One cool {million} seer suckers portentious flush the Maybelle blast. Across an open luster the follycome quickly descends organic (foot). Eaten for neither the new heart of the city or it’s advertising model. Made flat and squared and squared again in village hues of blotted autumns. These things came to think of it as appropriate plus-ones and faught for the right to incantation. Otherwise, there were the shops to study and work in; other shops to shop in.
The story about the dreams
For months now I’ve been having dreams about my father. Usually they involve something to do with water: in that way that all dreams feel underwater, even when they aren’t, but still conjure up images of blue. A horizon that’s a ceiling. A low-level structure that feels deep and I awaken to bed sweats and sometime-tears. The last one involved me performing an elaborate interpretive dance in front of him, while he sat, transfixed and on the edge of his throne. He was dressed as a 18th century king of some far off cinematic Prussia that never existed and hopefully never will. He began to weep until his tears became his flesh and the whole of him was water and splashed and spread on the palace’s floor. These are the moments I keep to myself, the little fishes, the nibbling ones.
I don’t ever dream of flying, like I did as a kid, anymore. Mom says she doesn’t dream at all anymore. Dad says he never dreamt at all, so he doesn’t notice a difference now.
The story about the birds
Dad didn’t speak. Mom didn’t either.
We held on. Sis took all her pillows and put them in a corner. She threw herself into them, repeatedly, until they were blood-stained and limp.
My brother locked himself in his room and listened to music. The kind of music boys of a certain age listen to when they want to pretend not to feel while feeling intensely, I suppose. That’s the kind of music he had, anyway.
We called our neighbors. They didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. We told ourselves “well, they were never ordinary to begin with”.
We sat in that deep dark and ate shrimp fondue.
Mom: We can conserve water. Use it when we need to. We can manage.
Dad: I love another woman and now I will never see her again.
Mom: We can manage.
I found ways to piece the bits together: lots of reading, the bits of news I could get off the tin cans I seduced to radios, thinking radios still mattered. They do, I’ve found. Air and waves, over the earth, can sometimes beat out the fire. But only sometimes.
I don’t leave the house, and no one else does either. The birds have everyone scared shitless, and they say that any contact results in almost immediate contamination, but they don’t say with what. Nobody expected the birds. I thought that when Pete, our parakeet, ended up on the floor of his cage instead of the perch he likes, it was just like another fish to flush. But now it’s almost like trying to flush an entire civilization. I never knew there were so many birds in the sky. A sky’s like an ocean, I guess, only you think you think you can see it all. But you don’t. You don’t really see anything, really.
And now, when I look out the window, I see dead birds. Hills of dead birds. And I feel sorry for those birds. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do.
