Wilma

No, we have not found him yet. Our brother. This is not about that. That is that and this is this and we wish you'd all just find ways to move forward, as we have, though our bellies have frozen in place from that very moment we did realize him lost. They refuse to take air as deeply down as they used to--this would mean conceding to some truth that we are not ready to yet concede. A stack of dollar bills has appeared through our mail slot, and we can only suspect we are being bribed for something. For keeping quiet? For keeping our noses to ourself and to the chronic stains left upon the underarms of our tank tops? Yes, we wear tank tops. Even here. Everyone wears tank tops. Everyone.

Otis Redding is softing through our ears, and this calms us. You are tired, and you want to be free, he says. And we say, yes, well, who isn't, and who doesn't? There are headaches leapfrogging down the line of us, here at our long, newly-stained wood table. The tallest among us felled a tree and the shortest helped him craft from it this table, and the brother of most-middling height did the staining. The rest of us, we just watched. That is the job of people who fall into no distinct height category (of which there are the primary aforementioned three (shortest, tallest, middleingest)).

We have gotten used to doing lots of watching, and it has, perhaps, made us somewhat lazy. Were we to re-enter the "real" world, were we to separate ourselves from our isolation and attempt, say, to get a job at the Home Depot, or the Price Chopper, we would automatically assess the heights of all of our co-workers and figure out from there if we could be rightly expected to do any work. Likely, we would not. We would insist that we were not relegated to any position but that of the "watcher," for obvious reasons. We would be fired. We would be forced, then, to return here. Which is where we belong. Which is why we do not leave. Which is why it was an especial blow to lose a brother to any world outside of the one we've created to keep us. When we lose ourselves and each other, we expect it to be due to natural causes. Within the home. This is the most important part. The home was built to birth us, to sleep us, and, eventually, to kill us. Not the snow, not the sex-wild light of the moon, not the dry mouth of the badlands, not nothing but this.

We'd like to move in the direction of discussing dogs more regularly. They are perhaps the only beasts fit for entering into our private conversation, this one we've been having. Today we met a beast named Wilma, with one leg very swollen and round above the knee, and a tongue that hung out the side of her mouth all of the time. She is medium-sized and soft grey with streaks of white and the sweetest face you've ever seen. Mostly it's the influence of that tongue, which makes her look a bit dunce-y, which she is not. The tongue belies her. Sometimes, when she rests her head upon her paws, the tongue drapes over one or both paws like fabric. Wilma is a bright star.

Sleep calls for us, too early we reckon. It's rain, and it's cold. The problem with relegating all work to only three brothers is that they begin to resent the rest of us and then to purposefully harm their backs in order to develop stoops and grow shorter, or the opposite. We have wondered at the shortest brother's recent habit of hanging from a bar he's placed in the doorway of the bathroom and letting himself dangle, quite limp, there. We've noticed he is always sitting with his back very straight at the dinner table which is also the everything else table; he is looking taller, but he will still always be the shortest.

We tell him we will always love and respect him, but we don't always mean it. Sometimes, when he's off working, the rest of us will privately make debasing jokes about various parts of his body, like his hands, and we rarely feel bad about it. We are not always good people. Sometimes, we just need to gossip. Sometimes we realize it is awful to be speaking this way of a brother, especially when one of us still remains lost. Other times, we don't realize anything at all. Until later, staring up at the ceiling. Then we remember everything that's ever happened to us and fall asleep just like that. Remembering.

Lost in Search of Meat

You waifs and wild-folk, you brash and bawdy cock-hounds,

We're all together in this, are we not? And do we not do things for to be known, to be not erased? To live through what we make. To live beyond the walls of the body. We have wondered on this of late, as the roof above our poor and winter-brined heads continues to crumble. Sometimes, all it is is a matter of waking with drywall in your mouth and learning to love the drywall. At least it keeps you full. At least you have a wall to speak of, be it dry or no.

One of us is lost now. The one with the shortest beard, nonetheless. He went out to search for meat, and hasn't returned yet. And of course he has not. We can't help but moan in our beds, feeling just danged awful down to our furred and burly toes. For who would send out into the cold and senseless world the brother with the least going for him chin-hair wise? It was unwise, but he was mulish and convinced it didn't matter that he has not only a baldish face, but also the thin neck of a girl-child, and only two Walmart-brand wifebeaters knotted together as a scarf. We tried to offer him the raccoon skin we save behind the mantlepiece for winter meat-trips, but this, too, he waved off with the back of his effete paw.

There is no helping the brother who will not help himself. We repeat this at our dinner table like grace, splicing our peas into sections of twos and threes to make our plates seem fuller. But we miss him. We miss him bad, and though we all put up a rough show of clear-headedness, deep-down in the gut we all are squirming and lonesome. Is not this just a microcosm of the world at large? All of us putting on all manner of shows for everyone else? Pretending we are not terrified of not existing well enough, or doing things right enough, or living up to whatever standards we have set or have been set upon us? Pretending we are not flappable? But there are parts of us all squirming and lonesome, is the truth. There are parts of us all that miss our lost brothers, gone out for meat and never returned. It's enough to make a vegetarian out of any one of us. Give us our frozen bag of Birdseye and that'll be enough. It will be enough.

We found in the satchel beside his bed-space a book called The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. We know little of this book, but our missing brother was seen, many days, scuttled away, interred in its pages. We worry now for other need of interment, but we can hardly think or speak of that. We chew at our inner-cheeks and think not of women (well, privately of women, but we don't speak of them as we would have were he here with us and not in some worrisome outer-place we can't fix or define.) Some quotes (oddly, and worryingly, mostly pertaining to death) were underlined, and we will relay some to you, in case you happen upon a small-bearded man mumbling these words under his breath somewhere in the snow. (Take note the knotted wifebeaters about his neck. Take note his soft and subtle chin. Return him safe to us so we might once again resume activities involving the discussion of women and their secrets.)

""I have a feeling," I said, "about the axial lines of life, with respect to which you must be straight or else your existence is mere clownery, hiding tragedy...When striving stops, there they are as a gift...Truth, love, peace, bounty, usefulness, harmony! And all noise and grates, distortion, chatter, distraction, effort, superfluity, passed off like something unreal. And I believe that any man at any time can come back to these axial lines, even if an unfortunate bastard, if he will be quiet and wait it out....even disappointment after disappointment will not take away his love. Death will not be terrible to him if life is not. The embrace of other true people will take away his dread of fast change and short life.""

"It's better to dig ditches and hit other guys with your shovel than die in the walls."
(we are certain our lost brother must be muttering this, whether lost or no, but perhaps this does not bode well.)

"Death is going to take the boundaries away from us, that we should no more be persons. That's what death is about. When that is what life also wants to be about, how can you feel except rebellious?" (This thought, by the way, seems to come at the heels of Augie's meeting a displaced (secretly German?) person, living in a monastery, begging money in the streets of Italy during WWII.)

"There's something about those business envelopes with the transparent oblong address part that my soul runs away from."
(there is deep, deep truth to this quote. We, too, feel horrible panic at the sight of such envelopes. A collection has amassed which we will address, later, when we are feeling less fragile.)

"I was still chilled from the hike across the fields, but, thinking of Jacqueline and Mexico, I got to grinning again. That's the animal ridens in me, the laughing creature, forever rising up. What's so laughable, that a Jacqueline, for instance, as hard used as that by rough forces, will still refuse to lead a disappointed life? Or is the laugh at nature--including eternity--that it thinks it can win over us and the power of hope? Nah, nah! I think. It never will."


Look for him, won't you? Every set of eyes you pass, every pair of weather-ravaged hands, every
impostor of inner-certitude. Speak to him of death and of life and see what he says. See him in turns world-weary and hopeful. Remind him of his smutty magazines and see how fast home he runs. He, as powerless as the rest of us. And as human.

Yours, truly,

Dick Fancy


Also, This:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VMf7OqTOuU

The Cold, and Other Events

The time is nigh, gentle readers. The time is nigh. There is reckoning afoot. There are reckoning afeet. There are feet set for the reckoning, and when the angels slip through, we shall all be upside-downed and lifted by the ankle, straight to the moon. To the MOON, we say.

We've been adequately snowed-in, and our (aforementioned) glib South Dakota basement has grown even more glib, even tawdry, by the snow flitting in through the cracks in our square, and tiny, windows--like when the woman you bring home removes her underpants and crawls into your bed while you were in the bathroom and so you didn't see it, and feel cheated in some irreparable way. Did she not want you to see her as she pulled them down her legs? Did she truly think it necessary to deprive you this singular, intimate pleasure? Perhaps more intimate, even, than the act which might have followed when you, too, dropped drawers like a dope and crawled into bed beside her, plugging your chin to the bony head of her shoulder-top while she feigned sleep? This is as the tawdry snow, accumulating while you sleep, shivering, in your long bed with all your bearded brothers. They grumble, snore and snort through the night while the snow creeps in, sneaky as hell, and the lady and her underpants are whisked away with the night, with the stars, with the serpent that sits waiting for her with forked tongue just outside the door.

There is no mistaking it, folks: this is life. This is just it.

And our beards grow ever-longer, wild as brush and self-satisfied like to crush the soul of any beardless man, woman or child.

And are we tempted by the heat of other lands? Are we tempted by the boorish hands of giants, which might lift us into their palms and let us nap there awhile, closer to the sky? Are we tempted by the life our mother has chosen to lead, far away, of sewing machines, low-cal hard candy, and early nights with the television? Well, of course we are. And, again, of course.

But, Now: an offering of weirdness to cut the brutish cold from your marrow.

                                                         Becoming

 Jonathon doubted I could become a horse and so I didn’t show him the bottoms of my feet growing coarser. In bed, I kicked away from him and covered my mouth when he fucked me from behind, because I couldn’t moan anymore without whinnying slightly.

He didn’t notice at first—he never noticed much. He ate with his face turned down to the plate and always using one specific fork from the cutlery drawer; he was like a child in this way, and I humored him because I understood that he held onto those things that made him feel safe because he was otherwise scared. The fork with three tines and the outline of little daisies carved into its handle. That was Jonathon’s fork.  

                                                +

I’d woken three months earlier, heart-poundy, from a dream that made me understand all I needed to become in order to feel whole. It was the same dream I’d had, recurrently, as a child but had been forced to ignore. And then it was back.

In the dream, I was a horse. With a long mane that shone gold with twitches of chlorine blue when the sun came up behind it and a heaviness in my limbs that felt stable and serene. My heart was large inside my barrel chest, and I slept standing up, surrounded by smells of dirt and the hot sun smells of grass and of sun, and with the stars waiting to be licked up by my giant tongue which rolled out of my mouth against my teeth, lazy, like molasses rolling down tree bark. I wasn’t worried about anything and there wasn’t death to think about. I felt certain. That was all it was. Being a large thing in a wide-open place and not wondering what else you were meant for. Feeling lonely but in a sweet way, an edifying way.

I’d once confessed the dream to my mother who’d smacked the back of my head and then told me, gently, to be sensible, rubbing my head after she'd smacked it. I was a girl with long, slender limbs and a refrigerator full of whole fruit. I had a black maid who folded my clothes like it was the nineteen-fifties, or the twenties, or the eighteen-twenties, and a four-poster day bed with a canopy and eight full pillows. I needed for nothing.

So I did. Become sensible. Went to school and was not a horse because I was a girl. A girl with a small mouth and a somewhat higher-than-normal gum-ridge who did as she was told, who grew breasts and shaved the hair from her legs and armpits and pubis and plucked it sometimes from her chin when people noticed and screwed up their faces at the injustice and unwelcome coarseness of it all.

Jonathan didn’t like hair, and was glad I was a girl who removed it, regularly, for money and for pain and for smooth. 

                                                +

When the dream came again, and persisted, I tried, again, to ignore it. Every morning, I woke and brushed and cleaned away my various dirtynesses with cold water and boiled soap stuffed with little fancy bits of shit like lavender and oat rusk, but it came roaring against me anyway. The dream. The dream.

Jonathon, I’m becoming something new, I told him one morning. It was raining out, and he’d shut the window I’d left open through the night so I could smell the air rising from the trees. I slid out of the pale sheets of our bed and opened it again as he sat up and watched me, frowning. He wanted to know what I meant. He told me to shut the window because it was raining and it would warp the wood. I told him about the dream, and then he laughed and his laugh was sideways and made me think of how much he loved that fucking fork with the daisies, probably more than he loved me.

I’m going to become a horse, I said. I was very serious. And I don’t think I’ll be able to live here with you once I do.

We both watched the buildings outside shoulder the rain. They were getting pummeled and could do nothing about it but stand there.  

Jonathon rustled in the sheets and sighed very deeply. Whatever you want, he said, rolling his eyes back like people do when they don’t think what you say means much. Do whatever you want. 

                                                                        +

           

It’s hard not to wrap my whole mouth around things I’m not supposed to. When he fucks me, it’s hard not to bash my head down sharply into the bed like it’s grass, or a big wet pouch of iron-y mud or to rear back and encompass his whole skull between my teeth. Sometimes I do, and the pleasure of it is immense, like running naked into the ocean at night in summertime when the moon is fat and hot white. When you start to change, little things take you by surprise—like how much water you suddenly need to drink, and how heavy and hairy your legs have become. Jonathon doesn’t notice my hooves developing because he doesn’t want to. I haven’t decided yet whether or not I will get shoed—different Internet forums recommend different things. In the end, the only difference becomes the sound you make as you trot; it’s whether or not you want to attract attention, and then it’s just money. Showing off.  

            Some people worry they are making their lovers into practitioners of bestiality without their consent. Some do it for people they love. No one does it lightly or for nothing. It’s not that kind of choice. One man is becoming a badger for his Swedish boyfriend.

I tell Jonathon this, and he says nothing, ignoring the neighing sound at the back of my throat, the tossing of my long, silky hair after I say it. He’s eating dinner out of a scalloped plastic container, and, he’s only got eyes for Fork.