people huddled in their dens. They clipped the ground and erupted waist-deep craters large enough in which one could lie down. In the light you could hardly stand to look for all the glinting, the masked back-rattle. You couldn’t step without incision. The aching stretched our gums. I told the young ones how some new fairy had dropped her payload in mid-flight. The children wouldn’t wink. At this point we’d lost ways of sentiment. Overhead there hung a thing that seemed to want us nowhere. I couldn’t help but want to stay under. I couldn’t remember anyone I’d ever met. The names of people once relations hid chipped, minor abrasions into my brain. I’d had a mother, I knew, and someone besides her. I’d had people who would talk. But these days were so overloaded, so crusted over and back-bent, I didn’t know what else to speak of when I spoke into the brusque remainder of my household, into the crooks that hadn’t yet been demolished. I touched my own teeth with my soft tongue and wondered how long before they’d be the ones that rained down and ripped us open.
SEABED
Randall had a head the size of several persons’ heads—a vast seething bulb with rotten hair that shined under certain light. Several summers back he’d driven to a bigger city where smarter men removed a hunk out of his skull. They’d said the cyst grew from the wires hung above the house. Randall’s son hadn’t ended up so well off. The crap ate through the kid’s whole cerebrum. Radiation. Scrambled cells. One had to be mindful of these things in these days , the doctors said. Now, though, with the woman gone and the baby dead, Randall kept on living in that old house with the mold curtains where his guilt breathed in the walls. He lugged the kid’s tricycle all over, the handlebars shrieking with rust on account of how he even brought it in the bath.
The streets were ruined that evening as he sulked half-cocked among the light. There’d been a parade at 3:00 p.m. for the Governor’s next wedding, a celebration of his legal promise to a whore he’d got caught pants-down with by the paper—therein, stoned on flashbulbs, the elected had sworn the fraggy dyke his betrothed: all six foot four of her, thickly mustached, tattooed every inch. Like most days, though, Randall slept to dusk, so that by the time he got up and fit his pants on and cleaned the dead birds off the porch—those fuckers fell all hours due to, again, the power lines, another stunner in the long line of hell that kept him up—the crepe had been unraveled. The trombones pumped and champagne popped. The whole town seemed to have cleared out. There were no sedans, no street sweepers, no bastards out on the club porch, where most days by now they rallied barking, randy for date rape.
Randall headed on along the strip where wheel wells from parade floats scarred the dirt. Folks had tricked their cars into makeshift barges, spurting confetti and huge balloons. They’d built a twenty-foot high reproduction of the Governor out of mud and chicken wire, which for days had towered up into the sky outside the trailer known as City Hall—a multicolor monolith, in minor silhouette of god. Seeing such a thing made Randall wonder his own quadrupled replica might look like—zonked out eyes as tunnels, a skull so big it blotted out the sky. In school they’d called him Lump Skull, Fat Face.
They’d smeared his name on bathroom walls with shit. They’d made him stand profiled under the monkey bars so they could swing down from each end and kick his eyes. On and on in that way for years until one day in shop class he’d tried to stick his neck into the band saw. After that he’d been expelled, ripped from the rosters, which at first had seemed a gift—though at home things weren’t much different. Randall’s parents were good-looking and ashamed. At night they locked their room.
Randall hadn’t shuddered when the mold collapsed their bedroom ceiling. He could at
SEABED
Randall had a head the size of several persons’ heads—a vast seething bulb with rotten hair that shined under certain light. Several summers back he’d driven to a bigger city where smarter men removed a hunk out of his skull. They’d said the cyst grew from the wires hung above the house. Randall’s son hadn’t ended up so well off. The crap ate through the kid’s whole cerebrum. Radiation. Scrambled cells. One had to be mindful of these things in these days , the doctors said. Now, though, with the woman gone and the baby dead, Randall kept on living in that old house with the mold curtains where his guilt breathed in the walls. He lugged the kid’s tricycle all over, the handlebars shrieking with rust on account of how he even brought it in the bath.
The streets were ruined that evening as he sulked half-cocked among the light. There’d been a parade at 3:00 p.m. for the Governor’s next wedding, a celebration of his legal promise to a whore he’d got caught pants-down with by the paper—therein, stoned on flashbulbs, the elected had sworn the fraggy dyke his betrothed: all six foot four of her, thickly mustached, tattooed every inch. Like most days, though, Randall slept to dusk, so that by the time he got up and fit his pants on and cleaned the dead birds off the porch—those fuckers fell all hours due to, again, the power lines, another stunner in the long line of hell that kept him up—the crepe had been unraveled. The trombones pumped and champagne popped. The whole town seemed to have cleared out. There were no sedans, no street sweepers, no bastards out on the club porch, where most days by now they rallied barking, randy for date rape.
Randall headed on along the strip where wheel wells from parade floats scarred the dirt. Folks had tricked their cars into makeshift barges, spurting confetti and huge balloons. They’d built a twenty-foot high reproduction of the Governor out of mud and chicken wire, which for days had towered up into the sky outside the trailer known as City Hall—a multicolor monolith, in minor silhouette of god. Seeing such a thing made Randall wonder his own quadrupled replica might look like—zonked out eyes as tunnels, a skull so big it blotted out the sky. In school they’d called him Lump Skull, Fat Face.
They’d smeared his name on bathroom walls with shit. They’d made him stand profiled under the monkey bars so they could swing down from each end and kick his eyes. On and on in that way for years until one day in shop class he’d tried to stick his neck into the band saw. After that he’d been expelled, ripped from the rosters, which at first had seemed a gift—though at home things weren’t much different. Randall’s parents were good-looking and ashamed. At night they locked their room.
Randall hadn’t shuddered when the mold collapsed their bedroom ceiling. He could at
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