Him and Her Just Barely Missing
Would have been better if we never saw us
Light house is gone. I lived enough that walls melted like candle wax, and now it’s gone. The magic, the hope, the dreams, til there was nothing but the faint scent of vanilla. It left
long ago. What’s occupied its place is cold granite. Now there are broken stoops, and dry rotten boards with endless dark holes. Now there are scratch paper birds nests beneath
the eaves. Chicklings sit in wait like soldiers in a foxhole, waiting for the next mortar. Black birds soar overhead.
But that’s what beer is for. Taverns and the men who inhabit them. The barmen who serve in them.
My brain is forty callous hands, and my heart is ninety. There is no room for you here. My fingers are picking, fighting, defending. Soon they will be regiments.
Soon the regiments will turn against their commander, soon the regiments will charge back the way they came like fingers fighting hands.
But that’s what beer is for. And long ago black house was way down end of the street, then it was end of the block. Before I knew it, black house was my house.
After all that, I still find myself sitting, knees acutely angled to my chest, face optioned to the sky like my lips are my eyes and my tongue is my brain, looking for blades of grass, ants, or falling leaves, hoping to find magic.
My shoulder hangs from my neck and my arm off my shoulder. Nothing connects. What comes down the street and over the sidewalk, what parks in my driveway is disconnected.
She cuts herself. Cuts and cuts but wax is all she gets. Her hair is the most beautiful wick, burning bright, burning gently, but she doesn’t know how to go. She can’t see herself, so she can’t trust herself, so she can’t go.
I stay alive by believing in my existence but the only existence I believe is my worst, and it took time to break into fragments. It took endless yarn to immune to shame, to immune to people, to immune to their powers.
The street’s been narrowing, squeezing out the last thing, which means I am getting as near to prison as I can be on the outside. There is no more showing. No
more seeing. She’s a cube of butter, cut and cut.
Look how she walks. Who doesn’t desire her. She cuts life with ample hips, she is enough for any man. But who can see her?
She is lashes and eyes. She is ashes and lies. She wakes up tired, so tired. She cuts and cuts and cuts. She gets nothing but wax.
Hey, I’m Roman. I’m working on my debut novel, 20xx, a work in magical realism. I write on Substack.
Nice to hear the intonation and rhythm that your voice adds :)
It’s nice to hear your voice.