All these are shock waves
and they disturb my surface,
all bangs and rattles
infusing the gentle soup
surrounding my brain.
Turning rings from wheels from
hoops of silent grammar,
blindfold crawling again and again and
the pinprick gleam of quartz a beacon
toward a rising syntax hidden
lost in the dirty corners of my house,
a falling away of verbs and of action.
These lips and tongue
fold themselves with increased looping
across the boundaries of new vocabulary,
a color emerges from its own new name,
rediscovered correspondence is translated and aligns itself
to order along a still wet alphabet.
In a sun flooded room west of here
I will sit with wooden matches
and scratch each to flame
until the box is empty.
Showing posts with label isolation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label isolation. Show all posts
21 March 2009
19 March 2009
Life On The New Frontier
He moves around his house through gathering darkness. He picks up objects and he examines them; he often understands their functions, their purposes. Sometimes he doesn't.
Though he believes his actions random, there is a pattern that can be traced, there is a regularity to his movements and his pondering. He is delineating new boundaries. He is inscribing a geometry; he is describing a shape.
She works. The job she does is like any other and she makes no distinction between them, the jobs she does, because the are all work. She can speak but she does not because there is no reason to. There is no reason to speak because she is working. Instead, she sings. She knows she has flattened one hundred aluminum cans when the song she sings is over. She can count but there is no reason to count when she can sing. When the song ends, she sings it again and flattens one hundred more cans.
The sweat that rolls from her skin rolls down her collarbone and collects against the skin that swells across her breasts. Her breasts are new ones; she never had them before. And the song she sings is a new one because the cans she flattens have never been flattened before. She wonders about her new breasts far more than she wonders about the new cans; she wonders about her new breasts through the song she sings over hundreds of new cans. She can do both at the same time. She remembers that every once in a while there are new cans in her life but there have never been new breasts in her life. Her can-song has begun to sound a little bit different.
She feels the sweat there under the swelling and she feels new to feel a new feeling there under her new and continually growing breasts. The way one fine drop of sweat will cling for an instant against and to her nipple before stretching itself to drop into the damp cloth of her rag, her shirt, her clothing. It is an old garment.
She takes no pride in her work, she takes no thing away from her labor except for a verse once in a while to add to the songs she sings when she works. It may be the flattening-the-cans song or the digging-a-new-hole song or the making-the-sex-thing song but it is only always another verse if it is a new thing. Like her breasts.
She knows her breasts mean big changes.
There is a town glistering in the distance and though he can see the lights from his place there on the road he knows that it will be several more hours before he is among them.
She feels the dust before she sees it rise from the road that leads to where she lives. She feels it rise and fall in all the heaviness dust carries with it when it rises and falls long before her eye holes take it in. She doesn't look up, she doesn't need to look up because the song isn't nearly over and she has a long time to sing before what the carries with it will be where she is. There is plenty of time to flatten cans, climb up on to the roof of the place where she lives, to look at the locus of the dust cloud, to sing the friend-or-foe? song, to prepare to welcome or to hide in the bushes before it got there.
His hands are making some motions but he doesn't exactly know what they are. They are motions at the ends of his arms. They, the motions, make things happen, but he really doesn't know what the things are, the things that happen when his hands make motions.
There are lights flashing past his eyes, his eyes that are watching his hands see things that are reflected in the shining skin that covers them, his hands. Red, blue, yellow, white, white, and white. These are the colors that pass across his hands, the hands he doesn't even recognize. Pity the hands, he (they) thinks to himself (themselves). Pity the foolish digits that do things without knowing what they're doing. Pity. Foolish.
She jumps down, she jumps up. The cans have been flattened enough, enough cans have been flattened, and she will retire to the bushes and hide while the pilots in the vortex of dust destroys her home. She knows that these kinds of things happen sometimes and she will sing the these-things-happen song while she hides among the dusty bushes and watches him (them) do what he (they) do to her house--the kinds of things that get done like burn it down because he (they) can't find her because she is hiding in the bushes. She wonders what they'll do about all the flattened cans.
She is surprised when she realizes that what she had been thinking "they" was really only one guy and his hands. She had felt "many" coming and had expected to deal with "many" and it knocks her a little bit to realized that "many" in her head meant "one" and his "hands." She revises her song as she sings it.
Fire is what they want and, despite his anxious posturing, fire is what they have started. He wonders what kind of house, whose kind of house, they are burning down. He does not approve of burning houses but has no resource for protest. He can merely watch and wonder.
His driving has become a stillness, his motion has become a part of his staying perfectly still. Except for his darned old hands.
The thunderstorms that roll across her horizon do not interest her unless they actually rain upon her. They are merely smears in the atmosphere until they come close enough to become potential sources of useful water. Then she must cease her work and begin the catching-the-rain song. She does admire them, the small storms, as the walk across the desert but she really pays them no attention. Unless they approach, there is no reason to. Pay attention to the,
Sometimes she sings to bring them near if she is thirsty or bored or looking through her eyes and other times she sings to keep them away, the storms, if she is tired or busy or thinking about something else. She wishes there was a thunderstorm now that she could sing the let's-put-the-housefire-out song to. She's glad, through, really that there aren't any storms to wish at.
He keeps wiping his brow until he realizes that he is. He is embarrassed that his action is so trite, so contrived, and so unconscious. He wishes emphatically for unique gestures, for an easy possession of unexpected motion. In his concern, he wrings his hands until he realizes that he is. He thrust them, his hands, deep in his pockets to control them, to let them think of something different to do. While he waits, he chews his lip.
She is one the roof of the shack and she is watching the dust cloud rise from distant wheels. In this, she knows there is interest and she knows she needs to know what to do. She may need to flee, to crouch some distance away. She waits on the roof and hums the waiting-to-know-what-to-do-next tune to herself. She wonders now if it will rain.
While he is burning her house, he is burning himself up. Though, of course, not really. He would like to think, to himself, that the damage he does to her house is like the damage he has done and will do to himself. It is not, he knows but doesn't like to think. It is not even close and he cannot and will not and won't not for ever and ever and ever realize that the hands with matches and the gasoline and the hands in his pockets and the hands on the steering wheel of his fast machine are the same hands. He won't.
He is weak that way. He is weak the way he is weak and his hands hate him for it and he hates them (but he has hated them for a long, long time). They know about the girl in the bushes, the girl with the terrible clothes, the girl with the new breasts, but they, the hands, won't tell him. Not a peep. Not out of his hands. They are too busy torching the pathetic hovel she sings as her home. They, his hands, drag him back to the car he drives when he can drive. When he lets the, his hands, drive a car. It is a Camero.
She is not surprised to remember that she knew this would happen. It is a song that she dreamed, this new house-burning-down song, and she suddenly remembers how the whole thing goes, the end of the song, the rest of the dream. She's going into town. In a thing called a "Camero." She stands up from the bushes and carefully brushes all the dust from her knees.
She waves her hand. She raises her voice to singing.
"Hello!" she makes. "Hello there! It's me!"
Though he believes his actions random, there is a pattern that can be traced, there is a regularity to his movements and his pondering. He is delineating new boundaries. He is inscribing a geometry; he is describing a shape.
*
She works. The job she does is like any other and she makes no distinction between them, the jobs she does, because the are all work. She can speak but she does not because there is no reason to. There is no reason to speak because she is working. Instead, she sings. She knows she has flattened one hundred aluminum cans when the song she sings is over. She can count but there is no reason to count when she can sing. When the song ends, she sings it again and flattens one hundred more cans.
The sweat that rolls from her skin rolls down her collarbone and collects against the skin that swells across her breasts. Her breasts are new ones; she never had them before. And the song she sings is a new one because the cans she flattens have never been flattened before. She wonders about her new breasts far more than she wonders about the new cans; she wonders about her new breasts through the song she sings over hundreds of new cans. She can do both at the same time. She remembers that every once in a while there are new cans in her life but there have never been new breasts in her life. Her can-song has begun to sound a little bit different.
She feels the sweat there under the swelling and she feels new to feel a new feeling there under her new and continually growing breasts. The way one fine drop of sweat will cling for an instant against and to her nipple before stretching itself to drop into the damp cloth of her rag, her shirt, her clothing. It is an old garment.
She takes no pride in her work, she takes no thing away from her labor except for a verse once in a while to add to the songs she sings when she works. It may be the flattening-the-cans song or the digging-a-new-hole song or the making-the-sex-thing song but it is only always another verse if it is a new thing. Like her breasts.
She knows her breasts mean big changes.
*
There is a town glistering in the distance and though he can see the lights from his place there on the road he knows that it will be several more hours before he is among them.
*
She feels the dust before she sees it rise from the road that leads to where she lives. She feels it rise and fall in all the heaviness dust carries with it when it rises and falls long before her eye holes take it in. She doesn't look up, she doesn't need to look up because the song isn't nearly over and she has a long time to sing before what the carries with it will be where she is. There is plenty of time to flatten cans, climb up on to the roof of the place where she lives, to look at the locus of the dust cloud, to sing the friend-or-foe? song, to prepare to welcome or to hide in the bushes before it got there.
*
His hands are making some motions but he doesn't exactly know what they are. They are motions at the ends of his arms. They, the motions, make things happen, but he really doesn't know what the things are, the things that happen when his hands make motions.
There are lights flashing past his eyes, his eyes that are watching his hands see things that are reflected in the shining skin that covers them, his hands. Red, blue, yellow, white, white, and white. These are the colors that pass across his hands, the hands he doesn't even recognize. Pity the hands, he (they) thinks to himself (themselves). Pity the foolish digits that do things without knowing what they're doing. Pity. Foolish.
*
She jumps down, she jumps up. The cans have been flattened enough, enough cans have been flattened, and she will retire to the bushes and hide while the pilots in the vortex of dust destroys her home. She knows that these kinds of things happen sometimes and she will sing the these-things-happen song while she hides among the dusty bushes and watches him (them) do what he (they) do to her house--the kinds of things that get done like burn it down because he (they) can't find her because she is hiding in the bushes. She wonders what they'll do about all the flattened cans.
She is surprised when she realizes that what she had been thinking "they" was really only one guy and his hands. She had felt "many" coming and had expected to deal with "many" and it knocks her a little bit to realized that "many" in her head meant "one" and his "hands." She revises her song as she sings it.
*
Fire is what they want and, despite his anxious posturing, fire is what they have started. He wonders what kind of house, whose kind of house, they are burning down. He does not approve of burning houses but has no resource for protest. He can merely watch and wonder.
*
His driving has become a stillness, his motion has become a part of his staying perfectly still. Except for his darned old hands.
*
The thunderstorms that roll across her horizon do not interest her unless they actually rain upon her. They are merely smears in the atmosphere until they come close enough to become potential sources of useful water. Then she must cease her work and begin the catching-the-rain song. She does admire them, the small storms, as the walk across the desert but she really pays them no attention. Unless they approach, there is no reason to. Pay attention to the,
Sometimes she sings to bring them near if she is thirsty or bored or looking through her eyes and other times she sings to keep them away, the storms, if she is tired or busy or thinking about something else. She wishes there was a thunderstorm now that she could sing the let's-put-the-housefire-out song to. She's glad, through, really that there aren't any storms to wish at.
*
He keeps wiping his brow until he realizes that he is. He is embarrassed that his action is so trite, so contrived, and so unconscious. He wishes emphatically for unique gestures, for an easy possession of unexpected motion. In his concern, he wrings his hands until he realizes that he is. He thrust them, his hands, deep in his pockets to control them, to let them think of something different to do. While he waits, he chews his lip.
*
She is one the roof of the shack and she is watching the dust cloud rise from distant wheels. In this, she knows there is interest and she knows she needs to know what to do. She may need to flee, to crouch some distance away. She waits on the roof and hums the waiting-to-know-what-to-do-next tune to herself. She wonders now if it will rain.
*
While he is burning her house, he is burning himself up. Though, of course, not really. He would like to think, to himself, that the damage he does to her house is like the damage he has done and will do to himself. It is not, he knows but doesn't like to think. It is not even close and he cannot and will not and won't not for ever and ever and ever realize that the hands with matches and the gasoline and the hands in his pockets and the hands on the steering wheel of his fast machine are the same hands. He won't.
He is weak that way. He is weak the way he is weak and his hands hate him for it and he hates them (but he has hated them for a long, long time). They know about the girl in the bushes, the girl with the terrible clothes, the girl with the new breasts, but they, the hands, won't tell him. Not a peep. Not out of his hands. They are too busy torching the pathetic hovel she sings as her home. They, his hands, drag him back to the car he drives when he can drive. When he lets the, his hands, drive a car. It is a Camero.
*
She is not surprised to remember that she knew this would happen. It is a song that she dreamed, this new house-burning-down song, and she suddenly remembers how the whole thing goes, the end of the song, the rest of the dream. She's going into town. In a thing called a "Camero." She stands up from the bushes and carefully brushes all the dust from her knees.
She waves her hand. She raises her voice to singing.
"Hello!" she makes. "Hello there! It's me!"
14 March 2009
Sharper Than She Ever Imagined
It hardly seemed worth it but still she tried to avoid the worst and deepest of the puddles. Drenched for the most part even swaddled against the weather—-raincoat, hat, and leaky rubber boots—Sheila went through the pointless motions of trying to stay dry even as ice water ran down the back of her neck. She was a beige and gray woman toiling through a black and gray cityscape, damp and defeated. Just finding her way home was an ordeal and once arrived, no comfort awaited.
Was it surprising that Sheila found no joy in her life? If she were to do away with herself, would those who might find her body be puzzled that she had killed herself? After the landlord forced the door to find her there forgotten save for the stink of her, would they ask themselves why, oh why with so much to live for, why in heaven’s name did this woman take her own life? Sheila thought not.
Looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, the only mirror in her house, Sheila pondered not the “why?” of her impending suicide but, instead, she meditated on the “going through with it and doing it right.” She had, after all, been disappointed by so much during her 25 years that she quite rightly feared that her own demise would prove a bungle or a let-down or just another waste of time.
There was loneliness. There were longings unsatisfied, goals unattained, dreams and wishes unrealized. Sheila mined her memory for a reason not to die in the same way she looked at the ceramic knickknack, a shepherdess with crook and lamb, adorning an otherwise barren shelf and she struck nothing in either to stop her self-destruction. No single part existed by which she could justify the whole.
Sheila endured a childhood unremarkable for it’s very lack of remark, no awards or ribbons or certificates of achievement, friendless and awkwardly so, tolerated by parents barely tolerable themselves until her after-graduation flight to a different kind of solitude as if that would be a cure. There were some terms at a university where Sheila floundered in confusing classes with even more confusing classmates before she skulked away with her lackluster Cs and Ds and no one even noticed that she’d left.
She felt like putty. She learned that she was soft and without angles, malleable had anyone ever cared to mold her though not even her professors had indicated that possibility. She was beige and gray and invisible. Sheila made herself available, no one responded, and she didn’t know what else to do. She sat her life lumpenly.
There was a job then and more pointless hours earning pointless money that only ensured she could pay her pointless bills so she could work some more and acquire more bills. Sheila met no one though she tried, could connect with no coworker or neighbor despite her tentative overtures, and she could make no friends. She cashed her checks and shopped for her groceries and moved about the world as if sealed inside a jar.
The blossoming she awaited never occurred and her appearance was, to be generous, drab and her personality, to be truthful, was unfinished. She was putty and, had she been truly visible, Sheila knew she would be recognized as such and then ignored all over again. It was all a losing proposition.
Sheila said “hello” and and she said “goodbye” to the few people she encountered in the courses of her beige, gray, softly sodden days and counted those as her relationships.
“Goodnight, Rodger,” she said to her manager when she left the shop each workday.
“Take it easy, Sheel,” he answered and she always tried to do that and she never quite could.
“Hello,” she told the bank teller. “I’d like to cash this check.”
“Have a nice day, Ms. Cord,” the teller always admonished her. Sheila knew that she wouldn’t have a nice day, that she couldn’t have a nice day, that she couldn’t even manage to take it easy.
Dark days followed darker nights. In winter mud, wet and cloying cold, she slouched her way to and from the place of her pointless employment and past the shops where she made her purchases. Along the way back to her rooms, Sheila would stop in those shops and purchase the tins and boxes from which she ate. Her days off were even worse than her days at work for she truly had nowhere to go with only the television to remind her that other people existed. She’d sit and eat, silent and unmoved and growing larger and softer as the programs unreeled before her. Sheila never laughed and she never cried and she eventually would turn off the machine and sit in silence or sleep until it was time for work again.
The futility of this repetition was beginning to become apparent. She could find no compelling reason to keep doing any of it and, one beige, gray afternoon on her way to her rooms from where she worked, Sheila added to her purchases one small paper package of razor blades called “safety” though why she could not understand why. They seemed seductively dangerous to her.
And so, balanced on the edge of her not very clean tub in her very not clean bathroom, it was with true and real surprise that she saw the paper packet of razor blades she opened with the desire to open her arteries continue to open and open more and more and further and further beyond the possibilities of its apparent size and shape, beyond the limits of its own dimensions and begin unfolding and unsheathing and opening again and again and then again in ways both strange to witness and unimaginable until before her stood a being, a form composed of knives, needles, razor blades, jagged shards, and smooth scalpels, opening more and spreading to become a kind of metallic person, a jumble of sharp angles and cutting edges, a face like a flower of cutting steel and glass and flint, like a fan of knives.
It then spoke to her with a voice composed of tuned metals, a voice that sounded like ripping rippled foil, like iron nails dragged across a shattered mirror, like shattering obsidian, like a bundle of needles disturbed to friction.
“Sheila, dear,” his voice insinuated the room. And the creature there trembled with light gathered and magnified and reflected, a blinding aura of potential, and the potential of a blade in repose. “So sad.”
“Yes,” she replied. “Oh, yes. So sad.”
He shimmered as he moved and the shivering sounds of sharp edges run across each other accompanied the sight. He was disorienting and beautiful and very, very frightening. Sheila wanted to cry but was afraid to do so.
“Afraid?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“Sad and afraid,” he pondered. “This is no way to live.”
“I know,” Sheila answered. “It isn’t. I don’t want to. I don’t know how.”
“You wish for something,” he continued. “You wish for more.”
“Yes,” she affirmed. “More. Much much more.”
“And here you sit with me.”
“Yes.”
“Then we shall sit together for awhile,” with his voice brittle and sharp and comforting in a clean sort of way.
‘How strange,’ she thought that there at the pinnacle of her isolation and upon the cusp of her demise, she would finally find a friend, a confidant, a person (or a sort of a person) who seemed to care for her. ‘How strange. How beautiful. How perfect.’
“How strange. How beautiful. How perfect,” he told her.
His gentlest touch, his lightest contact, and Sheila bled. The sounds of their caresses were the sounds made when skin parts whisper-soft under surgeons’ knives. Still, her longing grew within the glow of candlelight and flavored wine, the flickering reflections that her razor-man shed, and she grew both bold and slightly anesthetized. She flirted with her razor-man.
Sheila reached to touch his face and she did touch his face and then she put her bleeding forefinger into her mouth to taste the blood he had brought forth from inside her.
“Does this hurt you?” he asked as his lingering touch drew a line of deep iron red from her skin, a crimson line of contour from below her ear traveling down her neck and across the tops of her breasts. The line gaped, a fault line filled with blood.
“No,” she answered him. “Never. It will never hurt me to be touched.”
And she kept telling him “no” even when the real answer was emphatically “yes” until she could no longer speak at all but could only open more and more under his embrace, until his kisses skinned her face and her eyes rolled white, her teeth gleamed white all the way back to her molars against the shocking red shine of her naked muscles and bone. Sheila’s meat quivered in the open air.
“You are becoming beautiful,” he told her as he stripped away the lie of her and revealed the true of her. Free of flesh and yellow fat, her mouth fell open like a flower all long tooth, white bone, and sheets of red muscle along her jaw. “So beautiful.”
The cold, wet air on her now-exposed nerves sent Sheila’s senses reeling, the sheer weight of pain overwhelming her capacity for rational thought. She became her own reactions and there, teetering along borders she had only dimly imagined, Sheila lost her sanity in a blinding rush of agony and new-found love.
Her razor-lover gently turned back the layers surrounding her throat, peeled open her skin and fascia and muscle down to the very cartilage and he opened that, too; the rush of cool air through Sheila’s new orifice slobbered her devotion and its concomitant ecstasy.
Beige and gray no longer, Sheila blossomed crimson, scarlet, deep burgundy red under his attentions and each caress exposed something new and secret and long hidden away from view.
It was all revelation.
Each uncovering brought new jolting wonder, agony, and awareness. Unobscured by eyebrow or eyelid, her vision sharpened; she saw cleanly and she saw clearly, and she watched with naked eyeballs as what had once been inside her spilled outside and spread uncoiling across the floor in a multicolored slick of organ meat and membrane.
“Beautiful,” she marveled at her own concealed colors, awed and humbled that she’d carried them so long and unaware. Sheila thrilled as the blades that were his hands and fingers cupped her breasts and whispered them to ribbons, hanging shreds of golden fat and meat. The white-hot stab of billowing pain carried her nearly outside herself as her flesh shredded with his caress, hot floods of her brilliantly oxygenated blood laving them both.
Sheila reached to stroke his cheeks, to return his loving touch, and watched the skin and meat of her fingertips fall away in translucent slices against the angled edges of his features and each slice brought the nerves in her hands closer to her surface, each nerve singing electric fire into her overloaded brain.
She couldn’t tell if the wetness between her legs was purely sex or just what was left of her sex, her genitals in tatters, fragments, and still pumping pure, white-hot sensation to the glowing nucleus of her cerebral cortex. The feeble orgasms that used to reward her clumsy, lonely masturbation were burned to cinders by the heat of what was exploding inside her newly skinned skull. All other joy and sorrow, all other emotion and feeling withered away under the awful raw burning that swept Sheila toward willing destruction. Helpless in her razor-lover’s embrace, she arched and arced and convulsed herself enough to fling her colors against the wall, great swathes of red and yellow and lines of blue across the rotten plaster and shining brighter than any paint or pigment.
And as what Sheila was becoming rose above her flayed self and as what Sheila had once been fell heaped beneath, she found herself, for the moment, alone and bleeding in her bathroom. Her razor-man fled in sudden collapse upon himself and back down to the small and dangerous blade held in her hand, and Sheila could take a breath to contemplate her new and profound state of nudity, her slavery to pure sensation. This she did and she saw that she was a red woman, a blindingly white woman, and fully opened in a room awash with color until she was quite nothing at all.
Was it surprising that Sheila found no joy in her life? If she were to do away with herself, would those who might find her body be puzzled that she had killed herself? After the landlord forced the door to find her there forgotten save for the stink of her, would they ask themselves why, oh why with so much to live for, why in heaven’s name did this woman take her own life? Sheila thought not.
Looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, the only mirror in her house, Sheila pondered not the “why?” of her impending suicide but, instead, she meditated on the “going through with it and doing it right.” She had, after all, been disappointed by so much during her 25 years that she quite rightly feared that her own demise would prove a bungle or a let-down or just another waste of time.
There was loneliness. There were longings unsatisfied, goals unattained, dreams and wishes unrealized. Sheila mined her memory for a reason not to die in the same way she looked at the ceramic knickknack, a shepherdess with crook and lamb, adorning an otherwise barren shelf and she struck nothing in either to stop her self-destruction. No single part existed by which she could justify the whole.
Sheila endured a childhood unremarkable for it’s very lack of remark, no awards or ribbons or certificates of achievement, friendless and awkwardly so, tolerated by parents barely tolerable themselves until her after-graduation flight to a different kind of solitude as if that would be a cure. There were some terms at a university where Sheila floundered in confusing classes with even more confusing classmates before she skulked away with her lackluster Cs and Ds and no one even noticed that she’d left.
She felt like putty. She learned that she was soft and without angles, malleable had anyone ever cared to mold her though not even her professors had indicated that possibility. She was beige and gray and invisible. Sheila made herself available, no one responded, and she didn’t know what else to do. She sat her life lumpenly.
There was a job then and more pointless hours earning pointless money that only ensured she could pay her pointless bills so she could work some more and acquire more bills. Sheila met no one though she tried, could connect with no coworker or neighbor despite her tentative overtures, and she could make no friends. She cashed her checks and shopped for her groceries and moved about the world as if sealed inside a jar.
The blossoming she awaited never occurred and her appearance was, to be generous, drab and her personality, to be truthful, was unfinished. She was putty and, had she been truly visible, Sheila knew she would be recognized as such and then ignored all over again. It was all a losing proposition.
Sheila said “hello” and and she said “goodbye” to the few people she encountered in the courses of her beige, gray, softly sodden days and counted those as her relationships.
“Goodnight, Rodger,” she said to her manager when she left the shop each workday.
“Take it easy, Sheel,” he answered and she always tried to do that and she never quite could.
“Hello,” she told the bank teller. “I’d like to cash this check.”
“Have a nice day, Ms. Cord,” the teller always admonished her. Sheila knew that she wouldn’t have a nice day, that she couldn’t have a nice day, that she couldn’t even manage to take it easy.
*
Dark days followed darker nights. In winter mud, wet and cloying cold, she slouched her way to and from the place of her pointless employment and past the shops where she made her purchases. Along the way back to her rooms, Sheila would stop in those shops and purchase the tins and boxes from which she ate. Her days off were even worse than her days at work for she truly had nowhere to go with only the television to remind her that other people existed. She’d sit and eat, silent and unmoved and growing larger and softer as the programs unreeled before her. Sheila never laughed and she never cried and she eventually would turn off the machine and sit in silence or sleep until it was time for work again.
The futility of this repetition was beginning to become apparent. She could find no compelling reason to keep doing any of it and, one beige, gray afternoon on her way to her rooms from where she worked, Sheila added to her purchases one small paper package of razor blades called “safety” though why she could not understand why. They seemed seductively dangerous to her.
And so, balanced on the edge of her not very clean tub in her very not clean bathroom, it was with true and real surprise that she saw the paper packet of razor blades she opened with the desire to open her arteries continue to open and open more and more and further and further beyond the possibilities of its apparent size and shape, beyond the limits of its own dimensions and begin unfolding and unsheathing and opening again and again and then again in ways both strange to witness and unimaginable until before her stood a being, a form composed of knives, needles, razor blades, jagged shards, and smooth scalpels, opening more and spreading to become a kind of metallic person, a jumble of sharp angles and cutting edges, a face like a flower of cutting steel and glass and flint, like a fan of knives.
It then spoke to her with a voice composed of tuned metals, a voice that sounded like ripping rippled foil, like iron nails dragged across a shattered mirror, like shattering obsidian, like a bundle of needles disturbed to friction.
“Sheila, dear,” his voice insinuated the room. And the creature there trembled with light gathered and magnified and reflected, a blinding aura of potential, and the potential of a blade in repose. “So sad.”
“Yes,” she replied. “Oh, yes. So sad.”
He shimmered as he moved and the shivering sounds of sharp edges run across each other accompanied the sight. He was disorienting and beautiful and very, very frightening. Sheila wanted to cry but was afraid to do so.
“Afraid?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“Sad and afraid,” he pondered. “This is no way to live.”
“I know,” Sheila answered. “It isn’t. I don’t want to. I don’t know how.”
“You wish for something,” he continued. “You wish for more.”
“Yes,” she affirmed. “More. Much much more.”
“And here you sit with me.”
“Yes.”
“Then we shall sit together for awhile,” with his voice brittle and sharp and comforting in a clean sort of way.
‘How strange,’ she thought that there at the pinnacle of her isolation and upon the cusp of her demise, she would finally find a friend, a confidant, a person (or a sort of a person) who seemed to care for her. ‘How strange. How beautiful. How perfect.’
“How strange. How beautiful. How perfect,” he told her.
His gentlest touch, his lightest contact, and Sheila bled. The sounds of their caresses were the sounds made when skin parts whisper-soft under surgeons’ knives. Still, her longing grew within the glow of candlelight and flavored wine, the flickering reflections that her razor-man shed, and she grew both bold and slightly anesthetized. She flirted with her razor-man.
Sheila reached to touch his face and she did touch his face and then she put her bleeding forefinger into her mouth to taste the blood he had brought forth from inside her.
“Does this hurt you?” he asked as his lingering touch drew a line of deep iron red from her skin, a crimson line of contour from below her ear traveling down her neck and across the tops of her breasts. The line gaped, a fault line filled with blood.
“No,” she answered him. “Never. It will never hurt me to be touched.”
And she kept telling him “no” even when the real answer was emphatically “yes” until she could no longer speak at all but could only open more and more under his embrace, until his kisses skinned her face and her eyes rolled white, her teeth gleamed white all the way back to her molars against the shocking red shine of her naked muscles and bone. Sheila’s meat quivered in the open air.
“You are becoming beautiful,” he told her as he stripped away the lie of her and revealed the true of her. Free of flesh and yellow fat, her mouth fell open like a flower all long tooth, white bone, and sheets of red muscle along her jaw. “So beautiful.”
The cold, wet air on her now-exposed nerves sent Sheila’s senses reeling, the sheer weight of pain overwhelming her capacity for rational thought. She became her own reactions and there, teetering along borders she had only dimly imagined, Sheila lost her sanity in a blinding rush of agony and new-found love.
Her razor-lover gently turned back the layers surrounding her throat, peeled open her skin and fascia and muscle down to the very cartilage and he opened that, too; the rush of cool air through Sheila’s new orifice slobbered her devotion and its concomitant ecstasy.
Beige and gray no longer, Sheila blossomed crimson, scarlet, deep burgundy red under his attentions and each caress exposed something new and secret and long hidden away from view.
It was all revelation.
Each uncovering brought new jolting wonder, agony, and awareness. Unobscured by eyebrow or eyelid, her vision sharpened; she saw cleanly and she saw clearly, and she watched with naked eyeballs as what had once been inside her spilled outside and spread uncoiling across the floor in a multicolored slick of organ meat and membrane.
“Beautiful,” she marveled at her own concealed colors, awed and humbled that she’d carried them so long and unaware. Sheila thrilled as the blades that were his hands and fingers cupped her breasts and whispered them to ribbons, hanging shreds of golden fat and meat. The white-hot stab of billowing pain carried her nearly outside herself as her flesh shredded with his caress, hot floods of her brilliantly oxygenated blood laving them both.
Sheila reached to stroke his cheeks, to return his loving touch, and watched the skin and meat of her fingertips fall away in translucent slices against the angled edges of his features and each slice brought the nerves in her hands closer to her surface, each nerve singing electric fire into her overloaded brain.
She couldn’t tell if the wetness between her legs was purely sex or just what was left of her sex, her genitals in tatters, fragments, and still pumping pure, white-hot sensation to the glowing nucleus of her cerebral cortex. The feeble orgasms that used to reward her clumsy, lonely masturbation were burned to cinders by the heat of what was exploding inside her newly skinned skull. All other joy and sorrow, all other emotion and feeling withered away under the awful raw burning that swept Sheila toward willing destruction. Helpless in her razor-lover’s embrace, she arched and arced and convulsed herself enough to fling her colors against the wall, great swathes of red and yellow and lines of blue across the rotten plaster and shining brighter than any paint or pigment.
And as what Sheila was becoming rose above her flayed self and as what Sheila had once been fell heaped beneath, she found herself, for the moment, alone and bleeding in her bathroom. Her razor-man fled in sudden collapse upon himself and back down to the small and dangerous blade held in her hand, and Sheila could take a breath to contemplate her new and profound state of nudity, her slavery to pure sensation. This she did and she saw that she was a red woman, a blindingly white woman, and fully opened in a room awash with color until she was quite nothing at all.
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