Michael John Smith @michaeljohnsmithfineart-blog - Tumblr Blog

Museum bench. ( leather cushions to be added)

Small living space dining table.

-Excerpt from the short story, A train goes by from the section Catherine’s house of love

She had switched from the stance of benevolent, capable overseer to a state of professional distance, a transition that came almost automatically. As a nurse most of Cathy’s internal life running up to this point had been spent with people at a low point, a defining moment in their lives. Her mind had been slowly molded by taking in countless examples of life’s disregard for certainty. She was, as with most things about herself, purposefully unaware of this. Hiding from herself was her most practiced skill, more than removing blood, more than penmanship. The foundation underlying her career of helping people was a terrible mystery.

Catherine was a woman who was, and had, for as long as she could remember, been prepared for her own great tragedy. She expected her loving and devoted husband of twenty seven years to disappear without any word, one of her scholarly and successful children to be the victim of a drunk driver, or a stray bullet while walking late in one of the neighborhoods where they did their outreach work, killed by one of God’s bitter acts of randomness after taking his word to people who, she thought, could barely read. Maybe she would hit a child with her car while distracted one morning on the way to work, and then spend the next few weeks silent and still as she watched the machines monitoring the child’s crushed head and reluctant heart until both eventually gave out and her remaining years could be spent in repentance and regret. She didn’t long for any of this. She expected it.

She would die surrounded by her children and grandchildren scrutinizing their faces as those belonging to strangers. Her mind gone soft and sputtering with age, she would receive what she expected and be incapable of understanding the death of her own mind before her body followed, a tragedy that was wholly hers. Her last lucid thought, chosen at random from the billions upon billions of abstract filing cabinets the human brain consists of, would be one thin slice of memory welded to another by the heat of dying electricity. The smell and stain of a mulberries in her eight-year-old hands as an august sun reddened the bridge of her nose spliced at the hard border of a dark winter night from her early twenties. Her mind would stand in both places, snow flying out of the dark and melting instantly, her body straddling the line between both memories at both ages and both sizes. Two different people in the same deformed dream-made body trying desperately to look at each other and then nothing.

the next room

We’ve been in this house too long and too soon.

I can hear you from the next room picking the red paint from the Devil’s double chin.

If we walked between a roach’s wings you’d pretend, and play Moses in a microscopic theater parting the roach wing sea into two folded walls of veined gasoline.

With me in this room I think if the winter in your words were a beast I’d climb the mountain of its body and scalp its white mane from the top lid of all twelve eyes down to the butterfly of muscle where its neck stops bending. the curved blade of my Mother’s old world butcher knife would jump against up thrust pieces of spine.

The first noise against the snow would be the child born of the marriage between thunder and wet coughing. The second sound, powered by a heart set to mountain time would be a heavily braided fog of bone, and fat, and spark hot blood passing through the wood, and fishing line, and angled pipe of how you remember a wind chime.

I’d feel its last ten breathes round past its hexagonal lips before each tooth, everyone of them its own black drowning ton, each dead and separate pound plow ugly furrows deeper than a ladder into the frozen ground.

Standing next to the monster’s head, dwarfed by its slack and steaming tongue, I’d see the red, cloud soft edges of the wound shine like a shallow grave-sized sun.

In this room you can feel it to the winding image of the boogeyman’s neck tattoo burning a hole through the child-made dream catcher of my iris, the oiled carnival glass of my retina then brain then skull until its loosed as a scarred bald spot on the back of my head a nervous cat’s cradle all fingerprints and upholstery thread.

The sound you hear is me using your blanket and telephone call as both tourniquet and sponge to wick away the side effect that doesn’t effect my side at all.

But I’m not in the next room and neither are you.

We’re both in the first room outside barefoot and begging the alphabet to come together well enough to say when we said I love you we lied.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Michael John Smith