pen stretches

It was meant to be a tragic story, one of love lost and the desperate way people interact. And I intended to write it backwards, because that’s how we see them; blue veins of emotion that bleed though the shrug and meh of other days. It’s not until they are once again empty that you look back and realize it was in them, in the grief and the hope and the lust and the echoes that you pulsed, electric, red, alive.

I am used to this. I am used to the pyrite luster of epic intentions. The way they’ll glitter until the time for them is past, and in the aftermath you hold them in your hand. Tacky, they look, ugly and brown. It’s the reflection of yourself that you catch on a smooth side that honestly disgusts you. The Wal-Mart feel of yourself, and not the actual rock. Rocks… intentions are rocks. Intention is a rock and you, the literal you – stripped bare of intention, dreams - are a hard place. And what is between them? What is between them?

Casserole. She had settled for casserole because the cupboard was stripped down to the leavings; the last-picked-in-gym equivalents of the canned food world. All those twenty-five cent, cream of MSG, this might not be real meat…or even food… foods that seem so harmless and even necessary, until you step up to the plate and have to face them as they are. And there she goes, projecting herself once again, onto everything that she touches. Or perhaps, she absorbs it all… takes it in, with some yet unrealized corneal tractor beam of the subconscious and it becomes her. The cream of mushroom soup and her are not two things, they are not similar, they are the same thing. This could be important later. Or it may not. Who are we to say? How does anyone decide the things that are really important?

Frozen chicken breasts. She had those. Rice. The aforementioned soup. Parsley and assorted whatnots of the seasoning variety. Water. Ugh…the sink was overflowing, dishes with remnants now indiscriminate. It was a statement she was making, making herself sick. She was not their mother. She will never be their mother. Does she remember to say thank you when they clean up her dishes? What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?

It would have been a reasonable thing two hours ago, casserole; at this rate she wouldn’t have dinner until 11 and nearly chickened out and tried to convince herself that maybe she was just thirsty, or that she could smuggle a roomie’s popsicle and count that as the only needed caloric intake for the day. Her stomach rallied and internal democracy took over. Very well, she’d cook the dang thing.

It will start out with details like this, and you, you will get used to this. As it continues, less and less of it will feel real and now; it will haze, ripen… it will become ripe, almost too-ripe, the sugar will ferment, and just as you expect it to reach some apex of sweetness the bitter alcohol bite will leave you feeling detached, unsure. You’ll see it through the watercolor washing of time, of dissolving recollections.

I am being too abstract. I should perhaps abandon this line of narrative, and just tell the story…


Frances was coarse. It was not a word to describe her, it was her essence. Her voice: Louis Armstrong, only an octave higher. No one could remember if she’d smoked, but she sounded like it. Her breathing was ragged, even when it was supposed to be quiet, through the nose. She was older than everyone who knew her, but the way no one will admit to their age meant we really didn’t know. Keith Richards, she looked like. Keith Richards all over, only with an extra 30 lbs. of what may, centuries ago, have been some lusciously aerodynamic curves; now flightless, gimp, Frances’s curves had succumbed to gravity at the same time they unyieldingly clung to her frame. It was baggage, she had; Keith Richard, with baggage which had nothing to do with emotional or mental stability. When she moved, her body would have to vote if it was coming with her or not… of course it would always vote yes, but counting the ballots is what held it up, I think.

She and Frances are not the same, at least in the sense that it is not Frances who was making the aforementioned casserole. She was. But you need to know Frances. Frances needs to be a part of this story as much, if not more, than she does. And in that sense, she and Frances are the same. The way she and the soup are the same. And Frances and the soup are the same. It is these similarities that will make the difference, you see.

He was different. Tiny. When you see him, it’s the first thing you notice, how small, how childlike and fledgling he is. Sitting, in brown wool slacks that are (somehow) too short for him, on a grey pine bench, he folds into himself, drowns in the blue-lined button down shirt that at first glance looks new, so starched and white. You close in; its seams are worn, the shirt is off-white, the blue was brighter some other day. He’s had it since Nixon, he just knows how to use things. You forget to notice that he is missing a finger. You forget to notice the American flag pin near the brass of his suspenders. His tree-root hands rest on a dark varnished cane, the rubber cap on the end of it worn off on one side, at an angle, slowly grated off by cement, asphalt, dirt, the empty tennis court he walks through on his way back to a place we’d assume is home – he walks through them to clean up the trash, the papers, the empty ball cans and Gatorade bottles that everyone else has left during the day.

Laboriously, he sweeps (well, shuffles) his way over the courts in the ochre dusk, collecting, tidying. He cannot hold it all, pieces fall and he fumbles after them. Sometimes he’ll make three or five trips to the giant orange plastic garbage bins. The ones with the disheveled black plastic generic Hefty-equivalent bags; the bins they chain and padlock to the pavilion columns so the delinquents who frequent the park after hours can’t roll them into the street, overturn them.

He breathes, but it’s not breathing, he is talking. You will not understand what he is saying. He is not talking to himself. His panama falls when he reaches for the lemon-lime bottle that has stumbled. A heron, he is precariously balancing, the hat he replaces becomes the same. Like a bonsai, he is tiny, but he is huge in his minutiae; he occupies his space. He is a steward; he is more than the lie of his appearance. You see the very world as it sits on the backs of his shoulder blades. It is this that folds him. You reel in your own tininess. It swallows you.

Better – he is – than she, than Frances, than you. Better, and the same. He is the same. The watery cream of mushroom fills him, is him. He likes it with saltines. The stove and pot he cooks with even older than his shirt. You know this. Like Bubble-yum in your hair, he sticks to you. Like Bubble-yum in your hair, he will make you cry.

Unlike Bubble-yum, he will make you wonder how to fill your spaces. When you remember him, he is tall. When you remember him, he fills you. Like cream of mushroom soup, afloat with soggy saltine ships. He marks you, changes who you are physically, a bit like that compulsory gum-in-the-hair haircut you had to get when you were seven, when you were playing with your Bubble-yum.