I.
pring
was a brisk, white bitch, full of haste and half-promises. Skin-tight
skeleton lady, with a lipless sneer bleached white. We were erecting
the house of seasons, when she hung her scalp on the hall tree.
We built bonfires by night, burning away the excess, burning
away the chill nights of feminine months. It was our way of saying,
Stop vacillating! We shiver one day, sweat the next—pick
one.
“We” were something like a family, and the house
was the bare bones of our hypothetical home. Of the four previous,
I had little more than lost images that turned up when unwanted...
no matter. I was making new memories...
And mother was making new promises:
“This is the last one,” she said, while pulling great
bunches of roots from the ground.
“And what about Kevin? Role model number three.”
“I loved your father, but we grew apart,” she said,
while burying the hole she’d just made. “And I loved
Sterling, but he betrayed us.” She stabbed the dirt with
her spade. “I want Kevin to be the final role model.”
She patted the ground lovingly.
Kevin was kind...of indifferent, and I was pessimistic. But we
did have our moments, bonding over the blasts of a 30’6.
He told me that fire had stolen his last house away.
II.
Summer was a blind and angry God with a lolling tongue. He who
turns the air to heat, he who hatches... Always the pitter-patter
of insect eggs falling through the trees...erupting, becoming.
The larval stage was over—even we were wriggling free.
I was the one you see before you, except pale and burnt to an
Intensive-care pink.
Kevin had a prairie-dust face covered in scrub brush—he
gave me his straight razor as a promise.
Mother was garish: it was her season of agitated pinks and greens.
She was an importunate child in the backseat on the way to Disneyland,
“Are we there yet?!” Kevin had shoulder shrugs for
answers.
He worked on the roof and smoked like a chimney. At night, beyond
asthma, he used a breathing apparatus—forced “Gasp”
and “Sigh” of the mechanism, when night came to choke.
There was a shared dream of iron lungs—no one spoke of this,
but everyone knew.
It was my summer of building trades: drywall slabs and white
lungs on the second floor; hammers, nails, and slivered hands
on the first; brass pipes and spider bites in the crawlspace,
where Nicki the horse-sized dog slept during the hot afternoons.
We brought July to a close with the sharp-toothed whirr of ban
saws and the raw-throated roars of Otep:
“...and there’s...NO WAY OUT!!!”
August came with convective lifting, opposing fronts, and violent
arguments. We heard about them over the telephone like distant
thunder.
Every week of September brought a new crime:
XXXXXXX a missing bottle of Darvassett; XXXXXXX credit-card bills
in the names of banished ex-fathers; XXXXXXX and long-distance
phone calls to a man with a woman’s voice—XXXXXXX
he said hello, and mother said click. XX....
III.
Enter Autumn, the dread mute, pantomiming screams. She tried
to tell us, she tried to tell us... Ghosts were pushing people
off rooftops and rearranging objects.
Then came Halloween night when Kevin finally took off his mask,
and mother realized that he’d been wearing it all year long.
“Admit to everything, or leave now. ... Get out!”
In every window, staring from the house of seasons, Darkness.
In the fire-orange days of early November, while Autumn was frantically
committing serial arson, our house went up in flames.
The fire trucks navigated by great anvilheads of smoke.
Mother careered into the driveway, in a car, in a cloud. She
was the little girl in view of Disneyland when she realized that
it was being eaten alive by fire. She burst out of the car—strong
arms held her back.
“But my dreams are in there!!!” she screamed.
He was in the driveway too.
He said, “Well, now I don’t have a house but neither
do you.”
IV.
Winter came, hoar-faced gravedigger draped in furs. Eyes empathic,
shovel inexorable. He buried the ruins, always the drudge, never
begrudging. He buried the house of seasons. As always, he wept
while he worked, tears to icicles, building an icy beard.
I never saw it, the ashes, the ruins, the urn. I was four hours
away, wearing a cage on my head. I was all the worse for my distance,
no safer. Despite my remove, I could hear the howls of dying animals,
and the frore as it tore through frozen carcasses, howling for
them.
That’s when the idea came that homes are nothing more than
solid planes which define us, define our noises, house our thoughts,
our emotions. Urns for the ash of memory. But what if the urn
itself is ash, ash, ash? What happens if there’re no solid
walls or floors or roof to hold and keep?
Somewhere, to the north, raw pain was a thing, screaming through
the winter wastes. And Murderous thought, was an invisible avatar,
stalking through the forest...
Eye want to know my day is coming—
See my enemies punished -
Shed my skin again—
THIS WILL BE MY BEST REVENGE!
Otep Shamaya
[END]
© 2006 Matthew Lee Bain - Contributor's
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