[I’m sorry I haven’t written anything for y’all. My day job is wrecking my peace. Eating up days, nights, weekends, all, like a big big hungry mouth. But it’s a tunnel, right? Every mouth leads to a tunnel. I’ll be back with you soon. Might need a shower, ammirite? In troth to more writings to come, here’s a little meditation for you.]
A voice calls.
Ay ey eh eh oh
A lonely cry.
The base pumps, heavy on the backbeat.
A clatter of bells, something wooden
Wood flute, cool as rainwater, piercing
Your roof is leaking and did you know your house was made of leaves?
It is. Your house is leaking. The cabinets rise, the refrigerator lifts and tilts and floats, it’s big and maybe it’ll knock you over or is it electrified? Also not a good thought.
All the things you didn’t want to see, the things we pretend aren’t in houses, start to expose themselves. Sewage runs up the tub drain and out the toilet but it isn’t just that, it’s the plaster paper peeling off the walls, revealing lathes and whatever accumulates around lathes over 160 years, a sort of crumbled mess that might be corpse innards or just decades worth of matted dust. Every LEGO in the house floats and so do the roach traps and rat traps you forgot you left under the sofa —
You stumble from room to room, pushing against water with your thighs.
There’s your ex husband and your other ex husband and your grandma and your granny and your great-granny and your other great-granny and something’s wrong, your grannies are all dead but they don’t seem to know they’re dead. One waters the scarlet geraniums hanging on the front porch like there isn’t a flood on, that’s your very own granny, your favorite.
You turn back to wave good-bye to your granny like Gretel looking back at her house one last time and you see your lover, the true one, His Nibs in his big white shirt (but you can make him Rhett Butler or the Eleventh Doctor if you want, or Mu Bai, you remember, Chow Yun-fat’s character in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, anyone dream about him?) standing in the doorway to see you off.
His mouth creases into a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. He says (you hear it in your head), None of this has to be real.
That happened in a book, a children’s mystery, the villain smiled at the 13-year-old detective girl and her sidekick tomboy friend, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes, that was the first clue he was going to steal the dollhouse where the emeralds were hidden, but reading the book, 7 or 8 years old, you hadn’t heard of a smile like that, it was a revelation, and you thought, Sorrow. Sorrow. You were in love with that villain, the jewel thief. He looked like Rhett Butler in the ink wash illustration, mustache and black hair just curling out of a comb back, smiling that smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
Of course, you think, it’s the only way to live in this world, my heart would break, really break, if this had to be real.
Tears spring to your eyes but His Nibs is gone like a sunshaft when the clouds shift, and when has he ever had time for your tears?
So you squelch down the steps where the whitewash has long worn off the wood. The water’s cleaner here, reflecting sky around the grass tips, and you take the last steps into water, and so on down the walk, kilting your skirt. The lilacs are blooming or is it mimosa, where is this place, North or South, and you turn back again and the house has turned into a little round hillock where a little old woman lives with dozens of children and a cat suns on the roof and nasturtiums nod around the window and sure enough, there she is, a woman in a striped petticoat shaking out her broom.
In another step the water’s up to your thigh. You look for a boat and here it is, here it comes, a man’s poling this little leaf-shaped boat. He’s your size. He might be a ghost. A small man in a big white shirt.
You step in and stand and he goes on poling through a country that always floods in spring, that’s why they build houses in these hollow hills, these tall round hills with windows overlooking the waterline and children calling from window to window like they’d just looked out of a Gyo Fujikawa picture-book casement and daisies nodding on the green grass and maybe a cow munching in the distance, nothing strange about that, a cow munching on a rooftop somewhere.
You look back for your house but your grannies are gone and your ex husbands are gone and His Nibs is gone and maybe that’s for the best. And you don’t remember you had grannies or ex husbands or children either. Only that something’s been lost.
His Nibs, you remember missing him, but you can’t picture his face.
The man poles on, the man who’s just your size. Who can he be?
You don’t bother wondering for long. This is a strange country, a pretty country, green hills and water for grass, water green as glass except where it reflects the blue sky. A waterlily floats by, then a flock of them. They’re all around you now. You push through waterlilies like you were in Black Moshannon in Pennsylvania, remember the black lake in springtime and the horse chestnut trees in bloom and the water lilies, the lotus blossoms, crowding the boat? Remember the smell of the lotus?
The base rises again. Synth notes stream past like wind rising at dusk. What can it be, that song? Somewhere out of sight wild geese call.
You don’t need to know your companion’s name, or where you’re going, or even what his eyes might look like. The past is gone and love with it, gone past memory and even past remembering that anything has been lost. The blessed souls release their garlands at last.
A purple mountain looms. The sun lowers behind its shoulder.
Your companion never looks back.