sun began to set or the dark began to dawn, he took my hand.

Posted at 10:37pm and tagged with: lit, prose,.

a man wandered in the woods. This aspen forest hugged Saginaw Bay, a foggy drop of Michigan magic north of Detroit a hundred miles. I mention Detroit because people think Michigan is Detroit. But I am here to tell you that there is much more to Michigan than Detroit’s dirty streets and limo drivers. You should know, however, that this wandering man was a Detroit man. I use the term “man” with some hesitance, because he’s really just a boy. We are not sure when we become men for we are not sure what a man is.

If you saw this creature, dull-eyed, flaxen-haired, and wet-lipped, marching with some uncertain certainty in these woods, would you call him a man? He is dressed like a boy. He has a backpack. He has, even, a note from his mother. It’s on stationery a light, warm yellow. I’ll tell you what her looped handwriting says in just a moment. Every other step he takes like he knows where he’s going. Those other steps are visibly uncertain. Where do you run away? If there were woods nearby, would you run to them? Would you find meaning in your solace, in the dirt under your nails, in the struggle to stay warm in a Michigan winter?

You could say his father lives on the other side of these woods. But his father lives farther than this boy-man can walk. He walks to the idea of him, captured in photographs only, bound in an imitation leather album he’s got in his backpack. There are pictures of a man there with a wide smile and white teeth. He does not frown. To the boy-man, he is strange: a saint, or maybe an angel. What work is wrought by the dead by memory only? If a boy walks in the woods to the memory of his father, is it his memory compelling him, or is it his father with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls? If I write a letter to you with the feeling of my heart, do you receive it with the same feeling? Is that feeling in the words? Is it in the ideas behind the words?

His mother writes in well-worn phrases, picked dead of meaning, wall hangings as scribbles. Do those older than us use them because they have new meaning or because they are lazy? You must find your own path, she wrote. You’ll know what to do. He lifts the visor of his helmet to read again, stops under nothing particularly interesting, as opposed to a gold bar of sun beaming through a canopy of some sort, like you were thinking. His shoes make the faintest of prints in the hard dirt, covered in leaves. There comes a time, she writes, look to God, she writes, where much is given, she writes, it’s the moments that take your breath away. He searches them for meaning, for anything originally conceived, for anything said new this time for the first time.

A boy, a man, an anthropod, walks in the woods. The sun follows his helmet and makes it gold. The shadows follow his gloved hands and swallow them up. There is a backpack with few supplies and a letter. Go west, young man, she writes. Your father would be proud. The man with the white smile is upside down in his backpack, but the boy from Detroit does not know this. He will walk until he finds the original memory, or feeling, that called him into these woods.

Posted at 12:00am and tagged with: lit, prose,.

goes the song. I am an island. There is a palm tree of a lamp in my hand and I’m bracing against the waves of sheets, bracing against the dark. It’s so quiet I can hear the lapping of the books, tumbled from my bookshelf like paper doves. Somewhere in this madness is my square glass phone, reflecting a cut of moonlight from between my ill-fitting drapes. When I close my eyes I see it startle to life with one, two, or three words: i am sorry, maybe, or i miss you but that’s too hopeful. i am sorry comes with bangs and i miss you comes with curls, big natural curls that bounce even when she isn’t moving.

* * * *

We kissed like they do in the movies, but it wasn’t gross. It meant something. On New Year’s, when she found out about her dad, we were in the backseat watching fireworks melt across the sky and I caught her crying. She closed her eyes but I took her by the shoulders and wiped her tears like the man she thought I was. Don’t cry, I said, because that is the best of three things you can say when a girl cries. Behind her I saw an elderly couple watching us and I figured they hadn’t wiped tears from each other’s face in a long time, and that maybe they’d remember to the next time just because of us. I don’t know, she said, and she looked at me with something to say.

What’s wrong?

This isn’t working, she said.

After a little while, the fireworks began to end, trails of smoke hustling after the dots of color in climax. I’ve always been good at goodbyes. I could always say the right thing, just like in the movies. Is this it, I said.

I think so.

I even held her hand, which I never do, and she closed her fingers tight, which she never does. Hillary Hillary Hillary, I thought, closing my eyes.

* * * *

There’s technicolor movies where the damsel pulls a very small gun out of her purse, a black purse with small veins running over it, and points it with a gloved hand at your heart. This has happened to me. I am laying on the island of my bed with a heart wound because it was a direct shot. The heart has 4 chambers and she pierced them all, that divine knot that surges without coming untied two and a half million times in the average lifetime, thump thump thump, it says modestly, beneath bone and flesh while we walk unaware.

A bullet to the heart wouldn’t leave a hole for sunlight to come through, like in The Quick and the Dead. It would fill right up with blood, as if you were being made right again, but it would keep filling up until your shirt was red too. There’s not a lot you can do with a bullet to the heart, so I try to lay back and breathe deep, but I’m panting sometimes and my head is light. I need a doctor, or even a nurse, and I’d like to reach out and push a button like I did when I broke my arm and spent a night in the hospital. But the only thing in reach is my lamp, tall and rough, the palm leaves bowing over me in mourning.

* * * *

At first we walked from our Spanish class, one foot in front of the other. I had to lead the way or she’d disappear into the crowd. You have math today, right? I’d say. 

Yes.

I really hate math.

It’s pretty bad in the morning.

Why are we taking morning classes?

I don’t know. She laughed, I swear.

Because we work, that’s why. Important work. People need shoes, for instance.

I know, right?

She worked at the Famous Footwear in the mall. She practiced her Spanish there on anyone she could. That’s an unfair advantage, I said.

Maybe.

Look, do you want to get some dinner sometime? Like this week?

Sure. 

Okay. I’ll call you.

She gives me her number. Everything’s easy. The sun is coming up over the buildings on campus. We’ll get dinner sometime, sure.

* * * *

Sometimes I fall asleep with a hand at my throat, or over my heart, clutching it unashamedly in the cover of midnight. I can feel the physical pain of it, the surging of new blood beneath my surfaces, working to make things right. I imagine a new heart in a cooler on a train from the East coast, unraveling through the Midwest like a shoestring. It’s packed in ice, fleshy and torn-looking and red and pink and tattered tan. My name is on it.

There’s no cure for heartbreak, the doctor told me. He really did say that. He sat below me on a genuine oak stool, and I sat on the high doctor bench, the one with the funny paper stretched over it. He could have been checking my reflexes with that blue triangle hammer, but we were looking at x-rays instead. You see here, he said, standing up. The folds in his slacks dropped and smoothed to penny loafers framed in marked off-white tile. You see here where the break occurred, he said meaningfully. These pieces will eventually mend, son, but I can’t give you anything for it. Where my celestial knot of flesh should have been there was a blast of powder, colored pink by special dyes. Well that’s not true, he said. He fished in a few drawers for a sample boxlet of pills guaranteed to make me “sleep again, and eat again too.” My mother stood solemnly in the corner, like I’d asked her to if she insisted on coming. Her eyes were closed and she looked asleep.

* * * *

We first met in Spanish class. She had Egyptian eyeliner on or something, the kind that ends in a pinch at either end. When I walked in that first day I felt like we immediately looked at each other, but we didn’t. She was looking down at something, in all reality, her mind lost in conjugations. I was late and the professor was reeling in the telling of a story about Peru and temples and stones that lifted and locked into place like Indiana Jones. I was old enough that I went to the back and sat next to her. When I was younger I would have moved at her a row at a time, each class ebbing nearer until I could smell her hair and ask her to dinner without looking like I needed her so much.  I began to whisper in a very offhanded way, like, what did I miss? And she said, not much. This story?

Is it a good one?

What?

Is it a good story?

She nodded and lifted her eyebrows towards our professor because I was being too loud, I think. I notice everything. When I was little I would look out the window at the big boys riding their bikes in our cul-de-sac, around and around, watching the spokes in the wheel turn in the sunlight, watching the shadows turn with them in the grass, watching them watch me. When I was even littler I got a bloody nose from tumbling into the legs of the trampoline. I stood at my back door and cried because I didn’t want to touch the doorknob with blood on my hands. I cried until an older girl opened it for me. Hillary was nodding sweetly at the professor, and even laughing, because this story was apparently very funny. He was all hands, waving and circling and shooting something. He was very funny, apparently. He’s funny huh? I said. She nodded.

* * * *

I’m still on the island but I’m wading out now because it’s morning again and I can’t stay in bed forever. Today I will stretch and shower and pull my toothbrush over my tired teeth. I will rub my eyes into perfect vision, and I’ll tease my hair until it’s tousled just right. A tide of books rushes over my feet: My Antonia and The Brothers Karamazov and Broom of the System. The smaller ones fill the gaps: Of Mice and Men, Mrs. Dalloway, The Art of War. I put my hand over my heart and feel a very distant, burning twinge. But it’s threads and threads deep now, soon to be forgotten. I step out from underneath the palm tree. I’m looking for someone very special, I always say. Someone as special as me.

Posted at 12:00am and tagged with: lit, prose,.