Coagulants, a certain brand of medicinal literature, taken in earnest to steady the flow of the brain, in reality this is a blood letting, a constant unrelenting gush of psychic energy from one’s eyes, mouth, nose, pores, fingertips out onto the carpet, hardwood, concrete, and dirt. Prescribed is the coagulant fiction to stick those ideas in a place where they cease pornographic explosion onto peoples faces, hands, laps, etc.
Tre Natum talks in his sleep, his arms thrust upward to the ceiling. It’s like he fell from the ceiling of his room, or of earth, down onto the bed, on his back like a dying bug or turtle. He reanimates upon morning however, gets up on two feet, resolving not to die on his back or on the toilet like the tragic clown, Elvis.
The morning in 2012, wintery, Tre is cold as fuck, his hands like mannequin’s. He grabs the whole blanket off the bed, it won’t be made (it doesn’t matter) and wraps it around his naked body to be a kid for the day, sitting with a PS3 controller next to his dick, twiddling his thumbs to the atmosphere and narrative of the hero stuck in the wall. He remembers being four living in the projects.
I walked into the kitchen and struggled to grab a popsicle out from the too-tall freezer. Grape flavored, the first lick was mostly the unfrozen goo that settles to the side of the lateral popsicle wrapper, a heterogenous sublayer to the ice and purple flavoring. With this popsicle, the sweet herbaceous aroma of pot smoke led me to my mother hanging out in a room in the middle of our brick welfare apartment. I knocked on the door my mom came out and.
“This boy is so smart, let me tell you, sometimes he finishes my-”
Her hand drifted down and burnt the young invisible hairs of my arm with a Marlboro red. My mother improvised with a casual sense of shock, certainly dazed, and took my popsicle out of my hand and held it to the burn, cooling it. A spot of grape goo outlined the perfect circular burn, my mother had healed me. That night, later.
A paint crack in the living room when staring awake, sometimes awoken by a small cockroach falling on me, lost grip on the ceiling flailing down I never blamed em but I still killed em. The paint crack looks like the cartoon penguin from the tv dinner my mom used to get me, that I wailed for in the freezing aisle of Ingles. Still awake at night, the paint crack, white bone peering out from the pink plastic paint, sometimes the tv on, only five channels like mom used to say when she was little. The ghost trails of car headlight plunging past venetian blinds, when turned to red and blue, which was often, I felt the dread. Still, the sickening orange glow of street lights, a repulsive color second-to-none, a big fuck you from Public Works, anything was better than that shit. Like somewhere someone who invented it is thinking, “you can have light at night but we will trap you in the unending tempered pre-twilight climate of 90s cop drama. That’s the price.” The unending twilight, an unending burden of stress. Did I kill enough to sleep well tonight, to have enough meat for mother, sister, father? Never enough, even if some is leftover tomorrow, never enough.
Once, with a Yoohoo box in my hand I ran down the street, in between the horrible lights, stuck in the dark, too afraid to move at some moments. That fucking goosebumps orange, (only looking to the mother blue-black of the rural sky-scape did I escape) the tepid jackolantern fire called streetlight. I got home so late my mom thought I was up to something. I was 5 years old, horror was my occupation.
I did one time, at four years old, recreate a scene from a movie I once saw with a small blonde haired girl my same age. In a bush, so small were we, able to inhabit the small space inside a bush, not behind, or beside, but both of us within the arboreal cavern that felt like elf heaven. She said lets have sex. She pulled down her pink pants and showed her featureless pelvis, pulled up her purple shirt showing her babydoll chest. I pulled my pants down committing to the performance, my tiny penis brutalized by my pants waistband. We hobbled close to each other, our bare chests touching. That was it, four years old acting out a movie. The witch screams of my mom burned out the Projects front door. We weren’t caught, she was just wondering where we was. A moment later, we were caught, crawling out of the bush located right next to the front door, our clothes still halfway removed. Later.
In the giant man sized sewer drains behind my grandfather’s, where my father lived, I ran with flashlights and friends. We mistook raccoon tracks for gator tracks and ran out the giant cavern, the alternating rhythms of feet on soft sand and shoes on tin metal, following us out the tunnel. In the creek now, we flipped over rocks looking for crawdads, small mud lobsters, by far the coolest creatures I’ve ever seen. We played in the barn frame, no walls or ceiling, just a floor and skeletal walls, it felt like a stage to me. Diana’s father had begun building the barn but he never finished because he died the night of my father and stepmother’s wedding reception. Running down that morning to the pool where everyone had gathered, I watched the men in attendance drag him from the side of the pool. I thought he must have been strangled by a giant python, I thought I saw it around him, or maybe sliding down the overgrown embankment behind our pool. They shooed us away down the street. I remember Diana’s face as we sat in my neighbor’s basement, a group of refugee children, about 8 of us, too small to deal. We managed to still have a fun time playing video games and such.
Diana’s dad’s name was also Tre. My name is Tre, my father’s name is Tre. Who the hell runs this place? In the years after Mr.Tre’s death, as expected of a now half-orphaned child, Diana became somewhat mean and loud, our playtime usually ending in her crying. Yet up in the barn stage, the skeleton’s theatre, often we would silently walk around not sure of what to say but feeling our time was important, there in the darkening smell of sawdust and summer. In the years after, we grew apart but this ghost lives around us, hauntingly joyful, like my grandpa’s Sunday blues guitar.
Tre Natum ceased his floor-time video game session, he pulled some pants on and walked outside to the mailbox, the slick stack of junk that came out reminded him of that one dude who opened Rose’s safe in Titanic. He quickly threw all the junk mail in the garbage. Upon reentry to the bedroom he picked up a shirt, put it on, walked into the living room and prepared a song on the guitar.
“Once upon, a midnight love
I caught sight of the one I love
Up above, behind and around
The sound, oh what a lovely sound.”
After the last words Tre couldn’t hold back a frown, he set the guitar down, the song was done, it was no fun. He felt like a clown.
Eventually, he got a job, went to work, learned some things. Now he feels better.
