Behind him there is a mirror; above, a loose wire; and below, a maroon carpet. He thinks, I am boy, in an elevator. He thinks, I am made of skin, muscle. I am made of many cells. He came far to stand here—on the L earlier, rumblings up his spine like a totem, and then walking the blocks, legs hinged heavy. He had stood in the fluorescents of a department store and felt a draft of air roam his body. He had grazed each blouse. And the bodies he passed to arrive here! He could hardly tear them apart; they amassed, and he no longer knew where to look one in the eyes. So he looked down mostly, his shoelaces too long so he had bunched them into the boot tongue, the sidewalk, the many heels clacking, and in their midst, weathered toes, rattle of change.
The elevator ascends past his floor. A simple thing, four walls, a can of soup, sheets, pillows, a door. He always pressed three and walked down the hall and struggled with the key. He could not, though, this time, bear, beyond the open door, his belongings shining in the blueish light—buckles, ring, stovetop. The door opens on twelve. A lady, with her gray hair pinned, inches past.
He starts down the hall. He touches strangers’ knobs. What he told himself on the plane the year before—I will sit at the foot of the buildings. I will come to know and love such fake light. I will walk with the mass but will not scream. But a curtain fell across his way, and from it, a hand, drawing him in. He saw the body to which it belonged only later, in the cab, on the way to the man’s gilded room, but he let the man turn him over like a glass nonetheless, and then, the man washing up in the bathroom, he stood at the foot of his bed unclothed and knelt to press his face to the metal frame. He had been like this before, long ago, when a tide took his bottoms and he had stayed there, drifting out, not wanting to emerge on the littered shore so bare, until his father dived and reeled him from the water. A towel fell around his shoulders, clutched in a wrinkled hand.
He reaches the end of the hall and opens the garbage chute. That day at the beach, he saw when his father dived so he swam deeper. He remembers most the strangeness of recognizing his name even at that depth. He howls down the chute.
stormborns
gummygunk
prguitarman
annaxmalina
baratheonpilled
titsay
