Imagine a man and a woman in a dust storm. He wears a red rag wrapped about his face, protection for his work in the field, and it whips like a wound wildly opened by the wind. His black clothes render him lean and severe. Always a bone juts from him, the elbow now, his shoulder at some later posture. Her face is round and worked into a convulsion of distress. Stalks flattened by the dust. Sand constantly peppering her kitchen window. She’s aware of everything as are most women. The whole morning was spent dipping cloth in melted paraffin and wedging the sticky rags into cracks and rents. Dust snarled in her hair, gritty on her neck, muddied in her mouth. The earth flung up. The wind bearing their life away.

The man is aware as well because he sees it in her face. He knows everything is lost.

They are both solitary in their pain. His fingertips tremble on her cheek. The dust on her cool skin roughens and alters the texture of their touch. A gap widens. Both of course want to convey their pain to the other, share it, groom it into tragedy, the most communicable of all pain because it isn’t personal, however the mechanism of conversation and physical touch conveys nothing except an intimation. From that we construct within ourselves the approximate replica of what the hint conveyed as we have imagined it. We create another’s pain, love, and fear within us. We never experience their feeling, we only experience our own, a shade of their pain, often in a different hue.

The same thing occurs when we read, except that it is we who reach within more than the book reaches out to us. We read the words and construct within ourselves the emotion or thought at which the words hint. Of course we hunt for commonalities to agree upon, both in books and in interactions with other people, however the difference between reading and conversing with a person or reaching out into the dark to touch is that reading, more than anything else we possess in our arsenal to understand, introduces us to ourselves and deepens our understanding of what is within us. Through reading a book, a person can grow in ways that are immeasurable compared to the other methodologies of reducing want because a book’s approach to communication is often oblique and delivered through metaphor, the densest methodology a human can employ to convey information.

Metaphor both localizes a thing and enlarges it at the same time. It is the textual bridge over which our sentences can grow outside their own skin. To write purely in facts is a cowardice and solipsism, for we all know that the word for a thing is not the thing, and the words for an act are not the act (right? hmmm…), yet when we write frailly and factually in the face of this monstrous and perpetual disconnect we are relegating the thing we seek to conjure in another to a state of collapsing entropy and death. It is through metaphor, when one thing is likened to another thing which it can never be, that newness is created. Newness does not lie in the re-arrangement of formative structure; newness is evoked through imaginative comparison.

Fiction that shirks metaphor is the white belly of a dead fish bobbing in a slow river. Such fiction threatens only cosmetic meaning and can never be more, nor does it want such a thing. It is the hipster disconnect, that self-obsessed state wherein the text only matters to itself, fiction written solely for the mirror. Droll. A brown nut on a white plate.

Next time you read and you think that the text that you’re reading is a bit dry, pay attention. The text has likely shirked metaphor or employed its comparisons in a pedestrian fashion.

Some dislike metaphor because it’s imprecise. But it is through such imprecision that meaning swells. What else is there to bridge the gap that can’t be crossed? We are always tricking ourselves. We think we know someone but we don’t. We only know their patterns and we predict. It’s the same with fiction. All we need is a seed that doesn’t turn to mould, some universal thump that makes us apprehend that a thing is like something else and thereby the gap is crossed in the best way that we have to cross it, through our imagination’s ability to construct and render faith unto lies.

The current word count of 82,000 will likely grow as I line edit the manuscript. My stories always begin lean and layer on weight and import during editing. I’ve worked in complete isolation on this book so far. No one has read it, save for one small thousand word section that I sent out to be published at an online journal. This section may get cut or drastically rewritten during editing. We’ll see.

In the early phase of writing the book, I talked a lot about process and systems and so forth. It was all bunk. I didn’t know it was bunk until I went through it, but there is no such thing as a system for writing except that one’s ass has to be in a chair on a regular basis writing. That’s the system. I also used to believe in inspiration, but now I understand that no such thing really exists. Inspiration is generated by habit. Inspiration bubbles forth from the quotidian motion of typing words on a page. Like a bubble, inspiration often pops the moment it touches something other than itself, but the habit of typing words on a page remains. It’s sweat that persists and sweat that achieves.

I now, finally, feel like a writer. Hopefully I will feel like an author soon.

What does soon mean? I have no idea. I’ve never edited a novel before. Now I can talk about process and systems and so forth in relation to how one edits and once I’ve edited it, I can return and all call it all bunk because I’m certain that the same systems that work for the initial writing will work for the second, the third, and so on. I don’t know how long it’ll take to edit. I plan to sit down and read the entire thing, make notes along the way, look at each word to see if it’s the best fit or if there’s a better word with wider meaning, examine each sentence and determine whether the rhythm of the sentence fits the content or if there’s perhaps a better way to have it constructed, something leaner and more fierce that doesn’t stumble or trip or sag under its own ponderous weight. I know there are parts where the characterization needs to improve, where the gestures are dull, where, as well, the reach is too far and clumsy. Should’ve never read any philosophy during the writing. Note to self: philosophy is so rarely good for you, it should be banned.

I’m just happy to reach this stage. I wasn’t sure that I was able to. Writing a novel really is radically different than writing a story. In many ways it’s easier, but in others it’s much harder.

But I’ve done it. Allow me this exclaim: I’ve done it! Hopefully, it doesn’t suck.

They used to. I used to do similar stuff way back when. Those woebegone days when my hair curled into dirty commas at my shoulder. When my coat was long and black and I peered and squinted at the world through the haze of unfiltered Camels. Before I had a mortgage. Back then. You know? When I was young and fast. When I thought I knew everything. Back then I believed that literature was advanced primarily through philosophical idea. Look at Joyce. Look at Beckett. Look at DFW. At the crux of all of them is a philosophical notion. The task of compelling and forward-looking literature was to encapsulate into narrative the prominent new philosophical ideas of the era. Perhaps it is. In the end, however, it seems silly to pursue the currently popular in philosophy. If you’re going to write from a philosophic basis, do what McCarthy does–write about an absence of god. That’s perpetual. The rest, modernism, post-modernism, post-post-modernism, is all entertainment. It’s all the event-horizon trash swirling around the black suckhole of an ever-felt absence.

I quit investigating philosophy with any real vigor when I completed a phenomenology class in college before I dropped out. I left that class a wreck and soul-shattered. Philosophy often undermines our basic experience. When fiction seeks to employ philosophical idea as its main supporting structure and the force by which it moves into a reader’s mind, fiction then suffers from the same problems that philosophy does, namely an absence of heart. No matter how much we try to think ourselves into a system of belief, we can never escape our heart. The heart is what moves us all. Even the most emotionally absent serial killer is motivated by his heart, however misplaced and tangled those emotive threads are. When fiction steps outside the structure and language that conveys our emotional health it steps outside our capacity to really love it. The books that mean the most to us are the ones that conflagrate in our chest, boil in our belly, and then, finally, swarm with verve into our head. Occasionally, we toss the loins into that mix, but it is always our emotive self that propels us in our engagement. That’s why the intellectual is often trying to mask itself as dramatic. Heart is what philosophy and philosophical fiction lacks today.

In the essays about DFW, the writers discuss his infinite narratives, his unfulfilled crisis, the precision of his language and the divergent threads of his narrative. This is representative of the world! Sure, it is. It always is. Always has been. Certain things in the modern age are accelerated and exaggerated, but any caveman hunter surrounded by a herd of rampaging bison knows the meaning of information overload as well as a teenager with a cell phone and a gameboy and a iPod sauntering by a humming, neon advertisement for bras. The mediums differ, but the forces remain the same. The forces have never changed. Just as the complex has always existed, the simple persists as well: a slow day on the bank of a calm river; a drop of molasses on a cold day; a wide, yellow field; knuckles of rock laboring their infinite entropy. What do we do now for simple? We turn off the television. We roll up our car windows. We shut off, tune out, drop into lizardy brain rhythms. This is not the same. The modern simple is different than the relic simple from which we came.

Our fiction has forgotten this. It’s become busy in its wild gesticulation and clutching. Our newest narratives must be speedy and the sentences therein cluttered with strangeness and oddity. It’s not enough for us any longer to simply settle for a salesman stealing a wooden leg. No, we must have talking dolphins and raging Canadians and mathematical equations. What is such fiction reaching for? What’s the object of the frantic grabbing? It’s the simple that’s been lost. It’s the beat of a heart. The surface, Google mind of the young moves so swiftly that even the body speeds away from its true blood. We’re losing our heart.

That’s what I think when I read DFW, when I read so many of the Internet writers, who are the next generation, I guess, after DFW’s generation, which is supposedly mine. I think that they have no heart. No deep connection to their emotional bodies. Soundbite emotion and postcard hope. Or perhaps they are afraid to convey it in words, afraid of appearing stale. That’s old school, isn’t it? Why would anyone want to write a love story? A tale of loss? Oh my god, your grandmother dying! Gosh, it’s all been done. Of course it has. Everything’s been done. Infinite Jest is just another caveman trampled by bison. Joyce is just another solipsistic body-reveler. Everything has been done before. One can find value there, sure. But compare those books to a Steinbeck novel, for instance. Infinite Jest just isn’t any fun compared to The Grapes of Wrath. It’s just not.

When we abandon the heart in our writing, when we abandon metaphor as too vague, we morph into clinical lab coats writing manuals. We jazz it up with spectacular bling. Glitter and pomp. In an effort to be new, we become cardboard, which is perpetually new, but in a bad way. We forget that we must engage the ancient in our efforts to be new. The most ancient and persistent thing we have as humans is how we feel. Feeling is deeper than thought because feeling is our bridge to the physical. The new mantra is not to write from the heart, but write from the balls. Doesn’t that tell you something about what might be going wrong?

So what is literary greatness? What does a great literary work do and why can’t it do so in the pruned form of flash? The greatness of a work evolves or is evoked over a number of pages. No single sentence or arresting concept conveys greatness. Flash fiction by necessity is pared and honed down to a single aspect. Perhaps an evocative moment, an illuminating expose of emotional baggage, a staggering gut-punch of loss. Flash can do all these things and do them well, but it can not do them all at once. The single aspect of flash can open up and infer others, but true greatness is never inferred. Greatness is baldly stated. A great novel can work multiple aspects simultaneously. A truly great novel fundamentally changes our lives. The great forces a new perception onto us and wrenches us from our ruts. Such calamitous change is only possible with the accumulation of force gathered in many words.

I hear other writers proclaim this story or that as great. I go to look. The story is 400, 700, 900 words on the Internet. I read it. Occasionally, I say wow. Occasionally, one of these stories moves me to think or to feel or it lingers around like a healthy orgasmic glow. I’ve yet to leave the reading of one of these stories fundamentally altered in how I perceive the world or imagine myself within it. I think that McCarthy’s The Road and Blood Meridian are great novels, even though both are decidedly unilateral in their emotional approach. They are great because that plodding momentum of despair is only possible with a wealth of words, no matter how sparsely rendered. To take the element of absence found in The Road and cast it in a short story, even one five or six thousand words in length is to lessen and dampen and filter that overarching emptiness. The Void can never be contained by words, but it can be adequately hinted at with fifty, sixty, seventy thousand words. Even though that absence is hinted it, it’s baldly stated through the plodding and accruing nature of the narrative. The violence in Blood Meridian is only compelling and damning of human nature because of the accretion through the many pages. Five thousand words, a thousand, four hundred words can not evoke that same emptiness or bloodlust. The Road cast as a short would no longer be great. It could be very, very good, but not great. Flash fiction can never be great.

What bothers me when I hear the word great tossed about in casual manners is that it leads to a devaluation of literature. We move swiftly toward the surface of things like a bird mad to meet the mirror wherein all things glitter and all things spark and all of us, you and me and your pale story of emotional distress are great. We’re all great, aren’t we? That’s great, man! You rock! I rock! How fucking great is that? Let’s give it a five-star review on Goodreads. It made me chuckle. That’s five stars too! A six sentence story? By god, that’s great. I just had a corn dog. Damn, it was good. I put the yellow tang of mustard to it and it became great! That corn dog was great. Wow, that’s a great piece of flash fiction. Hey, you wanna a corn dog too? Trust me, it’s great.

—Homeschoolers, then? She said and marked something on a paper with a Bic pen.

—Indeed, ma’am.

When she turned away to summon someone to guide us to our seats, I leaned down and whispered to my son, —That there is called disdain, son. Learn to embrace it.

Each step up the marbled stairs caused my ear to throb. A red throb. A skinlack membrane stretched over the entire right hemisphere of input. I had to cup my palm to my left ear to hear my son. Everything gleamed. The carpet hushed our steps and the wood soaked in our reflections, giving only warped shades in return. I’d never been to a symphony before. I’d listened to classical music my entire life. Even back in high school sitting in my old Chevy truck in the parking lot during lunch, wearing my shit-kickers (a bad phase of mine), listening to Dvorak through the hissy single speaker in the grilled metal dash. Truck, boots, adagio. It’s this sort of mix that always rendered me odd.

Our seats were in the Loge box. The best seats available. Had to go through two heavy doors to reach them. Tickets were cheap for this educational event and since we have a school of two, it was no great capital expenditure to secure the best. We sat right over the orchestra. The floor worn to bare wood. Thin women in black dresses tuning their instruments, faces appreciative and forlorn. Ankles sharp over shiny shoes. One man fidgety over the strings of his double-bass. Another man slow and proud near the bass drum ran his palm across the surface as if it were a woman’s belly. One older man took his violin out amongst the children and played for them to wild acclaim. Others tilted their heads back and looked at their sheets down long noses and flipped the pages with the barest finger flicks. One woman with a bassoon sat with her knees locked together and her eyes downcast, hugging the instrument like a totem.

They opened with a snippet of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue played from the lordly pipe organ in the picture. What a sea-swollen sound! One large pipe, unseen deep in the interior, thirty two feet of devastating rattlemouth hum. Like some wainsome beast lowing at the moon, the sound tugging at your foggy blue gut coiled deep. All the aerie cousins curling out from this one dark sound graduated into their air fully realized, working energies against your skin and flaking the roughshod cobble off your heart. If sound were a warmth, this was opening the Sunday oven wide and breathing in the orange heat.

How much better would it have been if I were hearing fully eared?

One narrated story told the tale of a bird searching for home. The bird visited various cities: the city of rhythm, the city of harmony, the city of counter-point. As the orchestra interweaved two melodies in the city of counter-point, I fixed a problem with my novel that had been plaguing me. It was all so ridiculously simple. I sat in the wood and sound rich room, half-deaf, my dryskin hands dangling between my knees and I saw narrative movement unfold. My son said something but I couldn’t hear him. I leaned toward him and pulled his chin to my ear.

—I’m bored and I need to pee.

I patted his knee. —It’s almost over.

They’d left the wildness of the organ behind. Playing Debussey now, who I’d always found somewhat boring as well. A thin sort of melody, high and arching and beneath it no grief to account for the lift. I wished they’d played Bach’s Air on the G String, a sound supported in its reach by the vast woe underneath. It’s virtually the same with literature and most other art. That which exists solely in the realm of the good and happy is flawed in a way that’s unrecoverable. We must have loss as our primal structure for it is from that which all else flows. All that is and was and will yet be comes from that which isn’t. There is nothing of the hidden in happiness. One can have a work of insurmountable despair with nary a counter-point of hope, but the opposite is not true. The opposite is cheap and tawdry. We feel this way because we innately recognize the transitory as somehow false. That which is not quitch-wrought and fast in fading is always the dark. Our world hurtles through a black space and spins upon itself and is in no way compelled to provide evidence that anything good is able to outlast its own shape fading.

We left the Meyerson and walked outside to a bright day. The sun bare on our arms. My son reached up and grabbed my hand as we walked to where we’d parked. A vanishing act, that. He ages into his insecurities and suspicions at a great rate. They fill his skin as well as muscle and bone. A man with his life in plastic bags leaned against a concrete embankment and watched us. His face brilloed with beard. Knuckles dark with grime. I thought he was going to turn his palm out toward us, ask for something, but he just closed his eyes as the wind whickered through the tree providing his shade and the limbs parted and sun appeared on his face to expose the full extent of his grime. I thought of the organ and its woeful pipehum and wondered if the vibrations from that sound wrinkled through the concrete to him, if he sat and pressed his palms flat to the ground to feel the world echo out something to him, some sort of counter-point to abut himself against, but I knew it didn’t. He closed his eyes against the sun and sat still and the light passed and shadow reared and he opened his eyes again but by then we were already gone.

The problem is my tire was punctured in line one. Everything thereafter I rolled over with a slow eel of a wheeze. It’s the sorta leak that keeps you whipping your head out the window to check the tire hissing on the street and then you look up and the gas station lights are still too far off. There’s probably a serial killer behind you too, some mean sumbuck with a cleaver and a penchant for jalapenos. When the air’s out, all that’s left is a tiny, fluttering fart. Then you can move no longer. The battery weakens and the headlights fade to a puny yellow. That killer drives up slowly behind you. No need to rush. I hearken and bolster myself with thoughts that at least I aint flat all over. Tis only the bottom that puttered. Thoughts are a weak balm for a cleaver canyon in my skull.

Let me give it this: it’s trying for something. I can discern some element of thought propelling it. There’s a great disconnection there that many of the younger folks are writing about. A loneliness that’s unhinging their language. Before I went into my twelve year hibernation from words, I did similar things. Rape all the wild children with plastic dildos and trip the alabaster pantheon divine sorta stuff. Just fling it out there, man. Fuck the language. Fuck context. Fuck meaning, man. Fuck it all. It lead me to abandon the craft. Any attempt to undermine meaning is ultimately futile because all you do is undermine yourself and the reasons for doing the thing. Is that the revelation of some truth? I don’t know. Perhaps. Nihilism has no place on a breezy Saturday afternoon, however. I’ll save it for a rum-soaked night.

If it is the truth, I don’t rightly care. Give me a meaty lie, a doughy hope. I would say the same thing to him that I say to myself whenever the urge toward oblivion takes hold: go out and dig a fucking hole. Hew it out with your fingers. In our Texas clay that’s no easy task.

That hole will leave you bone-sore and muscle-broke. Whenever you’re cramped up down deep like that, it makes it harder to cast away meaning and abuse it like a two-dollar whore. Whenever my Daddy socked me in the jaw he was just telling me to appreciate the world. I am cleaved from your text, Mr. Higgs. It casts me away. It’s self-absorbed with its own deep want.

When I read (or try to) Finnegan’s Wake I don’t get the feeling that Joyce is attempting to undermine meaning; I think he’s slathering it on thicker than applebutter on my Grandma’s toast. Layers and layers of it. A desperate fleeing from the white page. When I read texts like Mr Higg’s Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously, I feel like I’m working a thin slice of airy low-carb bread with a skinny sheen of zero-calorie pretend marmalade through my gums. And I say gums, because who really needs teeth to chew on a nugget of nihilism? There aint even any McDonald’s bar-b-que sauce with them nuggets.

It’s so much better now. It took me four months or so to produce 30K words of the other work. I’m at 15K now in a bit over two weeks with this one. 63 manuscript pages. I read and listened to how to structure, how to pace, how to establish a methodology of production that works over the long haul and ended up just devising my own system, one cobbled together with bit and pieces here and there. What’s working for me is less a focus on daily word count and more a progression of blocks. A scene a day, whether that scene is 2500 words or 250. Doesn’t matter. A scene a day. A chapter a week with a chapter composed, generally, of 4 scenes. Word count aims, when I choose to look at it, is 7000 a week. If I complete my chapter before the week is out, I edit or take the day off and read to stoke the fire. Again, it doesn’t matter. What works for me is realizing the book in these discrete scenes. It helps with the writing because I know where I’m headed each day. I’ve a general outlined sketch of the next two chapters from the one I’m currently working on. Any more and the story doesn’t have enough air to breath. Any less and it chokes on the openness.

And these words labor only under my own expectation. I find that’s large enough as it is.

Nearly every word that I’ve put down the last couple of weeks has been toward this book — either actual text or notes or sketches for various development. It’s hard to think of the blog, thus you get this post about what I’m really working on.

In the meantime, go read Tom Conoboy’s blog . He writes great reviews, I think. Thanks to Court for directing me his way.

Oh, and to answer the question. What’s the book about?

It’s about 15 thousand words at the moment. And dust. Lots of dust. And blood.

How much deceit can one find in a lunch? Let’s look. There’s a family. Three daughters and one young son in yellow, rubber boots. Disdainful faces at soggy okra. One of the girls holds up a fork with spinach splashing greenly and dolorific back on the plate. She’s the oldest, the one most removed from innocence. When the wife reaches for her husband, her long nails bunch the cloth at his shoulder, dig into the skin. Your daughter, she hisses, pointing with her chin. A ligament jumps on his neck. —Stop it, Sarah, he whispers harshly.

—Dad, it’s fucking gross.

They’re like bees stunned with sudden smoke. That quick halting of the world for them. Surely everyone heard. Certainly everyone was looking. Furtive glances around. I dip my lips into the soda’s fuzz, watch them over the rim of the glass.

A change in the Dad’s face. I’ve seen that alteration in my own, in my Father’s before. Whatever it is that lives under the skin can be awakened, often to a terrible color. It was a flash in him. A sudden boiling that hardens his fingers as he reaches over to his daughter’s shoulder.

—Ouch, Dad!

—Sorry, sweetie. But watch your mouth. Your sisters copy you. Eat your spinach. People are staring.

And they are. I am. Others as well. What sort of foulness occurred here? Was it simply the attention of other eyes that restrained it, kept it inconsequential, out of tomorrow’s headlines? A different shade surfaced in his face. What prevented it from breaking out and flooding the room? The slope of a cheek? The stubblescratch chin? Or perhaps the red weight of that shade slowed its own flinging through our skin.

There’s a man across the restaurant, at the corner opposite which I sit. He hunches over his smoking plate, shoulders bunched about the neck. A thin beard thrusts now and then outside the shadowed cowl of his hooded sweatshirt. An inky reveal of a tattoo from a falling cuff. His left foot taps and taps. Forks scrape on plates. Glasses sweat on square napkins. He jabs his fork into a red hunk of dripping beef.

Is there a bold foulness within him, something that will stain someone’s day? He vibrates. His feet, even his fingers, twitch. The blade of the blackhandled knife sprouting from his fist quivers with light. Maybe he’s just eager, ready for the rest of his day. His right, front pocket bulges and his free hand always strays toward it. He looks at me and I’m not so bold as to hold the gaze. I study my food, run my finger across the cover of the Murakami book I’d brought with me. When I look up again, the hooded man is still staring at me. He’s halted his nervous motion as well. His face a dull boot-heel, his beard slowly jawing up and down, his gaze locked onto me.

Suddenly I’m hot and stupid, as full of fumbles as he is with twitch. I look away and reach for my soda. Ice cubes collide. Bubbles leap from the sloshing into my eyes. I slam it back down and Murakami darkens with a spreading stain. Fuck, I say, wadding a napkin against the book. It’s from the library. I shove my plate away. The Dad and his daughters turn to scowl at me. The mother gestures with her chin. When I look up again, the bearded man is smiling, eyes smug, and finally turns his attention back to his food.

I feel the rise of a different shade within me. Its color pale and harrowed. Shameful as a limp cock. Exposed as a small thumb on a big hand. How that shade swiftly changes from an insular, little elbow to a large suck of hot breath in a huffing lung. Fingernails bite red crescents on palms within the hot grip of fists. The breathing rough. A dimming of the vision. The narrow focus of the worst sort of hate, that shade that spills through the skin with a prickly rush. The tongue suddenly bumpy with a fuck, fuck, fuck.

The huffing becomes mere combustion as the shade stretches its tether. After all, it was born of shame, that mercurial, myopic shade with a reach barely long enough to encircle its own girth. It snaps back to me quickly, shrivels to the black acre in my belly. A childish flaring. Stupid loss of control. And there’s the subtlety of shame. It’s the blackest of shades, so deep that it’ll blot the brightest laugh and yet it’ll change its color, adapt to what’s around it so that one is constantly perceiving through it, yet unaware.

This is how one can come to question every reaction. One wonders at the true source. Is that a pure laugh in a group or a sound sparked out from the black flint of I’m-afraid-to-be-different-than-you? Does that literary bluster have real tautness to its muscle or is it a fury over a white page? I’ve thought all about this before. Previously. Stunned by the smoke of my own questioning.

It’s a drug, the search for reasons. Perhaps I feel the way I feel because it’s simply the way I feel. Maybe some things just are.

—-

The view in the hospital window dies. Blackened by the flat white of the flourescents. The click of the lightswitch steals away all that was out there beyond my fingertips. A nurse checking vitals. The surgery has failed. My hand spreads over a pane of black. Fingertips squeak on the glass. As if the light of the room burns the shadow out of me and flings it beyond the glass, into the rolled loam of the grounds, all the motors in the cars below clutched with a modest heat in the slowing cold. It’s a trick, I decide. A joke played on me. My wife will not die.

Her socks on the bedroom floor brown at the toes and heel. Her knuckles pink from a bath. Crumbled dirt from the garden black in her palms. The frothy vanilla of a drunk night. Her mauve mood, the alabaster anger, the yellow melon richness of her laugh. Cast it all in black now. A dreaded worm grows inside her.

Breath splashes cumulus on the glass, fades, splashes again. It’s a moment before I realize it’s mine. Just a week ago, we parked our car out there, the day wide with hope. “Welcome to the place where you’ll get better,” the Doctor told us. Thin smiles. Her trembling fingers cold in my grip. I look for our car out there in the dark. Try to remember where I’d parked. The nurse turns off the lights again as she leaves. What’s out beyond the glass lifts from the dark. There’s our car, I think. My breath fogs the glass. There’s my car right where I left it. It bursts forth as my breath fades.

Her socks on the bedroom floor brown at the toes and heel. Her knuckles pink from a bath. Soap bubbles sliding white down her back, popping on a mossy towel. Crumbled dirt from the garden black in her palms. A purple vein hot under my tongue. The red sting of her pulse followed by the blue ache of its absence. The frothy vanilla of a drunk night. Her mauve mood, the alabaster anger, the yellow melon richness of her laugh. The silver joy of our children. Cast it all in black now. Cast all the memory away. A dreaded worm grows inside her.

I wonder how soon she’ll pale. Will her hair fall out? Will she drool? Shit her pants? I know the color will bleed from her face. Her hand clenched my thigh at the news. The sudden strength of the doomed. It’ll fail. It’ll drain away like the frantic love of the young. Flushed cheeks bleach and quiver. What will remain? Our chocolate cake memories. Our peach pie mementos. A platter of lies. That is our life. Lies. The truth is the ending. Let me grab her hand and place it on my face. Let me breathe in her palm. Let me. Let me, please.

The colors of our lives flare and fade. Fold a sheet of paper into the shape of a bird. The wind will bear it away. The wind bears it all away.

———
None of this is real. I just wanted to play around with tense and words about color.