But I remember there was this day where I was at my friend Shannon’s house (we were really just in the basement, he lived semi-estranged from his mother and so I would enter through the backdoor and the basement was his own, we pretended that it was his own apartment on Brown Street) and we were playing video games and smoking weed. He had just gotten this dog which he named Doug, and I haven’t thought about Doug in forever but the consistency of time dictates that he must now be 5 or 6 years old. Shannon and I didn’t spend much time together. We just played video games.

Anyways, while Doug was off in the LED-lit corner, a ball of purpleish fuzz and squeaky bone, Shannon and I played Getting Over It. A famously difficult and infuriating game made popular by Markiplier and Jacksepticeye and the rest.

I remember we were taking turns playing, while Doug hung out in his corner, sometimes running up to me to growl or nip or otherwise intimidate me as I was unknown to him and in his home (basement), smoking weed, and Shannon was just better than I was, at the game.

For the uninitiated, Getting Over it is a game where you play as a man crouching in a cauldron, holding a little shovel or pickaxe which you use to pull/push yourself along the map, a map covered in obstacles and consisting of mountains of rock or trash, the final goal being some beacon of light far above you. It’s a game about climbing up various structures, basically, and “getting over” them all. I was terrible at it. Shannon was pretty damn good.

I remember we took turns, each on our own save file, switching off after each setback (Important: there are no deaths or anything, in the game, you just kind of fall back to the start or to some semblance of flat ground, if you fail), and quickly Shannon progressed far past my best. He had played before.

This game is an infuriating one, it’s important to note; there is this voice-over narrator that comments on your progress in this really quite condescending British accent, making you feel like a total dimwit for being unable to pass the system of convoluted parkours, which in turn made the parkours much more difficult. Shannon was seemingly immune to the RP voiceover.

The key part is that there was this one section, which I got to after a series of lucky breaks, consisting of some decayed cityscape whose windows are broken in such a way that you can just sneak through, if you time the angles right. The angles between the windows, which you must jump through. Shannon got through with ease.

I, however, could not do it. At least for a good while.

Shannon and I had, it’s important to note, the special kind of friendship that is based on jabs and quips and put-downs, all friendly and with love, of course, but they were making fun of me all throughout the twenty or so minutes I spent on the level.

“How can you not get over it,” he said, all up close and in my face. “It’s so easy.”

And then basically we had a great time. Oregon is beautiful, and seeing family is always good etc etc etc etc. That part doesn’t matter as much.

But Sophie, in high school, was quite the photographer. I think. Being much younger than them I always had this kind of idealized version of them in my head, and I know that they took several good photos, but I don’t know if they ever considered themself to be a Photographer. Oh well. But basically they have too much free time, and are getting back into it. Basically they took a great photo, and did whatever you do to film from a film camera and gave it to me, the picture. Photography is obviously a visual medium, so describing it in my half-assed prose won’t do it justice, but it was of a cow and Sophie’s roommate Owen, and I suppose the setting and the framing was nice. Oregon is just very picturesque, I don’t know. But the picture made me feel old and mature, and for the first time in maybe ever like I was, to my sibling, Henry, and not Little Brother Henry. It was nice. Seeing family is always good. Then the visit came to an end, and I taped up the photo to the windshield of my car to keep me company on the drive back home.

I was nervous, is the thing. I was now fully aware of how I didn’t do any productive thinking on my long drive there, and I was all in my head about it in a major way that made it so I was kind of paralyzed, thinking-wise, and any hopes of ever doing productive thinking were erased. If I made an effort to think with purpose, I would be aware that I was making an effort, and then I would feel ashamed that I had to try to think with purpose, instead of just doing it naturally. So that put an end to my trying, and obviously no aphorisms came about passively. Without thinking about it, I fell into rumination. I would glance at the photo and recall a memory of the trip, and then I would think and think about that and corrupt small details that eventually grew larger, and then certain details would remind me of other parts of my life, and soon I was thinking about everything at once and nothing had any real significance or meaning anymore, when I was thinking about it, because all the memories were just darting around and their small details were being corrupted. And the whole time this cow was looking down at me, from the top of the windshield, and I couldn’t look at a stop light without meeting its eyes. It was a constant reminder of two important things: the first being that I have lived relatively well and have had good experiences, and the second being that that will never be enough. I will never be sated, and the grass of the past is always greener than the grass of the present. So I thought and I thought and I thought, and I conflated separate memories and mixed up names and motivations, and all the while the sun bleached and bleached that photo on the windshield, and when I eventually got home I couldn’t remember who said what, I could barely make out anything anymore on the piece of film.

I met Ms. Addler last year. It was at the height of this whole spiritual and emotional crisis I was going through, the details of which don’t really matter but it is important to understand that I wasn’t all with it. And I’m not a perfect person, mentally, and I wouldn’t describe myself as one who has an eternally sunny disposition — I can even err on the overcast side, sometimes — but last year at around that time I was more than erring on the side of torrential rain and hellish lightning bolts. These things come and go, I now understand, but back then it was eternal and I was doomed. Oh well. Basically I thought I was doomed forever and anything and everything was just so much lint in a dirty belly-button, soon to be cleaned out.

It was around Halloween, and I was at the grocery store buying toothpaste and boxes of raisins and bottles of Visine that I was planning on filling with vinegar. The only enjoyment I got and the only thing that elicited chuckles from me were these stupid little jokes, maybe they were nihilistic or something I don’t know, but basically by showing the world that everything was so much lint and that none of it really mattered, and the things that people found fun, and did to escape the pressures that I too felt, were stupid and beneath me. It was very narcissistic, I understand that now. But basically I was buying these stupid little things to play dumb games on the cheery kids that were soon to be coming to my door in droves, screeching and giggling for candy, when I met Ms. Addler.

She was in checkout aisle seven, and she was and is physically unremarkable. An old woman of medium height, with frizzy white hair and freckled, mole-pocked skin and hands that must be dryer than dry. Yellowing teeth, et cetera. It was by chance that I ended up in her lane, and after I put the items on the conveyor belt — all the way at the start, so that it takes maximum time to reach her, which was another little stupid thing I did that made me smile inside, vindictively — I went down to her and looked in her unremarkable eyes. I remember what she said, that’s the important part.

It is also important to note that it was a beautiful day. Crisp autumn air, a chill breeze blowing the foliage around, making the leaves rustle. Sunny, but chill. I didn’t notice it when I left my house, though. And it is also important to note that the day before had been dismal, rainy and cold and far too windy. I digress.

As she held the button to move the belt, she kept eye contact with me, and she asked me how I was. Simple stuff. I just nodded to her, and looked over at my groceries sliding down towards us. She was still looking at me.

“Well, aren’t you going to ask me how I am?” she said, after a second.

I was taken aback, as that is a very forward question that I had never gotten before. So I asked her how she was. All she did was nod, and then she asked me again how I was. Feeling snarky, and a bit forward too, I said that I was dismal. Positively dismal.

“That’s too bad,” she said. By this time she was scanning the groceries, all while looking at me, and then she looked out the window, gazed at the parking lot in the light of that beautiful day, and said that she was good, very good, and that she was happy that yesterday’s weather was so gross, so that today could be perfect. And that stuck with me. It was a beautiful day, I realized, and the day before had been terrible. And the two were necessary. Up to that point, it was the single wisest thing I had ever heard in my life. That she was thankful for the nastyness of the previous day so that the now could be beautiful.

I felt a pang of sadness, and I looked at what I was buying and felt it was all so stupid. Nonetheless I paid and got a paper bag as well, but when I left I said thank you for the first time in who knows how long and when I got to my car I made a decision.

I walked back to the entrance of the store and threw out my stuff. Then I went back to the car and moved it closer, to a spot with the doors to the supermarket in view. And there, I waited. Basically I needed wisdom. And what I saw in the store was wisdom incarnate. So, when Ms. Addler left the store and drove off— I learned her name from her mailbox, and I deduced later that she is a Ms. and not a Mrs. — I was there, waiting, and I followed her home.

The main thing, though, the second of the preliminary details to my falling out of a tree, has nothing to do with Ms. Addler. Her presence is still important, though. Essentially she reversed my stupid feelings about the world. The first interaction with her, and watching her activities at night and on her days off, the peace she keeps about herself and the grace with which she does everything, turned my torrential downpour of a mood back into my normal state, the not-overjoyed but happy-to-be–alive state that I now possess. A state, which, in my opinion, is necessary for love. And fall in love I did. But not with her.

It turns out that Ms. Addler’s neighbor is perhaps the most beautiful person in the world. I learned — also from his mailbox — that his surname is Nicks. So Nicks he is to me. A pale skin, dark haired, bearded man, cut from a cloth that is simply above the rest. At times I think I am a good writer, but even the best most romantic poets would only taint his essence by writing of his looks. So I certainly will not. But he is beautiful. We have not spoken a word to each other, maybe never will, but I feel like I have always and will always know him. Even if he doesn’t know me. And that is okay, that is love.

Perched on a tree branch, for about three and a half weeks, I watched him. I watched him in the mornings, bed-headedly making coffee, sifting through the mail over the kitchen sink. I watched him smile and laugh, and also gesticulate wildly and aggressively whilst shouting on the phone. Once I was lucky enough to see him make love through a crack in his bedroom curtains, and I watched him draw hearts and write letters on the foggy side of his sliding glass door. I saw him in the throes of sadness, only to be elated the next day in a way almost manic. Nicks is a chasm, and he contains everything that can be felt or expressed. I imagine he can do a wide variety of vocal impressions. I imagine it so vividly, and believe it so ardently, that the imagination teeters into knowledge, hard fact.

There was a problem, though. I knew he couldn’t be mine. And this made me sweat and shiver, even in that horrid November chill. My old sadness and world-weariness was back, although this time on a different basis. Where I had been anxious and depressed from a feeling of nothing, that nothing mattered, I was now feeling the same depression and anxiety, but because I knew that there was one thing in the world that mattered more than anything, and its significance eclipsed all else but I couldn’t grasp it. What I wanted was simply not to be, for reasons real and imagined. Having built up this idea of a perfect man, I could not possibly speak to him, lest I discover it was all an illusion. It would be terrible to meet God, only to find out that He is not at all what I worship.

And even if I did speak to him, and it was all as I imagined it, what of the woman with whom he was making love? I wanted to think virtuous thoughts, as I knew that thoughts become actions, and it would not be virtuous at all to wreck a home. Love, is virtuous, and I had it.

This caused, for three days, great turmoil in me. I had to create a balance between the most intense, burning desire I have ever felt, and my knowing that it was not for me. Is not for me. This caused many tears to fall.

On the last day of my time in the tree, I failed. I could not make the middle ground. I climbed up in the early morning, and, until the late afternoon, I burned with rage. To me it was so unfair that others could be blessed with love and happiness and the knowledge of another. It was a sick joke, and my love turned sour as I thought that he, Nicks, might have been playing it on me. Every day I saw absolutely repulsive people canoodling and loving, but I, a reasonable and I dare say pretty young woman, could have none of it. I couldn’t eat at the feast of love, and it was no fault of mine. I was rejected. So I made up my mind that I would confront him. I would pour my heart out to him and tell him how unfair it was that he made me feel what I felt, and that he must have me or rectify his wrongdoings in a most serious way. In my head I composed and memorized a script that I was to recite. I still know it, but it is far too long and personal to share here. I was going to bring a knife too. A hunting knife with a handle made of antler that my father left me. And if he was unable to resolve his offence to me, I would take matters into my own hands. And these are not virtuous thoughts. I know that. Just wait.

So it was at the height of my rage that Ms. Addler noticed me. I must’ve been vibrating, I was so mad. I heard her open and then close the screen door, but I thought nothing of it. I was seething. It felt like a million years went by, and then, from the base of the tree, I heard a little voice pipe up:

“Can I help you down, miss, from that great height?”

The question broke me. I yelped out in a scream of sadness, embarrassment, and genuine fright. She scared me. And as I screamed I lost my balance and I fell, but it was during the fall that I thought my truly virtuous, magnanimous thoughts, and I do not consider it to be hubristic to say that of them.

In my fall I realized that I wish for Nicks’ infinite happiness. That he could not possibly be playing a joke on me, and that if he was, it was because he was lost. I saw his sadness. And I wished him all the happiness and love in the world. Because the fact of the matter is that the future is a very exciting thing. And I could very well encounter Nicks in real life, but even if I never do, he has the whole world ahead of him. As do I. And to wish him anything but infinite happiness would be worse than bad. It would be worse than murder or filling eye droppers with vinegar. I think that I still felt that our destiny was to be together, and that my thought about us never meeting was just me hedging my bets, but, even if we were to skirt fate and I was never to be held in his arms in waking life, I knew what I wanted for him. Infinite happiness, for him to seize the world. And I couldn’t even be mad at Ms. Addler.

So now I walk around, I work, I sleep and shower all while willing into existence his happiness. And that if he ever feels crushed by the weight of the world, the weight that crushed me, that he remembers. That the future is a very exciting thing. And paths open every day, and happiness is a choice, and that love wins.

The day after, as I watched the tide come in, I saw
his recessed chin in a wave-hollowed rock.
I knew that the sand was his powdered tooth, grown too long.
A child served me ice cream on the pier
and it dropped between our hands. Slowly did
the dessert drip down to the cold ocean.
Him sucking up the last drops of sweetness.
I looked up in agitation—how could the tot have done this—then
I realized that we both carried the burden.

Salt in my hair, I got off my train and walked home.
A man approached me, haggardly with
a crushed paper cup, jangling it in front of
me for change. I don’t carry cash, I said
and he leaned in close, grabbed my shoulder,
and whispered It’s me! in my ear
And I said You?
And he said Yes, me, Jonah. I’ve been looking for you.
I said that I am no Jonah, and asked who is he,
and he said he was the man to whom
I owed money, and then keeled over laughing and swigged
his beer. I laughed and went off, turned around and we met eyes
and his crows feet were there, and the man sat down and took
off his shoes.

From the window of the sedan I saw everybody look at me.
Malicious, stalking grins below squinted eyes,
the cowled elderly faces whose soul was now young, relatively.
Wise toddlers and others utterly transformed.
Their bodies all occupied by his essence.
His body, in the coffin, looked the same.
It moved about as much as it did when he was alive.
His face bore about as much expression.
Only the upper half was visible, but I cannot imagine his legs could then move,
at least not in that body.

After, I started noticing fully.
People possessing knowledge he closely guarded,
rare frequencies in the laughs of others that I knew
only him to possess.
Preternatural likenesses of him in the world around me,
fronts of busses with his exact Adam’s apple,
intuitions I could glean from passersby that only he could have.
He was the glint of the Aspen snow that blinded me,
The laugher of any laugh I elicited.
He was the undecipherable Morse of my failing lamp,
the crushing weight and the hand that tossed me into the air.

They were all barefoot, standing on the pebbles of the parking lot. I know from experience how much that hurts. I didn’t see any shoes, and I know that the bottoms of their feet were crusted with sticks and dirt and had a leopard-print made of indentations from the various stones underfoot. There is no spigot to wash off the parking-lot dirt. Only the ones on the beach for the sand. In the father’s hand was a leash.

I took all of this in in a second, and before I had the chance to roll my window down and yell out to them ‘what was wrong?’ and ‘could I help?’ and ‘I have a strong father myself who surely could make this go away, if you’d like?,’ my mother put the car in drive and we sped off and towards Scarborough.

I thought about that family often for a long time afterwards. And, evidently, I think about them still today. I am an anxious-ruminating internal-orator, and my time spent thinking about them was often expressed through me asking them questions, giving them answers. Of course I have immense difficulty giving them a voice in my brain, so their responses are just my guesses of what they may say, or my desires of what they may say. And all of this is tainted—tinted?—by the fact that I have never spoken to any of them. I only saw this family once in a parking lot of a beach who’s name I cannot remember, just one moment of a trip to Maine that was filled with moments.

I believe that they lost their dog. It would make sense. The general sadness, the anger in the fathers face and body language, the leash in his hands. That is what happened, at least in my eyes. I could be wrong, however.

The father was on the phone with the lifeguard’s office, or the sheriff, or the president of the HOA of the beach community. He was speaking in a tone of anger, directed at the people to whom he spoke, but the anger was really for himself. He was the one to blame, he was the father and the dog was his baby, the boy he always wanted. And he let it go. Dropped the ball, Screwed the pooch. So when he yells at the lifeguard who is packing his things up because the beach has now been closed for five minutes, he is really yelling at himself. And this does not make him bad, I think, just human. And while I would have preferred him to cry and feel a bit of shame and then self-forgiveness, we are all different. And everyone is tender in their own way.

The mother feels embarrassment. She feels embarrassment for her husband for the way he is expressing his guilt and sadness, and for herself for the fact that she has let her daughters down. But her daughters have grown up to be wonderful and forgiving women who regard this night as an unfortunate happening—one of them thinks about it as an act of God to give her an early taste of the cruelties and disappointments that await us all—so they see no good reason for her to be embarrassed. Even then, as children, they thought of the dog running off as sad, but in now way indicative of their father’s character, or as a let-down perpetrated by mom. But the mother still was embarrassed, and still is. So she held back the rest of her tears and put her arms around her daughters’ shoulders, pulling them tight and not letting go.

And the daughters cried. They shook the snot out of their noses and wet their cheeks with tears, their own tears and the tears of the other, and they chittered their teeth and were held by their mom. And the next day, while dad was looking at old pictures on the Mac and the daughters were thinking of what to do if not to play with their dog, mom went out and bought a stuffed animal that looked just like the lost puppy. And she brought it back and gave it to them, and they cried even more, and the snot ran down their face again and it was like they had never stopped at all.

I think about the dog, too. I imagine a golden retriever racing down the shore, stopping to sniff at the occasional tide-pool and all the while leaving little footprints behind. And it doesn’t know if it’s leaving the prints in order to be found more easily, or if they are to be used to help it find its way home—although they don’t lead back to the family’s house, and the dog doesn’t think about it. And it doesn’t worry about the little girls crying, faces slimy and green with snot. And it doesn’t think about hurting them.

‘Mama!’ Ethel called out. Her mom didn’t turn her head in response so Ethel shouted out ‘Jeanine!’ and Jeanine turned around. ‘Your cigarette!’

Jeanine went wide-eyed and noticed the cigarette that was down to the filter and threw it down on the ground and settled back in. Little Ethel instinctively got off from the counter and scurried over to her mama and picked the cigarette up and put it in the ashtray. Then she scampered back to her spot on the counter. The men on the TV fired a shot at the mallard, but he dove underwater just in time and escaped to his nest where there was a camera crew waiting, filming. Soon the plaid men got around the pond and got the mallard in their sights and fired and then he was a duck laying down with a few tiny holes in him. Then an ad-break.

Jeanine grunted and mumbled something from her chair but the commercials on the TV drowned it out.

“What was that, mama?” chirped Ethel.

“Serves them right,” Jeanine said. “Stay there. Serves ‘em right.”

“What do you mean, mama?”

Jeanine turned from the TV and looked at Ethel with her lips parted and a look of wild confusion in her eyes. “What, on Earth, are you saying, Ethel?” She took a cigarette out of the box and lit it. “Are you talking to yourself again?” It seemed that with every word she said the candles flickered out and then burned back, brighter. The room was only lit by candles; Jeanine’s voice was the light and dark.

“No, mom, you said something about ‘serves them right,’ and I was wondering what you mean, is all. I was talking to you”

“Serves who right? Is someone here?”

“I mean on the TV, mama. The ducks.”

Jeanine turned and looked at the TV, where a man was advertising used trucks and motorcycles in worn out colors. “There are no ducks, Ethel. Can’t you see I’m trying to watch?”

Ethel gripped the edge of the counter and stared at her mom’s thinning hair and then jumped off the counter and grabbed a heap of the used tissues and the scraps of paper and tin foil in a big handful and dumped them in the trash can. She filled up the kettle and put it on the burner.

“Mom?” she called.

Jeanine made no response but Ethel continued anyway. “I’m going to my room. I’ll only be gone a second. Please don’t burn the house down, will you?” And after waiting around for a response she turned and scurried down the hallway lined with old newspapers coated in wax, and candles melted down to stubs, and into her room.

Solace. Ethel pulled off her sweater and in the dim, moonlit room she grabbed her matches and lighted the candles and incense on her desk. She stood in the center of the room and took a deep breath, another, and then kicked away the clothes on the floor so that there was a little spot for her to sit. Then, in a blur of stringy curls and over-picked fingernails, she turned and jumped onto her bed and took down the poster which hung above. It was a poster of beetles. She hopped off her bed and set it down in the little clearing on the floor and then kneeled down right before it and put her face so close to the paper that she couldn’t even make out any of the bugs, just colors and lines that seemed to make no sense but to her were beautiful and exactly what she sought. She moved the curls out of her eyes and smiled and laughed to herself and kissed the poster, and then lifted her head up and stared at them intensely, purposefully, as if her stare could make them pop off of the page and come to life.

And then it seemed to her that they really did. The small ones lining the edge of the poster arose from their slumber, wiping their eyes with their little beetle legs, and they moved. Tiny ones that looked like blueberries or marbles glittered metallically, running around over the big ones that were still only ink, although they too would soon rise. They stopped and looked at each other and then at Ethel– they looked right at her– and then they ran up to her and climbed atop her knees and up her legs, resting in the folds of her shirt, chittering happily.

The Japanese beetles woke up, as did the ladybugs. They took off in flight, buzzing around the room like little angels glowing in the soft candlelight. They flew over to the windowsill and gazed at the moon, then they would turn and look at Ethel and, as she watched them, it seemed that they sighed and gazed at her lovingly, then some of them took off in flight and came to her and let the blue beetles on her legs climb on them and they flew their passengers around the room, letting them see the world as they never had before. They landed on Ethel’s hair and shoulders and she had never been so happy. She felt like love incarnate; she could remember none of her sadness or anxiety and she forgot the ducks and the cluttered counter and everything besides the beetles.

She ran her fingers over the paper, over the beetles that had not yet awoken, and her touch brought them to life. First their massive mandibles, and then their legs and then their shiny bodies rose out of the paper like babies brought out of the baptismal water, and they stretched their heads to the sky and all turned to look at Ethel. Beetles of every color, beetles who looked like scraps of damascus steel or petrified wood. A symphony of their tiny footsteps and chirps and buzzes, and Ethel joined in, and then it seemed to her that their chittering took on an English aspect, and soft words were spoken into her ear by the ladybugs and she could not make out any of the words specifically, but she knew the feeling they inspired in her although it had been long since she had felt that feeling before.

And then the big ones, the longhorn beetles all stopped. Ethel thought for a moment that they would sink back into the paper and her dream would be over, but then they moved again with newfound vigor and purpose. They strode to the clothes encircling them, and, using their horns or teeth, they dragged the clothing to the edge of the room and the floor was clear. And then it seemed to Ethel that there were so many more of them than had been on the poster, and her room was swarming with thousands of beetles of hundreds of species, climbing up the walls and flying onto the desk and dresser, and then they all stopped, every single beetle.

Ethel knew that they were to go away. It always happens. They all stopped and then they would run to the poster and sink back into it and she would have to hang it back up and go out to her mother.

But then they started moving again, all of them, and they moved over to her and past the paper and surrounded her, and they formed concentric circles that moved around her, shrinking and expanding and pulsing. So many circles, from the tiny one nearest to her to the circle at the edge of the room that must have been made up of hundreds of beetles, moving in alternating directions, put her in a trance. Her hands started to rise in front of her, involuntarily, and she felt magical. She felt magical; life coursing through her.

Then a lone beetle who had been sitting on the lip of a candle took flight and landed on her palm. It was translucent– she could see its inner organs that looked like a little engine. On its back was a little bit of gold, a flake like a hat that glittered. It moved across her palm and stared into her eyes, its antennae flicking up and down, and then it was still and she knew it was asleep.

And then she heard the whistle of the kettle on the stove, and she snapped out of her trance and she was alone in the room and the beetles were gone. It was just little Ethel, kneeling before a poster, her hands in the air. But the gold-hatted beetle remained. It was still asleep, and she quickly jumped up and ran across her now clean floor and put the beetle on the dresser.

She felt something like a hunger pang in her heart. But there was no time to reflect, as the whistle grew louder and louder, and it was completely possible that her mother was in front of the TV, piling and piling cigarette ash in her lap. She went to check.

The baby was, upon birth, massive and dexterous. It showed signs of great intelligence. After it was deposited on the banks of the Presumpscot, it regarded its surroundings in a way only it knew, languagelessly, and started to crawl. It crawled to a sharp jut of rock on which it sawed the umbilical cord, separating it from its mother. Its skin, still coated in slime and amniotic juices, allowed dirt to stick to the babies calves and knees and palms, protecting it from the dangers on the ground on which it was about to crawl. The slime and the cut cord trailed behind it for several feet, rustling the sand and when the child got off of the riverbank and into the forest before the road the slime and cord rustled and disturbed the leaves, and one would think that it was a goo-covered snake, but it was a baby.

The baby knew no human language, but understood and processed things in its own.

Stumbling, it crawled up the stick-strewn hill that led to Brown Street, gooing and gagaing as it went, marveling at the world into which it had been thrust. The sac had been so warm and pleasant, but the endless mysteries of Earth aroused great pleasure in its small heart, and although it had no means of narrating its feelings, something stirred deep inside of the baby and it knew that it would seek to understand everything that in its first few hours confused it, or made it wonder, and any subsequent wonder would also need to be known. Where did the sticks come from, it wondered. And the leaves? What am I seeing and what am I, and why does the ground suddenly change– why is it black and pebbly?

It had reached the road, which prompted even more questions that could not be thought but were certainly felt, and although the baby had no idea how to answer, let alone ask, these questions, it only grew happier at the innate feeling that one day it could solve them. The baby knew nothing about the squirrels or frogs that it saw, besides the fact that it saw them and it loved them.

It turned and moved down the street, crawling on the pavement, dragging its cord. It passed the multi-colored houses with cars in the driveways covered in stickers, it looked at all of them and the numbers on the doors of the houses and it did not know what any of these new symbols meant but it firmly resolved to know them.

It began to recognize patterns: once an ‘a’ was noticed, or the number 1, the baby recognized them more and more easily and began to understand that they must, in some way, be important. But again, it had no language to think about this. It simply understood. It passed by houses where people could be seen bickering in the windows, and cars eventually formed a line at the end of the road and the baby heard the honks and the people arguing loudly and it recognized anger or panic in those sounds, and that confused it. It saw itself in the people inside, and it wondered why it was naked and they were clothed, and why some people wore glasses and others didn’t, and why the cars were stopped and what a car was, and it made itself happy by wondering.

It eventually reached the end of Brown Street, where it intersects with Cumberland Street, and on Cumberland the baby crawled onto the sidewalk. This street was much busier. Cars sped past blasting music, and the baby crawled across a bridge from which it could see the place where it was born, and its mother was not there and there was no sign that she ever had been, nor the baby itself. There were people up ahead of it. They were walking quickly towards the baby, and then they stopped. It was a man and a woman. After stopping for a second, they started running and the baby noticed that their faces looked panicked, but it had never seen panic. The couple quickly reached it, and they squatted down next to the baby and started bickering and gesticulating wildly and the woman took out a phone and the man started yelling at the cars, and then they started yelling at each other as the baby watched, wondering what they were on about.

I was wandering around the backyard because dad wanted some privacy, and I heard it before I saw it. Scritch-scratching the grass so loud. And another reason that I thought it was blind was because it wasn’t even in the dark part of the yard, it was under the porch light and it didn’t seem like it saw anything. I’m happy that I’m perceptive. I scooped him up and sniffed him and then brought him inside after a fair amount of time had passed and dad probably didn’t need privacy anymore. After I brought him in I felt bad; I thought that I should’ve just found a mole hole and put him back in. Dad thought the same, and said that I should put it back outside but I said I wanted to show my class, and mom agreed. He changes his mind when she wants him to. I put him in a cardboard box for the night.

Then the next day (yesterday) I brought the box on the bus and everyone wanted to see what I found but I didn’t show or tell. That was to come, and I wanted to capture their curiosity. But then I felt bad because not all of them are in my class with Mrs. Brown, but still I didn’t want those ones to find out about the mole and tell everyone else about it. Then we got to school and I went in with the mole. My bus gets to school last out of all the buses, and I went in last so I was the only one in the hallway by the time I got situated and made sure that the mole was safe. I put a little block of cheese in the box but he didn’t eat any. And I heard squeaking and scratching coming from inside. All the other kids’ curiosity was really captured. It felt good to sit on my secret how I did. (I didn’t literally sit on the mole).

And then, as I was putting the box in my locker, Chachi came up behind me. His dad always dropped him off late. And Chachi was so mean, he always is, he made me show him what was in the box. I won’t tell how he got me to show him, though. But I showed him the mole, which was running around all frantically like the aforementioned chicken, and his star-nose was wriggling and worming around in a really gross way, like each point of the star had a mind of its own and I had never seen anything like it, it was so different from any star I had ever seen yet it was still a star and I wanted to puke. But I couldn’t let Chachi sense my grossed out feeling. And then he said something that irked me: he said Eric, everyone has a mole. Everyone’s seen a mole. It’s nothing special, why would you want to show it off? And I really didn’t know what to say so I just blushed and said Ummmm like an idiot.

It’s funny that the most dickish kids have seen the most and are surprised by nothing. Shouldn’t all that open their eyes?

But I wasn’t deterred. So we went into class and all the other kids were there, and I went up to Mrs. Brown at her desk, and I was like Mrs. Brown Mrs. Brown, can I please do a show and tell before class starts? And she asked me what it was I wanted to show, and I said I couldn’t tell but it was amazing, and plus it was scientific themed so it can be educational as well. And I put on a really pleading beggy type of face and she just had to say yes. She said yes, but only after the short lesson on punctuation (we learned about parentheses and colons: please give me feedback on my usage of them!). Mrs. Brown frequently stresses the importance of making clear when one sentence ends and when another sentence begins. Clauses too, for that matter. It is paramount, she says, to be clear and precise in your descriptions and representations of things, as well as in the manner in which you present yourself.

The lesson went off without a hitch, and then Mrs. Brown called me up to the front of class. She said that I had something important to share with all of you, and to listen to Eric (me.). Quickly I realized that I had left the box with the mole in my locker, and so I said sorry and dashed out into the hallway to retrieve it. I heard chuckles from the audience as I dashed.

The box was still there. Thank God. I took it out of the locker and opened it up– just a crack– and looked in. My mole was still in there. Thank God. Not only was he in there, but he was completely still. He sat in the middle of the cardboard floor and looked up at me as to the stars, and he and I locked eyes for what felt like forever. His tiny little beady eyes that were almost completely covered by fur. I put my hand in there and stroked his head and he didn’t move or look away. I felt deep inside of me an urge to put him in my pocket, to run away from school and to go into the woods where we could have a nice life together; I could run around in a loincloth and handmade moccasins to catch food for us– snakes or berries or leaves– and he would tunnel and tunnel, building our home as he went. But then I snapped out of it and I took him and the box into the classroom.

Mrs. Brown, quieting the class, gestured for me to stand front and center. So I did. Everyone was looking at me. I felt nervous. Really nervous, I felt like it was all stupid and who hasn’t seen a mole before? And even if no one has seen a mole at all ever before, they’re just stinky animals not worthy of our attention. I’m not lying, I was shaking. And I said it all stupidly and stumbly. I think more often than not my words come out all jumbled and not at all like how I think of them in my head. And even if I say them exactly how I think them in my head, they still sound dumb which makes me question my judgment of my words in my head. So I don’t want to write down what I said. It was all a bunch of mish-mash and I know it because people were snickering at me and passing notes and whispering. I essentially tried to explain that the night before, I had to go out into the backyard and I discovered something that I found to be cool but you guys might not and if not it’s okay, really. Then I set the box on the ground and told everyone to come forward to look inside. Then when a small U shape was formed around the box, with Mrs. Brown staring down over everyone watchfully, I opened the box up.

The mole wiggled its little star-nose at us and squeaked. Everyone gasped and some girls ran away and screamed that it was disgusting. But the mole wasn’t disgusting. I picked him up and told everyone that I found a mole, and that it is interesting because it is a mammal like us but is mostly blind and it digs, two qualities which are not like us.

Mrs. Brown was not pleased. She told me to put it back in the box right now, and then made me come with her and with the box with the mole in it out into the hallway. In the hallway she disciplined me. She said that it was entirely unsafe and irresponsible to bring a dirty animal into school, that it could carry disease and that I must wash my hands immediately. She made me go to the bathroom to wash my hands and then when I got back continued her discipline, although my time away softened her tone a bit. She told me that, while she appreciated my enthusiasm for discovery and my want to share my feelings of happiness and wonder with the class, that she could not let me keep the mole around for the entire school day. I just stared up at her scared. She asked me if I understood, and I said yes, and she paused for a second, told me to stand still, and then ran back into the classroom. She quickly returned to the hallway with the rest of the class behind her. She told me that we would use this as an opportunity to show the other kids that animals belong out in nature, in the world, and not in brown cardboard boxes kept in boys’ lockers.

So we all went outside, they all gathered around me at the edge of the forest, and watched as I shooed the little mole away, off into the forest, where it could be eaten by birds or cats or all sorts of things, and where I could (probably) never find it again.

“Don’t look so glum, please,” she said. I don’t try to put it on, but I think my resting face is a sad one. I wasn’t unhappy. I cast my gaze down and saw my and her legs rippling and waving in the water’s reflection, and our hunched bodies inclining towards the fireworks, over the lake.

“Do I look sad, do you think?” I asked. “I’m okay.”

“You do look a bit sad, yes. Watch the fireworks. Or we can go to the boardwalk and find something to eat, if you’re bored of the show. It’s whatever you want, I don’t mind.” A massive American flag burst into existence over Lake George. “Or we could go to the bar and talk, I really don’t mind. Just don’t sit there looking so, so glum.”

My gaze was glued to our reflections. I did look a bit tired. I was tired. And I wasn’t smiling. I, sometimes, will subconsciously delve into my sometimes sad state of mind and affect a scowl that I hope reads pensive, mature and concerned. As in, I’ll wade around in the sadness like a man in a mud bath, hoping that by caking up all the muddyness and poo-pooment it will make me feel better. But this kind of mud bath only further dries out the skin, drawing out more sadness for me to wade around in, creating a cycle of wallowing in my own poo-poo attitude towards the world. I wore that scowl then. I was just tired, or my body was, while my mind was unproductively overactive.

“I’m lost in thought, madame. I apologize. I’ll have a more positive demeanor from here on out, if that is what you will,” I snarked. I was lost in thought, but I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. I was fooling myself into thinking that I was intensely focused on the ripples and the manner in which they reflected and distorted the fireworks, trying to find some kind of metaphor to put into a story that had been on my mind for the past few weeks, hoping that the ripples would reveal to me some beautiful way to say about self expression that a hundred other authors will have inevitably said. But in reality I was only thinking about thinking about my observation, without observing anything at all.

“Well, sir, I live for you. My will is yours,” she said, and I turned to her and gave her a weak smile and turned my head up to the sky. She answered my smile with a sympathetic half-smile, which continued even after I turned my head to the sky. I only started looking up because I couldn’t bear that sympathetic half-smile. And then I really waded into the mud bath.

Pom-poms of magnesium blew up with massive booms and cracks that I could scarcely hear; my focus was given solely to my internal monologue. The fact of the matter was that I was sad. Even though I denied it earlier, that little smile that I couldn’t bear that she held on her face as I turned away and looked to the sky with a brave face, that smile brought the acknowledgement out of me. And I got to thinking about why I felt shitty, and I realized that I had no real reason. It was just the case that, for whatever reason, several weeks ago I had some anxiety-causing incident, and even though the incident passed and I was safe– as always– the unease I felt persisted, solely because it had once existed for a real reason. The malaise, which was at one point just a reaction from some stimulus, had, over time, become both the cause and effect of itself. To the point where I could not, nor can I even now, remember that initial stimulus. It was as if I had tripped and bruised my knee, gotten up, went about life, but the bruise was growing and replenishing the humors that constituted it, to the point where my body was continuing to bruise my knee for no reason besides the fact that it was bruised, and should thus stay bruised. And I looked to my right and then back up again, watching all the fireworks that are designed to catch attention and to distract, and I knew that distraction was to be my remedy– I eventually forgot about the bruise– and I just couldn’t. Couldn’t lose myself in the world around me as I should have. And that realization made me anxious. I felt trapped inside my own head and I did not like it. The only way I knew to help myself was to wallow in pity and obsess over my anxiety, and that method of help was, obviously, detrimental to my getting better.

I started to look around me, all frantically like I had done something wrong or that I had somewhere to be desperately soon; I wrung my hands constantly and kicked my feet against the wall I sat on, squirming around on my butt, all anxiously. And my face was positively pitiful. My date asked me again if I was okay and I looked at her and absently nodded my head, which was unsatisfactory to her. She asked again why didn’t I just want to get up and leave, or talk about whatever I was so obviously anxious about, and I just shrugged my shoulders, again absently, and kept on wringing my hands and bouncing my legs. She said that I should really just talk, that it’d be better than what I was doing, and I didn’t respond, I was out of it. Then she said that everyone in the world could line up with flowers, waiting to give me a kiss, or to talk to me about whatever it is that I would want, or to whisper sweet words of care and affection into my ear whilst massaging my back and feet, and I would be too distracted with my own thoughts to even see the line of people forming in front of me.

Then a little kid, maybe a boy of four or five ran up behind us, as I was preparing to respond in some witty way or something like that. He had apparently lost his parents and came up to us for help, walking silently up behind me and tapping me on the shoulder while I was lost in thought. And it scared the shit out of me.

The little jump that the scare gave me, coinciding with my wobbling and unease, sent me falling off of the little stone wall we sat on, and I plunged into the lake with a high-pitched scream. And all I could think about was how wet I was.

I appreciated Moon’s monologue, but really I just wanted to watch the circus. I asked them, I went up to them and said “Moon can we go to the circus, I want to see the world. I want to be amongst people and to see the physically deformed and gifted,” and they begrudgingly agreed. Of course I have no money, so they bought our tickets. The utterly noseless woman did a backflip with a twist off of a trapeze, to be caught by four little men in orange striped overalls.

“Thank you, you’re right,” I said. I wanted them to stop talking. I wanted to see the world, not hear Moon.

“You get what I mean though? I can see your leg bobbing. Think useful, pragmatic thoughts.”

“For sure.”

The circus was interesting but nothing to write about. Recently I’ve become very unenamored by the prospect of writing prose. I will be famous on Threads one day. But essentially we were in the upper balcony, under us was a sea of people all looking at the stage. There were several acts, some animals, yadda yadda. The show started with the noseless woman doing backflips into different crowds of little men, then a woman with mis-matched prosthetics came out and did backflips off of a trapeze strung opposite the noseless one, and then another woman who was maxillofacially swollen came out and did more backflips into more little men, only perpendicular to the other set of women. Then they left the stage and the elephants and boars came, and I really didn’t like that. I wanted to see people, not animals. Not the point. It was the third act that interested me.

“But seriously, –––––, stop with the leg. One must immerse oneself in the moment if one wishes to survive such trying times,” Moon said. They spoke at normal volume, rather than a whisper, which I found unbecoming for a person at a showing. “Look at the magician. Isn’t his hat cute? And don’t crash out.”

I wasn’t planning on it. I was already looking at the magician. “I’m watching,” I said, not without snark.

The magician was doing magician things, I don’t know. He was pulling rabbits out of hats, he escaped from a block of ice, he made a woman’s tongue disappear, he did mentalist tricks where he discerned audience members’ credit card numbers. But it was the kid. There was this kid sitting up front, maybe two rows from the stage, who wanted to get up there. So bad. He was throwing everything he had to catch the magician’s attention. Shoes, hat, socks, toys and cetera, he threw on stage. He screamed. I can tell he wanted to get on stage very badly. To be the center of attention, to be with the magician is every little boy’s dream.

Maybe twenty minutes into the magician’s act, the boy left. He made a big show of it, as at that point the magician had made note of him and had made comments about the boy to the audience, so the boy gave a yelp and crawled over his mother, declaring that he had more important places to be. The magician became a comedian and called the boy, as he was exiting the theater, a sorry twat that can’t stand to sit in the dark.

He continued his set and I remember very little. I have found that, after watching many magicians work, they become less and less interesting. The ability to pull the wool over so many eyes is impressive, but over time it is really all the same. As in the trick. It is almost all slight of hand, and I have given up on trying to spot it. Let them fool me, I say. I simply do not believe in magic. So I watched as he locked himself into a cage, was prodded with spears and lowered into a pool of water, only to reveal himself later as one of the spear bearers. Show me something I haven’t seen, wizard. I wish I was a child again. Moon was wowed by all of it. And I am forever jealous of them.

The magician left as quickly as he appeared. The fourth, and final set, was a medley. It was a mix of gymnastics: trapeze work and trampoline work, animal displays: the aforementioned elephants and some new giant lizards, and a dance show: dancing. I have not much to report. I came to see people, to see the world and take it all in. In my seat, I told Moon I was watching diligently. But really I was thinking about nothing. I was not thinking about what they wanted so badly to talk to me about, I wasn’t thinking about the deformed or the gymnasts or the music or the kid. I was just in my world. Sitting, humanly.

Then, the doors opened. They opened so loudly and dramatically, I knew that they opened without being able to see them. And in marched some burly yet fatally pulchritudinous men, dragging that same small child that had so rudely interrupted the show earlier. He was being dragged in by his wrists and feet, his mother nowhere to be found, and he was screaming and kicking, calling out that he really meant nothing and that he wanted to go home. He was too young to realize what he had done. I wanted him dead. To interrupt such a show is to bring death upon oneself. Row by row the crowd looked back at him, realizing that we were in the presence of a devil. God I’m so tired I can hardly make this up. No. I lied, everyone was jeering at him, but as soon as they realized that he was ten or eleven, they stopped. I wanted him dead for longer, though. until they brought him on stage, that is. For when they brought him on stage, they stripped him naked and dipped him in a pot full of white liquid, which I now know is glue. They dipped him and took him out of the glue and made him stand still while, in front of a silent audience, the crowd of little men threw hair on him. Of what species I do not know, but they glued and haired him. Then they attached, in front of everyone, a large snout that stretched from his mouth to the ground, and one of the little men struck the boy hardly on the small of his back, and the boy fell, and the little men sprinkled black, ovaline objects over the stage, and they prodded the boy until, through his snout, he picked up and ate every one of the little things, all this happening while a crowd of silent faces watched, gawking at the sight of such a small child, barely eleven, being forced to humiliate himself in such a way. Most of the audience members did not even realize his interruption. But that is the way of life.

And this discreteness is limiting. Painfully so. The limitation starts in my mind and moves to my lungs and larynx, it continues into the air and is distorted as the vibrations ripple and reflect, and all that you hear from me is limited by your own discrete parts in the most destructive way. Maybe if my brain was homogenous slop I could get my thoughts right. I know the truth. The way, the universal verity is hidden in the slop of my soul or subconscious, but to bring it into a thinkable form is rendered impossible by my brain.

Likewise, these thoughts I have I am too scared to speak. No words can sum up what one really feels. And so it comes out in a stuttered mess of consonants and uhs, and I really make no sense at all. And what you glean from these sounds I make– that is unknowable to me. Maybe if we were all that slop, all of us together, we would all know everyone’s true intentions. And my hypothesis would be proven. I would see that no one is truly bad, and everyone would realize that any bad I have done was in the name of good-doing. That life is too strange to think you know anyone, truly, at least until you’re in the homogenous slop. But then if we are all dissolved in the sloppifying acid and we are all one, then surely we would not have intentions at all, at least not individually, and thus our intentions would be neither good nor bad, and there would be no way to know anything. All of our actions would be one and I would have nothing to say to you as you and I would be one too, but the thing that would become of us would be so totally different from our present forms that it would not even register to us that we are who we are, just joined by means of dissolution. So what use would it be? We are destined to be misunderstood, and the only time you or I could be realized is when there is no you, and there is no I. So why care?

A light snow had started to fall, the little flakes resting on my red hat and in the crevices of the curls of hair around my ears and neck, all of them settling in a rather pretty way. My ears always have a tendency to redden in the cold, and this was long since I got rid of my hat with the earflaps. I thought, at the time, that red ears in the cold were cute on little boys, but they quickly make a man look rather immature and childish. There are few men, I thought, who can let their ears redden and still retain their machismo, and most of those men are Scandinavians who died long ago. I remember thinking about this and then putting the hood of my jacket on.

I could hear the guitarist playing under the terrace. I thought that his music was very beautiful and touching. I tried hard to notice all the intricacies and all of the notes in each grouping, but I was continually distracted by the morning. Obviously I was not totally alone, but she had said something about me that left me nonplussed. I do not wish to dive into the specifics of what she had said, but it was concerning my fulfillment of the role of the masculine part of our relationship– in more ways than just the obvious, mind you. And I can admit my faults, but it was the manner and tone in which she made the comment that left me feeling strange. I wished to tell her that, but I thought that that would be unmasculine, and that cycle of thinking fed into a routine over the course of five minutes where I would put on a hard face, but inside me was a flood of soft, sticky mucus, so to speak.

It was as the song was ending that they all came out. The square around the fountain had been clear for some minutes, and upon it descended a massive group of people. From each entrance to the square came a parade of people, men women and children, dancing and playing accordions and guitars, all with flowers in their hair and white linen shirts and pants above their moccasins. They carried lamps and wreaths and spreads of food, trays of teapots and china were hauled in by several men each. They sang this fantastic song of harmonies that I can describe harmonically, but the feeling it evoked in me is impossible to translate to words. Such soul-melting awe is rare. I was the only person there, and they did not seem to notice me.

As the last of the parades filed into the square, a small rowboat arrived at the opposite end and a party climbed out. It was a woman, surrounded by four men, one of whom also carried a folded object. They walked her to the front of the fountain, facing me and the guitarist, as I and all the others watched. She wore a face of quiet resolve, a slight smile that never faded. The man with the object unfolded it, revealing a cot-like structure. Then the woman took off her shirt and pants, becoming completely naked except for the moccasins on her feet. She laid down.

The men stepped back towards the fountain, and then the congregations of people started walking again. From each entrance they walked, single-file, towards the woman, and then they formed a revolving circle around her, each person walking around her once, and then returning to where they came from to sing and dance and drink. Each one had a knife. Every person, as they circled and circled this woman, took their knife to her and cut or made an incision or smacked her with the flat side of it. And none of them penetrated or bruised her skin. The knives pressed down and down, pushing her skin down like a hand in soft dough, until the wielder brought it back up. And every single one of the knives would be stuck to her by some kind of gooey substance, invisible to me standing so high up. It seemed as though the people did wish to cut her, but that could not have been their intention, as neither the first nor the fiftieth nor the hundredth could. It was all futile. She was sticky and soft, and she wore it on the outside, and she could not be cut.

I got the sense that I was witnessing something private, so I walked back to the train station. I was consumed by the events of that morning, my stoic reaction to criticism that was ultimately feigned. I thought and I thought, maybe too much.

There are so many people around, go ahead,

smile for them!

And you do smile, but not

with your mouth. To face the world

with your mouth in such a state would be far

too much embarrassment.

But do be prepared: sooner or later one of them will come up to you and see all those cavities.

There’s no escape, verstanden?

And quit playing with that ball.

.

The people are all away from you.

They’re busy across the street, drinking things and holding folders and their keys.

Sometimes they look at you,

but it isn’t personal. People’s eyes

just wander, and here they tend to linger.

They regard you about the same as a toe

on anyone else’s little foot.

That is to say: they don’t think about you much at all.

Someone will still talk to you, though. And see all those cavities.

Make sure you brush well, okay?

.

Your smile is nice and big now.

Good!

It’s easy to smile when you speak the language of love.

Love is real because the language is real,

because language is real, and

because I can see you and you can see me.

It’s real because you have a place to go and things to do.

And because of your massive burden of responsibility. Breathe and smile.

.

And someone will approach you and try to converse,

but you do not speak what they speak here. And she will be so surprised and you will know–

for this is the language of love–

you will know her surprise, her gooey core, without hearing her words.

And she will say:

“Doch es ist die Sprache der Liebe!”

but to you it will be retching phlegm.

A few days ago I had a dream. I’ve been having trouble sleeping for the last several months (which has really been truly unbearable, I feel so bad for true insomniacs) and I decided to take a few melatonin gummies as an aid. I’ve always shied away from melatonin, for some reason I have always regarded it as a placebo-type affair, but now I see it as it truly is, which is

I can’t stand my writing. Over the weekend I read a story on Substack that had a voice similar to my own and I thought it was the most amateur thing ever, and since then I’ve been thinking about all of the sentences I’ve ever written and how only two or three of them are actually good. Writing is the only creative outlet I’ve ever had that makes me feel inadequate when compared to those who are virtuosic. I do not know why music is different, but it is. I just do not have it.

But the dream. It wasn’t even my own. I was in some sort of office-type building on a lower level, and there was a biblical rainstorm outside. The streets were flooded and the water was quickly rising. I was probably on the fourth floor but who cares. The main thing is that there was a really sexy firefighter on the, say, seventh floor (close to the top) who was running down the flight of stairs to bring the people on my floor up to the top. At the start of the dream the flood was almost at my level, and there were maybe three or four other people standing around me, and our shoes were quickly getting wet.

I sat in this office with a window overlooking the rivers flowing through the streets, looking at all the detritus and corpses and little kitties swimming from side to side, at the few people in boats who all capsized and drowned. The sexy firefighter would come down to my floor, grab someone and throw them over his shoulder and hustle back up to the top. I really, really wanted to go up asap, but for some dream-reason only he could take the stairs, and I couldn’t bring myself to actually ask everybody if I could be the next one to go. And the water was rising.

It began to wet the PC in the office, which sent cool sparks flying everywhere, and I fucking hated my life for getting myself in such a situation. I’ve had many disaster-type dreams, and in all of them I remember having some sort of heroic resolve to stay with it and be brave even if the braveness was feigned and fraudulent, but in the flood dream I had none of that, and I didn’t want to die in a flood, I just wanted to go up to the top floor. And then the firefighter bursted into the office and grabbed me and threw me over his shoulder and he trudged through the two-foot high pool that had collected over the carpet and into the stairwell, and he ran up the three flights to the top floor. But as we were going up I realized something that did not seem like a realization, it was more something that I had just decided to push out of my mind for reasons of pleasantness and comfortability, I realized that the water was rising just as fast as we were. That, and I had known this all along, I was to die anyway, fourth floor or seventh floor made no difference at all. And that I really just wanted to be held by this sexy firefighter whose face I never really made out, I just knew he was sexy in a firefighter way. This was one of several dreams I had that night, maybe he was in a previous one. But he was taking me up and the water was at his chest now, and I knew that we were about to drown. God I can never have an original idea, even if this wasn’t even my idea in the first place. I want to write an essay on originality. Dreams bro, this dream probably happened in Petersburg in all likelihood. But we were about to drown, the water was at his shoulders and with every rise of his left knee my face dipped down into it. And I realized another thing, that I was happy because I was wrapped around him. That who cares if I was going to die in the dream, that the whole affair was miserable and scary– I thought of pine trees and the great bigback whale and Humboldt Fog and of Zembla, of pin striped linens and old Impalas and a skull wrapped in an American flag. I thought of steak and mushroom sauce, rebellious love and red hot snowflakes. West London hoes and Zeke, great Brooklyn wolves and albatrosses flying overhead and smelling nice hair in great big breaths and cold hands on my hips, of cold water and whiskers strewn on the floor, and of everything that has made my face tight and crows walk on my eyes. God knows there has been a lot of that, and I hate my face for it.

Anyways, the fiasco. I was home for a long weekend in October of 2022, my junior year of college, and I wanted to do something nice for my parents who were and are so gracious and loving to me. And for context, this memoir-type piece– the writing and posting of it, that is– is done at the behest of my therapist. He said that putting oneself out there, feelings-wise, in a non-allegorical piece of writing, can be in a way healing of one’s insecurities over past shortcomings and failures. Et cetera.

Anyways, the day before the fiasco, as they were driving me home from the bus station, we were all ranting about how we hate having to cook when we get back home after a long day. They were saying that it’s a real pain to have a really tough, white-collar type laborious day, only to come home to no dinner made and the meat having to defrost on top of it. I agreed, although I didn’t work at the time. So the seed was planted in my mind that I would have dinner ready for them when they got home the next day, which was usually around 6. And of course I had just seen the new way to do burgers, so I would cook burgers.

It all went really smoothly up until the end. I cut lettuce and tomatoes and onions and pickles, I biked to the store to get some nice pretzel buns and some really nice cheese that I was proud of remembering the name of. I have since forgotten it, but that’s besides the point. I measured out three 5.3 ounce patties, and preheated the oven to the specified temperature, which was of course f(5.3). I shaped them and everything, salted and the rest, then I put them into the oven on a metal baking tray.

Now I hadn’t used an oven in some time, and I suppose over the years I had forgotten the proper etiquette. When one is inserting a tray into the oven, one must ensure that it is fully within the bounds of the oven. That is to say, it can be bad for the glass window, and for the tray, to insert the sheet half-way, using the closing of the oven door to push it all the way in. In a traditional oven, this is essentially a rule to conserve the cosmetics of the oven. But my parents had just gotten a new one, which I did not realize– this oven, for some reason, had a convexity on the oven-side of the glass window. This convexity stretched halfway up the door– or to the height of the top rack– and then it rounded off and returned to a normal flat plane. So this worked out such that, as I used the door to finish sliding the tray with all the burgers in, the convexity sort of pushed the tray upwards and backwards in a strange paraboloid type of arc, and when the tray came back down with a clang, I suppose the burger in the back had fallen off and onto the floor of the oven. I did not notice– I went on and started toasting the buns.

Now, this oven was also fancy in a sort of old fashioned-revival type of way. In that it had a real fire burning at the bottom, that you could see actually kind of well through slits and holes of varying sizes.

So, as I was toasting the buns and cutting cherry tomatoes for a salad, the fire licked and licked at the fallen hamburger patty. And as it licked away, the fat from the 80/20 mix melted and dripped down over the open flame. It was a whole oily mess. Now I had to cook them for fifteen minutes, but I could tell that something was off when I smelled the burning at around the six minute mark. So I checked the oven, and, lo, there was a little ball of flame at the bottom. It was no big deal, really.

I got a plate and some metal tongs to try to fish it out of there, but as I tried to grip and slide the blackened ball towards me, it kind of crumbled and leaked more, and so the fire started to spread from just the burger to the puddle of grease accumulating over it.

For some reason, I did not turn off the oven until much later.

So there was a decent fire, actually, by the ten minute mark. Like the bottom of the oven was engulfed in flames, and the bottom of the metal tray was being blackened, and the burger that started it all was barely recognizable as anything other than a pile of fleshy ash. And the fire grew. Long tongues of it licked up and onto the tray and soon all the burgers were aflame, and I could feel the heat on me and I could tell that soon, very soon, the fire would hop out of the oven and light the floor on fire, and then the walls, and I would be truly fucked indeed. I was really beating myself up about it. It was all so overwhelming, and despite all my anxiety about it, the fire only ever got worse. Like it had it out for me. And the smoke alarm was beeping and smoke was rising, and I was really scared.

Thank God, I had a real thought about what to do. Instead of just sitting around, I actually turned the oven off, then I ran out to the garage to grab a big canvas tarp. I took it back to the kitchen, and used it to suffocate the fire. And it worked. The fire went out, after a little bit, and it was just a smoky mess. And then, I guess, the oven’s failsafe kicked in. Maybe it has smoke detectors, or something, but it detected that something was wrong and an internal sprinkler system went off.

It was at precisely this moment that my mother came home.

The sprinklers went off, and the oven door was open, and the water was kind of spraying down from the top of it and sizzling when it touched the bottom. It came down fast and heavy. My mother walked in and saw me, at this point, curled up in the fetal position and crying from stress and relief as this torrent of rain came from invisible fountains on the roof of the oven. It poured out through the open door and onto the floor, and she had no idea what had happened but she knew it was all fucked up and she embraced me. And I sat there, crying in her arms as the water from the failsafe system flooded the oven and the meat patties, and the water was flowing out and onto the ground around our feet and bottoms, and the burgers had turned the stream almost as salty as the tears that fell into it.

How could I have known?

My nose isn’t that big,

I can’t smell it all.

And the beer has orange, surely

the shit is citrus scented? No?

Well it’s true, I haven’t brushed my teeth

in quite some time.

And the beer was kind of warm.

Pretty please forgive me, pretty–

maybe you could plug your nose?

The waves were high and whitecapped. The tide never seemed to come in or out. Luna and I sat on a towel next to the stream; they wanted to sit closer to the ocean but I refused, thinking we’d have to move or else get wet. But the tide never came in or out, we could have sat ten feet closer. A child was sitting next to us, building a sand castle. His lower face was red from the kool aid he was chugging. The sand castle proved difficult to build.

‘He speaks only in iambic pentameter.’

I could hear cars pull in or out of the parking lot behind us. Cross-country campers, minivans with rusted, hole-pocked frames with seats practically made of cigarette ash, piled high with kids. Toyota Corollas and Vespas, all coming to or leaving the beach. We had walked.

‘You finally get a date with some them you’ve been eyeing since middle school, and they continually forget your name and call you by the name of the kid who’d put gum in your hair every homeroom,’ I countered.

The kid next to us was still working on the castle. He had a solid foundation down. He used a set of buckets to lay down different towers and parapets, concentric cylinders topped with drippy sand. His parents were nowhere in sight, I thought that they might have gone to get hotdogs and had forgotten about the little tyke. Maybe they only needed his little sister to feel like a family.

‘He only ever refers to the waitress as garçon and absolutely refuses to tip.’

Across the stream, by the boulders and tide pools that bookended the beach, was a man dressed in a leather jacket and ribbed jeans. He choked down cigarette after cigarette as he stared out into the blue. A fog had started to gather way out over the Atlantic, obscuring some of the little islands in our bay. I stared at the man for a long time. I had no thoughts.

‘None of this will be listed on any of his profiles, but all he talks about is how proud he is to be a groyper. He has a strange skewed, black square tattooed on his forearm too. And while he asks you about all of your tattoos, he won’t give any context to the mysterious square that is so heavily shaded in.’

As the sandcastle grew higher and higher, a strange stench drifted across from the swamp. We all noticed; I could see people hold their noses shut and Luna took a break from our game of hypotheticals to make a comment on the stink. The kid used it as fuel to speed his construction. The man in leather started walking in our direction.

‘She is three children in a trenchcoat.’

The people around us started to move up the beach, past the swampy area so that they would be upwind from the stink. Luna and I stayed. After most of them had left, the smell stopped. A dead raccoon floated downstream. I spotted some birds of prey high above.

‘You just get stood up. You never even meet them in person’

I thought that that one was lazy. I didn’t say anything. The man in leather was close now, almost at the stream. The little kid had made a real fortress, a beautiful castle of sand with real walls surrounding it, little buildings in the courtyard and trees of drip that surrounded the main keep topped with parapets and turrets. He was positively beaming at his creation.

‘First, you expect him to pay. He brags about his wealth and his amazing career, et cetera. He orders the finest wine, a bottle of it, two even, makes you buy the most expensive item on the menu. Appetizers and the like, the whole nine yards. More wine. Truffle on the pasta which already has tartufo in it. Then he desperately needs to use the restroom, and you never see him again. You cannot afford the bill, so you wash dishes to pay back your debt.’

The man in leather jumped across the stream. He locked eyes with the child, still beaming, and walked briskly by. As he passes the castle, it crumbles into the sand it was made of.

but I’ll write a testament of Amelia.

She was born in Berlin, her father a financier

and she grew to be a doctor, until she died like Ophelia.

Her neck was strung with the copper with which she sang:

a gift from my father, one day she’ll be his memorabilia.

A four-legged shapeshifter she is,

and most of all she will reveal the

love of this world, divine, prescient and sweet,

the age old Catalan inquisitor, Amelia.

And she is the pavement, the twigs and sticky buds,

a salty cove of Peaks, la isla.

And more than the words she is the space between,

spaces on some page of a textbook on mycelia.

I am sorry Caleb, no horror today, I hope

you accept El Testamen de Amelia.

what I do best, I think, or I thought

but after all this time, the empty lot 

has no house,

just footprints in circles, and muddy ditches,

and more footprints in circles. 

I had a dream where I really started:

I dug two-yard post holes, poured cement,

and honestly thought out a foundation.

And I found in it no elation, just a shaky fear

of what to come, the hardships and costs

and the time I will lose if all goes awry.