Flies leap from my wound to the window, silent red paths traced on glass. I am dead and the sun shines…A sprawled question mark in the thin dust. Hands, the roots of petrified trees, clutching. Neck. Eyes. Lifeless as the photograph of a rock.
The world, unchanged by my death teems with life not yet grown to death. All as it was. But I am not.
Separated. As on those bright deep childhood evenings when the sun had not set on bedtime; room filled with the false dusk of drawn shades, and only the window looked out on life beyond.
When voices, laughter and breezes would mingle and mute in the charged August air, and I prayed my tiny moans would rise through cold walls to join the joyful sounds of waking in the streets.
Alone as the first death in the universe. Cursing the unfair darkness which allowed day to go on so vibrant and near at hand.
I would dream but never sleep, straining for some hint of life beyond the window. Voices, natural as the hum of crickets, hung palpably in the warm, thick air.
Sometimes, a word or phrase would rise above the sea of sound like a man bobbing in the surf. “You suck.” Two syllables buzzing, rebounding in my head like flies in my ears.
“You suck.” So precise. So final.
“You suck.” The sound of children not locked in my prison.
“You suck.” I would turn these words over. Taste them. Scratch their surfaces.
“You suck. I would say them aloud, whispering into the blackness of bed covers, rolling from my tongue like keys tripping locks. I repeat them. Repeat them. Changing the pitch, and altering my voice. They seemed some magic “open sesame” which need only be chanted in correct form to unlock the secrets of life beyond.
A car starts in the distance. Steps and voices in other rooms.
The last light of dusk burns out, an orange ember licked from the wall, with an almost audible hiss. Outside, a car whines away perusing the cold sun.
Night comes early these days. I flick a switch and am contained in a circle of light, itself contained in a room, contained in a house, contained by night.
Autumn leaves, freed from their branches, race down streets, alleys, flinging themselves angry against walls, charging down chimneys. They howl a raspy chorus like a thousand scratchy phonographs, more alive than when tied by life to their trees.
Books and books are spread like a field of headstones. Dead thoughts of dead men contained within covers, in this room, this house, this night. Containers contained in containers contained within the misty fog of a feverish flu. Withins within withins, packed neat as a freshly wrapped pharaoh.
Somewhere the boys are out drinking the teenage night. Voices, laughter, breezes cut through the crisp fall air like teeth through a chilled apple.
That night is beyond the window which contains only the reverse of what is in the room: blank eyes eying blank eyes eying. Looking back. Looking back. Looking back.
I look back at the books. I am tied to them by fever and high school age. This would be a good night to get studying done, out of the way to secure freedom for another night. A night when I am not ill. When I am beyond the window. But books are never opened. I dream with a distant car that whines…
…Like the recording of sound effects, cutting the air with a precise crispness. Intense and slightly surreal.
The night is thick, warm, and cold. Fog rises from the snow like the ghost of winter. Tomorrow is spring. Earth careens through space to rendezvous with a single point in the void, exactly like every other point in the void, where spring and winter collide.
The night is holy as a church, the apartment house incense of sausage, pepper, cabbage, and meat is thick in the air. It is a night for action. For running free. A night for yelling and laughing in the fog-smoked breeze. Yet I am contained. Contained in a room. In fog. In lethargy. The time has come to grow misty and uncertain of form. To drift like fog into spring. Yet here I sit. Corporeal. Real.
Tires swish to a halt, An engine cuts, sputtering like a final drum roll. Moments of thick silence. You can hear the fog creep. The car door opens. Closes. The final chaboom of a coffin lid. Steps like knife blades on the pavement.
A throat gurgles above the knife blades. Footsteps cease. Phlegm, gathered like wheat is harvested, spit through the fog. Steps resume.
Steps on steps, leather on polished tile like small feet tapping a creamy beat in linoleum classrooms, when the air was sweet with candy, and round clocks like giant eyes peered from green speckled, cinder block walls. Ticking. Ticking.
My heart beats. I am suddenly aware of a black telephone cord stretched across egg-white upholstery. The shadow of a lamp shade tilts like a dog’s quizzical head.
All about me things reveal themselves: the exact line of a book’s edge cuts across a table; the precise division of a shadow’s umbra and penumbra. A spot on the tiles is the image of a coiled snake, head resting heavily on its tail. It is like a plague of spring flowers.These things unmasking themselves.
In the dark window I see myself in reverse, life unfolding backward like a time-lapse blossoming.
Steps ascending. Each scuff locking that moment ineluctably in time. Each moment defined by the sound. Moment on Moment. Step on step. Sound on sound. Like keys turning. Bridges crackling in flames.
One moment becomes the next in an ever tightening chain. I am contained in each momentous moment.
There is nothing. There is nothing but this moment.
This moment when the steps cease. The door opens. This dark, late night, early morning moment when a stark light silhouette trench coat figure of death hovers like nightmare between inside and out. His stiletto scythe gleams once in the
light like the square patch of shine on an apple in a first grade reader, before slicing my throat like soft margarine.
In this moment from deep within withins, I watch. Each moment a neat still-shot. A stopped frame, crackling in the heat of the projector bulb.
Death turns and wields a handkerchief. Reeking reality, he wipes the blade with the slow deliberation of a man cleaning eye glasses.
As he moves away his footsteps splash pink puffs as the first light of day rides in on shafts of dancing dust. The door closes with a soft…chaboom.
As the light widens, the door is painted a satin rose. My wound gapes at the window and sees its reverse barely gaping back as dawn reveals the pattern of rooftops and streets beyond the glass.
My tiny moans yearn to rise through the cold walls to join the joyful sounds of waking in the street.
Flies leap from my wound to the window, silent paths traced on glass. I am dead and the sun shines.