NOVEL EXCERPT: CHAPTER 88

Stepping into crisp autumn night, a blanket of black sky greeting you, yet not with sadness or fear or galactic mockery. In you breathe the naturally chilled air, as the bookstore behind you beckons for your return—you its lover now become estranged. And suddenly you bloom, feeling your spirit once numbed now enlivened together with the flittering leaves that still adorn the maples.

 

Music from somewhere begins and you are moved; it is the sound of a tune piped to an outside speaker attached above the door.

 

What is there to do with the rest of your days? How long will this theory of existence last? You recall birthdays from long ago, the candles brightly lit on blue and white cakes, colored plastic figurines—age-appropriate for each year—stuck in the tops with a spike extending from the bottom of the feet, just enough to keep them from falling over. But once the wishes were made and the flames extinguished by one or two deeply taken breaths, the decorations were then dismantled and the cake destroyed by mouths eager for sugar fix. The presents always seemed anti-climactic, the rush to tear them into exposure more furious than festive. Do you remember any of them? The presents? Maybe a few: a model airplane, a mystery book, a small red guitar, a board game. But now they’re gone, vanished into thin air by simple mathematics of growing older. Who should remember them anyway? And why?

 

There are photographs. Some taken formally, others as snapshots, the latter’s showing arms in motion, reaching for this, grabbing for that, no posing allowed, and faces smiling, teeth showing white, a tongue sticking out, someone laughing as if they just heard the joke of jokes, another face embarrassed for an unknown reason. These are the best: these are the ones you look at the longest. The formals lay forgotten in boxes or dusty albums or at the bottoms of unopened drawers.

 

Birthdays. Days of one’s birth. Truly there is only one, and it is gone forever.

 

And now the night applauds your presence. This night, like so many other nights, is still yours. All of the summers and winters, springs and falls, the seemingly endless suns and moons, the infinite and countless stars: it is all its own grandiose schematic that makes up your life in and of itself. The dead lay buried in a past made just for them, and sooner than you think you too will join their ranks. The mere thought at first is terrifying, how death means the ultimate Earthly end, that no longer will you be able to look upon an autumn sky and breathe the air that smells sweet as lilacs fresh in bloom. Gone will be the days to witness the smile of children in play, tender legs taking them to and fro faster than the speed of their own voices. Such energy. And this too will pass, for dying itself takes energy. Death is energy made perfect in time.

 

But you digress, stationary where you stand, car keys at the ready to take you home, where manufactured warmth also awaits. And isn’t this the thing, the dance everyone wants to learn? How to survive life into death and then beyond? Some say the steps themselves are easy. The trick is keeping the feet moving, moving.

 

The car starts with a bang under the hood and as you engage a forward motion, you pretend the road is not a road but a tunnel you are whooshing through, your destination just ahead but still very far away. Time seems to lose track of itself. Soon you feel you’re cheating Time and all its ramifications. You’re your own theory of relativity, the greatest dancer of the universe. The car moves sprightly, evenly, and soon it takes on a grander scale, catapulting you into delusions, not of grandeur, but of being no one but yourself. If only you actually understood what such a thing means. Then you really would be someone. Instead, you stop the dreaming and pull into an empty driveway, unlock a weathered door and find yourself inside a house built to withstand the bombardments of Time, but find in its cracks and leaks and visual imperfections it is failing, failing fast.

© 2023 Jeffrey S. Callico

COERCIVE MEASURES

1.

Days go by I don't know
fry the whying pan whines
under the plankets. I close

my rice and fall into the pyre.
The world churns the gutter
and heeds the sheets with purine.

Is it flue the ban did the freed
with the stamen? Or did nothing
plant on seeming with the hit.

Renouncing the rarefish
leans against the toast.
There is a loan in the mesa.

2.

Exegesis catapults
under clicking ramrod
factory grievance.

Sisyphus seance blankets
gold vernacular.
Kick-weathered

numchuck openings
troll grandiose
zygote schemes.

3.

Juniper yellow mass
excretions rake rings

in round trebles.
Hegemony soots

grammar raze. Talifaro
bystander hustles

theoretic trailers as
voluptuous carbines

quell minions’ need for
binary symbiosis.

4.

Nefarious growlers
click edges motionless.
Ubiquitous mosquitoes mask
weathered Bavarians stripping

provocative clocks.
Gerrymandering truants
rifle coercive measures
encasing motor-theory pylons.

5.

To trot a fretting fruit
rakes gallant. Ubiquity

harbinger on the lake
and a grand welkin barrager.

Permit vermouth asunder
the trudge. Osprey is

vile interior curmudgeon.
Brand-news howitzer

vacillates a browser but
two widgets quote the truncated bolt.

© 2023 Jeffrey S. Callico

 I CAN'T COME TO HAWAII

1.

Sometimes things like this happen at two a.m., or close to it, when snow is on the streets and the only person out is me, when the church bell is silent and no one knows I am here, when my mind is adrift, when the middle of the cold night is a frozen thought, ever present, much as if I am a particle in the frigid air, not a snowflake, no, much smaller than that, more the size of floating dust but only a tiny unit, I in this deserted town equipped with one flashing red traffic light, but since there are no cars at this lonely hour, its duty is pointless, so I continue on through the snow, my feet heavy in my boots, my sense of time lost in its own melting.

 

 

2.

I am having coffee but then again I am not having coffee -- what I am doing is imagining that I am having coffee.

Yes, that's it.

Imagining.

But see, that's what my life has become: a series of imagined events, all of them strung together like popcorn on string, a useless thing except maybe for decoration.

My life is no decoration. I am a popcorn string, strung out.

You don't want to read this.

Go have some coffee instead.

Make sure it's the real stuff.

Make sure it's strong.

You'll never ever be sorry. Not ever.

 

 

3.

Funny how they don't miss you, funny how they don't care. But you knew this already. You knew they wouldn't, so why the long face? Why the short temper? Why the why?

If you really want to, go ahead.

If you really feel a need to, have at it.

If that's the answer you're going to give, then answer accordingly, as they say.

It will be your final jab.

 

 

4.

They don't say anything anymore.

No one says anything, not even you. Sitting there in your empty chair, still empty with you in it. And now what happens is beyond you, beyond your internal vision for what you imagined would truly happen: nothing. But who are you to argue, to blame, to circumnavigate the truth. The truth...is...whatever you want it to be(?).

Here is more for the dentin to chew. More to ponder in your laboriously laden brain.

Take yesterday.

Yes, the one that you lived in and a tomorrow that will find you living in another. A story unfolds, but slowly...slowly...all your stories do, they unfold themselves, they are flags unfurled in slow motion, like in some movies. This story begins and ends but the ending is one you reject so you frown upon it and spit.

If you don't like something (or someone, which can be construed as either similar or equivalent) then say it. Your mouth will cooperate with whatever your brain dictates, as long as your brain belongs to you and no one else.

Leave the heart out of this.

 

 

5.

People stop talking to you, their mouths close up, they stop forming labials, they stop talking, they stop.

This is the way it happens, the way it is supposed to happen, it is the way you knew it would. There are no real surprises anymore. Nothing like it was when you were much, much younger. Now it's the world's mundane approach to who you are, what you are, the being you have become.

Silence marks the spot you're in.

But somehow your smile forms itself somewhere inside, the place you hide in, the large space in which you find yourself existing. It's much like before but different, and this creates that smile.

The one no one will ever see.

 

 

6.

You have no idea what I'm talking about. You don't even know what you're talking about. Admit it. I mean, really. You talk and I talk and all anyone hears is talking mouths saying nothing. It's just this aspect of oral fungus we can't control. No, I can't either.

I won't go much further since you're bored already. You bore me, I bore you, we bore each other, there's no point in continuing. The world is one big boring place we live in and the world is a boring place we live in and the world is a boring place we live in and the world is.

 

 

7.

Don't call anyone. They won't call you back. They won't acknowledge you called. They won't return your emails. They won't respond to your calls for help. You could be at the bottom of a well full of rattlesnakes and no one would care even if they looked in and saw you in your terror. They would pick their noses or their teeth and spit then walk away. Maybe they had just come from a fast food place after getting their fill.

It wouldn't matter, so why even mention it.

Don't call anyone, don't write any letters, don't say anything to anyone.

Don't even whisper.

© 2023 Jeffrey S. Callico

 NOTHING MORE

After I stopped radiating the dizziness stopped and I could see things clearly again. My parents came over to chat and we sipped various drinks and kept television at a distance. My sister had died three years earlier and my brother was missing by his own choice. I went missing at some point as well but my parents found me in the dark of a campground trying to kiss a girl I had just met hours earlier, when light existed. The years that passed bled into the now-ness I know and do not require forethought. My parents grew weary and left, leaving me to sit and sip with the televised images, who were not sipping anything.

A day or two passed but it wasn’t much. I mowed my yard and trimmed a few bushes and retrieved mail and made a sandwich and watched the television like I was watching a kid trying to piece a puzzle together, a puzzle meant for an adult. When night came, as most nights seem to come for me, I found myself without a blanket, exposed to a world of cold. I thought of my dead sister. I thought about my missing brother. Both of them were missing but my sister would never be found. If I ever located my brother on any grid he would deny everything. What’s the use of finding someone if they tell you they don’t exist.

© 2023 Jeffrey S. Callico