A Death

Flesh and blood. concrete. How often we meet. My sister's neighbor smashed his skull wide open the other night. The blood bloomed around his head like a sad, steamy-warm merlot melting the ice. Six feet down. I imagine it making a hollow sound that echoed off the brick and stone of the buildings on 5th street - a small bit of steam curling around his upper lip, dissipating past the snowflakes, the freezing rain.

On second thought, it may have looked like full head of red hair burst from his zenith, or that his veins crept out of the hole and into the cracks of the ice and the sidewalk - running from his heart - coagulating, freezing, then sleeping. He is dead now. I didn't know him, but I saw him once. My sister said he didn't own anything aside from a bench press, a couch, and a small white television.

This Game

I am tired of this game. My headache tastes like alkaline. It’s one in the morning and I am still in my pajamas from last night. I am picking at my skin. I see blood. Neurotic. The cat is curled like a thumbprint on my bed - black, intricate, and still. I see him breathing softly. His small belly rises and falls. There is a general lack of inflection. Decisions have to be made. Coke or Pepsi? McDonald’s or Burger King? Vanilla or chocolate? Mary-Kate or Ashley? VHS or DVD? I get the point. I sail through the variables into a cliché with the logic of a computer program. There are always two possibilities. One, rejected, the other embraced. Never look back. Nike or Adidas? Boy or girl? The truth is that none of these things are equal opposing forces. Apples and oranges simply buckle under the weight of my desire to have them meet head to head in some sort of cosmic battle. It is my nature. Crest or Colgate? When I was in elementary school I discovered that one could actually write (with a pencil) upon the surface of an eraser. It totally blew my mind. Rain or shine? Brittany or Christina? I had a dream that a large, white wolf descended a foggish-blue hill and nuzzled my hand. Jesus or Satan? The notion of infinity, spatially or conceptually, awakened a terrible fear of vomiting in my early childhood. Beef or chicken? I stopped eating animals after I watched a cow’s throat get slit from ear to ear, then hang upside down, bleeding to death, licking the air for anything.

Someone I Met

Anna is one of the many park workers. She is about fifty with red hair and erratic eyes. She is always wearing black spandex and chain smoking. The other park workers say that she doesn’t have a belly button and that she has to go to the hospital a lot because her digestive system is all fucked up and her stomach seeps liquids out through her skin. It’s no surprise though. She eats road kill and digs through the campground garbage cans for food that people leave behind. I was in the park truck with her once, driving up to the park office. She was telling me how she found a freshly killed deer on the side of the road and how she stopped to see if it was pregnant. It turned out that it was, and she cut it open and brought home the dead fawn to show the one son she has that is not in jail. As she was telling me this, and I was on the verge of vomiting, the truck came to a screeching halt. She jumped out and ran to the side of the road where a wild turkey had been recently hit. She tore it open with her bear hands, and ferociously pulled out its breast muscle. Turning around to the truck as if she had a trophy, she held it up in the air and said “Dinner!”