EH

apathetic meat popsicle hurding through space 

[ellishaley]

Some Brilliant Light

It’s 4:40 AM. I wake for water. The kitchen’s fluorescent glow flickers on. Some brilliant light across the grassy way which separates the neighbor’s apartments illuminates the sidewalk. The yellow glow silhouettes the undergrowth. I spend the next hour tossing, fading between dreams and violent premonitions of your flight crashing. But there’s no flight, no ticket-checking, no bag-packing, there’s just the Pacific churning cold in the dark. It is night in Hong Kong? Or day already? Sometimes I forget. Another year, I whisper to myself, and I’ll buy a ticket and visit. Another year. The dreams overtake the visions and I remember no further.

[ellishaley]

Mist Watcher

You called them the mist watchers, those early morning walkers through the exurbs of Atlanta, who would find the little patches of green space in the pre-dawn hours, hustle along the sidewalks with their cap-flaps bouncing and their hands dug deep in their pockets (found little bits of lint and crumbled receipt edges). I passed one on the drive, January, his eyes neither looking forward nor beyond, just shuffling along against the chain link fence of a baseball field steeped in frosty mist. I wave from the car and think the heater is so loud he somehow can’t see me; I chuckle at how preposterous that is, but he doesn’t wave back, regardless.

[ellishaley]

Providence

There is a lock of hair still upon the mantle. There is a clock which articulates the passing of ages, the loss of memorials, the tides of lush and famine. There is a finger which bleeds from the nip of a knife. There is vodka in the throat and sadness in the whorls of thick heads of hair.

Pain as providence.

The gradual fall of dust mites to the accumulation of generations. The unspeakable truths of the world eat away at us every day. Resist the sweet scent of death; all life is protest against it.

[ellishaley]

A Book / An Island

There is an entry in a book in a dark cave on an island no one has visited (in this century). Two pages describe two lives, the other thousand are blank. Beside the altar (the bed of the tome) is a quill and dried-up ink. There are the remnants of candles, pieces of charcoal, bones of birds, and the dried hearts of deer which do not live in the island. There is a letter there I wrote to you, three hundred years ago. It says “abandon all hope ye who have come without it”. There are two exits to the island. One is in the sea the other cannot be said aloud.

[ellishaley]

Farewell Transmission

Janice is there with the sunrise radio on across the westbound veins which clog at on-ramps and off-ramps of scarcely-marked towns (towns forgotten before they were founded). Cheers to the dawn-to-dusk, oh yeah, cheers to the rain and sun across your windshield and all the fucks not given. Here’s to filling twin 50 gallons as the sun peeks up above the lonely western landscape, those panoramas the remainder of what was once wild, now a future of stucco and plastered glory. Here’s to nights slamming cheap beer at unnamed bars in cloud fronts of smoke, in the company of people who are good at pool and keeping on the same course to decades at a time. Here’s to the loneliness and the monotony; here’s to paychecks and new boots. Here’s to the future.

“This is it,” she says, past Stanton, past Odessa, past Wickett, “a farewell transmission.”

Janice has a trailer setup, way off in west Texas, way off where she’ll have to learn some Spanish just to get by. And Janice will sell her rig with all its wear and tear and settle down for some quiet time with mystery novels and back pain. And Janice knows the life not burned hard and mighty is not the life worth living, albeit an end that lingers in the dim of pain meds and the endless wonderings of “what if”. But those are years to come. There’s still a lot of life left in her eyes even though her skin is sun-damaged and sagging like Play-Doh. There’s still a lot left out there, too, waiting in the scrub-brush like rattlesnakes who are wont to bite. So it’s a farewell, for now, until the next moon rises and the echoes of lives past rattle their way up the prickly-pear spines in the darkness, whispering “hey you” and “remember when” in their sweet and dangerous tones.

[ellishaley]

Issues a Command

Lay down your weapons on the edge of the rivers where the sun comes down like shattered slivers of ice. Lay down an stop resisting. You have lost the war (the war has not even begun, and you have lost it). Lay down and pull your catechisms from your coat pockets and page through their back-and-forth and then surrender them as well, for you will not need them where you are going. No, you will not need God or fear or food. You will work under clouds of soot and sleep in quarters too cramped and we will watch you from our panoptic towers with our half-closed eyes. We will watch you for years, for decades, as you work towards the end of the long trail. When you reach the end, there will be a great cliff which overlooks a beautiful ocean which extends beyond the horizon, beyond understanding entirely. And you will dive in or we shall push you in. And as the saltwater overtakes you, you will remember that you have left behind the ones you have loved, that you really kept at the toil for them, and now you cannot see them at the top of the cliff watching you go, but that is the command we have issued, and so as you follow it, so have (long ago) and so will (when all light has faded) all gods as well.

[ellishaley]

Manifold

Time is woven in a loose-knit manifold with threads of gold and green. Time sits in a pile in the corner of an unlit factory floor, soaked in the silt-laden waters of the floods. Time drips from a fern - a single drop of dew which has accumulated into something tangible in the time since the sun has risen across the late-Carboniferous horizon. Time waits alongside northbound Interstate 75 at the onramp with a cardboard sign which says “veteran, God bless.”

[ellishaley]

Before

Before I saw you, I wrote a letter to Michael. I didn’t mail it until 1994, which by then his address had changed several times. The letter got nice RTS-stamp across the front and began its journey back to Michigan. Of course, I never saw it again, and so assumed that Michael had read it, noted what had happened to me in the past half-decade, and decided that he didn’t have the time or the energy to properly respond. I didn’t fault him for it; I probably would have done the same had a similar letter come my way. I’m at least honest about that. But what bothered me more was finding out nearly fifteen years after the fact that Michael had moved from Portland (Maine, of course - but you know that) to the coast and then from the coast to Massachusetts and then, somewhere along the line, he decided he wanted his old life back again, only now looking across an empty table, with an address book full of phone numbers that no longer connected, he realized that he couldn’t, that he was literally an island, adrift in the highways which criss-crossed the tiny states of the northeast, between motels and month-to-month apartments, trying to bail his own ship, trying to get that damned water out of his boots, trying - goddamn did Michael ever try.

But that’s not why I’m writing to you. That’s a parallel line, what happened to Michael and what happened to my old Volvo station wagon that I picked up on Georgia and drove on an all-nighter back to Grand Rapids. No, that was all before I saw you, smoking a cigarette outside a walk-in clinic in Lansing.

“Supposed to be thirty feet from the door, right?” I said.

I was pregnant. I had “had quite a scare” as they said with regards to blood arriving when blood shouldn’t. But it was fine - you know it was fine. And you just laughed and put it out and asked how I was feeling. No one had really asked that in my six months of a pregnancy with a man that had disappeared the moment I mentioned those two fateful words.

You were a “non-emergency ambulatory driver”. I was just passing through, on my way from my parent’s place to Grand Rapids, in the crisp early fall. You said that I look like I needed a drink, but in the absence of being able to do so, you’d buy me a malt.

“Are you a time-traveler from the 50s, yeah?”

And you laughed again but I actually said yes because at the time I was too shaken up to be driving back across busy highways with salt-corroded roads and people. So I rode with you to some faux-fifties place (the rise of them was spurred by the already-withering, nostalgic Boomers) and we just sat and talked. We talked for a long while. For a week. For a month. We talked when you moved to Grand Rapids. When I started contractions. When I had to quit my job to raise J. When we got married a year later.

It is not that things start happening - you know this, too - but that things have always happened. Things have always taken place exactly when and where they were supposed to happen. Life happens for some people and to other people. It’s about whether you work with life or against life. It’s not fair; it’s not unfair. It’s not good or bad or anything - it just happens. And we’re in the middle of it and we’re thrashing around like we’re caught in blankets and we have a fever.

Before I saw you, we each could have been different people. The things that happened didn’t have to happen - you know that. I know that. But the things that have happened become the happening, you know?

You’re sleeping in the other room. And J. and K. will wake up tomorrow before we do and they’ll eat Froot Loops in the dim kitchen light and we’ll wave bye as they take the bus and then we’ll wave bye as we drive off our separate ways. But I want to you know. I have to let you know (even if you don’t see this letter for another ten years), that today, more than anything, more than the sum of all seasons that have ever past, more than the rain and snow and pine forests, more than the years that have become our lives, that I love you.

[ellishaley]

Editor’s Reel

In the beginning, God created the heavens, the earth, and the areas where good establishing shots could be taken. And the earth was filled with darkness and superhero cinematic universes and so God gestured in the directions of the light techs, who scurried back and forth to get some spots rearranged. God then made land and water for growing coffee and any future Waterworld reboots, respectively. God then created plants - which really just took a background role as the story progressed - and animals. He later decided the animals by themselves were not substantial enough sort of “fill out the narrative” and so created these hairless apes, full of jealousy and apathy, which worked as antiheroes, but just didn’t seem overall likable enough to consider the whole project “done”, you know? So on the seventh day, God just calmly set down a half-finished latte, placed a scribbled-upon notebook on a folding table, and said “we can always fix this mess in post.”

[ellishaley]

Before the Aftermath

It happened in waves. Flotsam from the British Isles and continental Europe drifted slowly over the deep, icy waters of the North Atlantic, their pelagic stay finally ended at the threshold of the eastern seaboard. They landed on piers and jetties. They were ejected from the hulls of transport ships, their pupils like flecks of factory coal transfixed on the mirrored version of the cities they had just left. Or maybe they hadn’t left cities themselves, that it was some city they had only heard of, that they had left the chaparral countryside where starving oxen milled the dry grass. Or maybe they were from the coast and so the smell of cod and smelt being filleted on the docks was familiar in this unfamiliar place.

But this was all before, because the airplane had yet to be invented. In the span of twenty years they would cover Europe like starlings and brave men would be made and all men would be broken. Years would pass in uncertainty.

“In the aftermath . . .” sounded the radios, in dark tenements, in coal-slag bedding, in wood-fire winters.

And so they wrote to their distant families, back home, in the place they kept with them but to which they would now never return. The letters left America. They drifted back across the Atlantic, up hills dotted with olive trees, up past empty old churches, to the places of their ancestry. And crippled hands wrote back: “Why have you abandoned us?”

[ellishaley]

Hush

It was not quite dawn, not quite the end of nighttime, but the liminal moment between these two events when the earth’s rotation slowed enough that each minute became stretched out, almost to the point of snapping. The clock ticked by with glowing red numerals. He melted into the duvet, armpits tinged with sweat, lips dry from radiator heat. He waited. He counted - not with a lot of effort - his best estimation of the seconds going by.

5:45 AM. The alarm crackled on with radio static. He never set the alarm to anything less that totally jarring static. It was like waking up to a Lynch film, he thought, which was a sure-fire way to get someone out of any location. He should have patented an Eraserhead fire alarm that played old jazz standards over the sounds of a dentist’s drill.

Toothbrush in mouth, he started the coffee. There was coffee at work, of course, but one can never have too much coffee. He absentmindedly gnawed the end of the brush while measuring pre-ground beans. They smelled burnt as hell. Really good beans, he found, smelled kind of like cat piss, but he could get the same head-clearing goodness from either. He finished his brush and coffee-making routine with time to spare.

Outside, the sun was invisible but starting to cast magical slivers of light through the building tops and onto various apartment fire escapes. Everything started to get this lovely glow, so much so that for the first time that week he actually stopped getting ready and took a breath, a really good breath, a breath that would make a physician go “woah there” during an annual and chuckle. And sometimes, that was all it took to reset things, to make things slow down a bit. To just look out across the cityscape in the quiet, post-dawn-pre-work world, to breath a really fucking hearty breath while giving your nose a coffee-steam-treatment, while just absorbing the morning, keeping it with you in your muscles throughout the day, keeping it with you as even as the sun started to fade away again in the early afternoon and think, hey, this is something I could fall into, this is something that’s not as bad as everyone makes it out to be, this is something that serene and important and overall not bad, not bad at all.

[ellishaley]

Slope

The declination began forty minutes before landing. It was a steep slope downwards, starting - exactly underneath - at some unincorporated township outside St. Cloud. Directly below the plane was what remained of the midwest: filler towns that linked arterial roadways clogged with strip mall plaque. Dead strip malls, no less. What strip mall thrives, after all? Don’t they all just grow from some amorphous heap of cheap construction material, go through mitosis a few times in terms of size and number of stores, and then slowly wither away into places where Goodwills and mattress stores can find cheap leases?

The air had the dryness of a sauna to it, but without the smell of cedar. It really had no scent at all, except when the lavatory door opened and there was a waft of indeterminable chemical cleaner. But the air was the same air they had on board when they left Eugene. This air would be released - along with the people that were currently enjoying its ability to keep them alive, albeit passively - in the taxiway of Duluth International.

That’s where she would be released, too, to scuttle off through the bouncing, cold jet bridge and into the deju vu-inducing terminal floor. It was like every other airport ever - right? She had sworn she had been there before, six months ago, leaving for Eugene. But it had been a year-and-a-half, in reality, as last Christmas was just “too busy”. Not for her, no; she had been bored out of her mind as all her classmates went on their respective sojourns back home. It had been too busy for her family. Too many relatives from Wisconsin, from Iowa, from the remnants of river valleys that once teemed with eastern wolves and deer and now just deer and people who drank copious amounts of light beer. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, really.

The taxi arrived. The wheel tread looked like teeth that needed flossing with bits of road salt stuck in between. The driver only turned on heat up when she entered, probably in some vain attempt to cut costs. To be a taxi driver must be an exercise in cutting costs, a Zen level of discipline waiting in a cold cab for dispatch to remind you that someone mother called in a yellow cab at Duluth International for exactly 3:16 PM because, of course, you had to account for debarkation.

[ellishaley]

Shipwreck

It was a lonesome thing. It was a memorial, impermanent and misshapen, its twisted railings raised up in frozen prayer, rusting in the sea breeze. This was two hundred miles south of Marrakesh, off some isolated strand only accessible by headstrong drivers of all-terrain Jeeps.

It took me several days to reach the coast. These were days across strange, alien land of radiant sun and endless, ill-kept roads. These were days that were not lost to time but locked in time like cards discarded in a game of gin. I could reclaim them later, as long as no one else reclaimed them first.

And when I finally saw the shipwreck, I snapped a few photos and wanted to go. It was another dead thing, a leviathan which had washed ashore to fall to pieces in the years which washed over it. Its starboard, eaten by rust, revealed its guts all entangled on a sandbar. It was not your fault, oh great mid-sized transport vessel of the northern, eastern Atlantic, but that of some sleep-deprived ship-hands, who now - I assume - are wasting away in unnamed cafes in Rabat.

[ellishaley]

Madrigal / Meadowlarks

We sing clandestine; we sing hopefully. We sing across the countryside which is tawny in the wake of fall. We dash aboveroads with crepe paper of mid-day-blue and yellow. In silhouette, we make our way across farmland and forestland. In between sunset and sunrise we are cautious in the winnowed branches. We sleep peacefully, for what cares have we, other than to care for others?

Morning star, you rise above us and in sacred tones and in harsh tone rows we signal to the dark-strewn sky the coming of dawn. In precious dawn, we fly, singing, giving pause to travelers as we make our southward escape.

[ellishaley]

Toroid

Glistening with hues of pink and yellow, trays of donuts hide behind this immaculate glass pane. K. is poking me with black-lacquered fingernails. Her eyes are already jittery glass beads and she hasn’t even sunk in yet.

“Which are you getting?” asks K., and she steps up onto her toes, then down, bobbing up and down. She’s a five-year-old again, at least for the next few minutes. Then she’ll dive into the morning headlines and invariably say something really tragic to me. I’ll say to K. “yeah” and she’ll say “yeah” and then we’ll sip on our coffee without really drinking it.

But for now, K. is sweet and excited and I respond with generics, with I’m-not-sures and they-all-look-goods.

“Raspberry-filled, just for the purist part of me, and then the lemon-mango-rum-buttercream, just to try something fun.”

She points at each. The former is ellipsoid, the latter is toroid. K. has lived most of her adult life in a city and so follows the craze du jour of sugar-laced breakfast “food”. Donuts superseded cupcakes a while back as somehow one could justify eating a donut at 9AM but not a cupcake. C’est la vie.

We order and K. smiles at me without exaggeration or irony as we sit at the bar seats which look out onto the Wednesday morning street. K. is being sincere when she says she really likes my hair today and it catches me off guard so much that my response is simply to laugh. Then I apologize, because when laughing fails, an apology is certainly in order. And K. smiles again, because she can wave a Pope-like hand at my unwavering workday awkwardness and just “eh, that’s how she is” to other people when I make a mess of things. And so we each devour our respective toroidal shapes and watch flights of people step across our plane of vision.

[ellishaley]

Syntax

These are your words, you insist, pointing towards the faded photographs of east-coast dynasties. These are families that own boats, that own whole harbors. Your acrylic nails are the same shade of peach as the wallpaper. And it’s true, you insist - again and unnecessarily - that I wrote upon the photos names and dates and little notes in red pen.

“That’s what you said,” you say, “about your family, about your friends, about all these people who were kind to you. And you disavowed them for what? You still show up to collect your checks, you still show up to check on index funds for the gilded future they laid out for you. You can’t keep doing this forever.”

But the syntax is all scrambled, I’m glaring through drug-hexed eyes at a bunch of other bankers with mouths and jaws like whales thinking, but you’re thinking, but I’m thinking “just take the money and see you again in a month”.

[ellishaley]

Moloch

Baruch ata adonai starts the call (a blessing) that in unison we chant. But not we, really, for I linger on the outskirts of the unfolded folding chairs with my mouth clamped shut while you continue with words that you and your people have spoken for many more years than what Abraham would have thought possible. Could he have even counted so high? But at the same time, Moloch demands what Moloch will get and three years later you miscarry and so I meet you again in a coffee shop in Brooklyn. "Many Jews are atheists", say you and I nod but I am neither because I am nothing. I go back behind the counter, where I belong, steaming milk for strangers, obeying the commands of unknown others.