An Accounting of Objects
A boy sat alone, wondering if this was what it was like to lose one’s mind. For several days now, when by himself and left to his own thoughts, the world became an alien place, familiar but changed. The air around him and between all material objects seemed to expand, to become an unimaginable gulf of space without the objects moving at all. Motes of dust in hyperfocus in the air hanging inches from his eyes seemed somehow light-years away in warped time, a terrifying psycho-sensory paradox, and the sound. A deeply nagging barely perceptible hummmmm, always present, like a leak in his sensorium.
“Is this real?” he would whisper to the room at night, his voice seeming to travel across vast distances to echo from the wallpaper around him as he lay cowering in his bed.
Nothing ever answered, and his prayers where not comforting. That sensation of distance faded after a time, only for the torment to return periodically, the unreal space of undistance between objects, brief but well remembered. He never told anyone for fear of what they might think and for fear of these episodes getting worse, which of course, they inevitably did.
Blue sky. Large cumulus clouds. Not flying, just impassively floating along. One of the clouds has a titanic white mouth. It is preaching or prophesying loudly, a fiery sermon. Can’t hold on to the words, may be trying to teach me something. The only phrase remembered is “And it will be this way again for eternity!” repeated over and over, fading for several seconds just before and after opening my eyes, the outline of the giant mouth visible in the white linen drapes shading the window from the afternoon sun.
The boy sat up and kicked the quilt off, staring at the white linen drapes hanging lazily over the mobile home’s window. He spun himself around and hopped quickly off the bed, walked over, parting the drapes to look outside. No one outside that he could see, just the rows of beans between the mobile home his great-grandmother used to live in and one side of the main house. His grandma-ma hadn’t lived in the house for months, just her cats, his aunt, and the grandchildren as often as possible. She lived in the main house and was too frail to be alone now in the little home the family plopped down on the property after his grandpa-pa had died suddenly last year. The cats openly despised the children, of course, deeply resentful of their presence at all times and not approachable by anyone. Cornering the cats was quickly found to result in shocking violence and spontaneous defecation and not attempted again. The boy put his clothes and shoes on.
Yellow glow of an old cassette player, the soft clicking turns of the spindles the only sound. They aren’t even listening. They are watching. They are part of the dark.
What time is it? He left the bedroom to find the clock hanging on the wall in the living room. Three o’clock? Is that right? He was hungry. No wonder he was hungry. He hurried out and down the short path through the bean poles to the main house to find his grandmother just inside the side entrance to the kitchen, feeding the dobermans. She had on her usual jeans and a red floral blouse. Short straight black hair, light brown skin, a little wrinkling around and under her dark eyes. The three big sleek black dogs turned their narrow heads and floppy uncut ears to look at the boy briefly, but they were entranced by his grandmother as she mixed their evening meal. Half a can of Alpo each mixed with kibble and a little water. She set down down the bowls and they dove their noses right into the chunky pink stew, erupting with a chorus of chewing, gulping, crunching and the occasional snarl. She looked up at him, her lips pursed, one thin black eyebrow arched with suspicion. She knows the boy is hoping to get fed.
The Place of Dead Birds. Sadness has infected every surface.
“Lot of work to do now, but you can probably find a sandwich in there somewhere. You stayed up so late, you missed the whole day again!”
He looked at the ground sheepishly. “Yeah,” he said sheepishly to his shoes. He didn’t try to explain and she was impossible to lie to. “Where is everyone?” he asked, looking back up at her. She had stopped pretending to be stern and all he could see when he looked up at the round moon of her face was her smile.
“I think Mike and Alex are still playing by the stables. Everyone else went shopping and your grandpa will probably be home any minute from work. Mother is taking a nap. Hurry up and eat something Little Bit, you look pale.” He was the oldest of her grandchildren and she called him Little Bit from the time his four pound form emerged screaming from her daughter’s womb ten years ago. No one else had this honored title.
A small blue sneaker on the ground alone, its partner is gone. Only the wind runs inside of it now.
He hugged his grandmother and ran to the fridge. Grandma walked into the yard, turning toward the large garden nearby. He peeked out the door to make sure she wasn’t coming right back. He opened the fridge and pulled out the little drawer the lunchmeat lived in, jamming 3 pieces of bologna in his mouth, took a couple slices of American Cheese Food to quickly unwrap and do the same. The sudden mass of cheap meat and fake cheese threatened to stick in his throat so he grabbed the gallon of milk and chugged on it right out of the bottle, painfully swallowing the over-large mass.
Having avoided any grandmotherly frowns at his uncouth treatment of the milk bottle and lunchmeat, he walked across the brown slate tiles of the big kitchen to the other door, emerging into the back yard. The yard sloped gently down from the house, about a half acre of green grass with a short fat Douglas fir right in the middle. Huge oaks to the right shaded about half of the area from the warm summer sunlight, a cobbled path between them leading to the horse stables, barn and pastures. To the left was the rest of the garden, and beyond the neat rows of various vegetables soon to be harvested were the cow pastures from which could be heard the occasional lowing heifer. He started down the stone path toward the stables to find his two younger brothers.
The static on an old CRT television gives the viewer the impression of waves of frantically morphing blinking and unblinking eyes, a manifestation of one or more malevolent entities. It is always agitated.
He found Michael and Alexander climbing around the hay underneath the huge aluminum canopy that sheltered the heavy bales from the elements. The bales were stacked like a ziggurat, and all three of the boys spent a lot of time there pretending to be knights, commandos, ninjas and other heroes. Behind him he heard two of the dogs fighting, again, and his grandmother yelling at them. They always sounded like they were ripping each other apart but they were never visibly injured.
“We’re playing swords!” his younger brother Alex called down from near the top of the pyramid of straw. His sword was one of the handy wood slats the boys had scrounged from around the property for their games, often doubling as rifles. No other toys were necessary for them for the most part. His youngest brother Michael was four and was a few hay stories below, brandishing his oversized sword up at Alex like a challenging warrior. Swords were waved about and they all pretended to be heroes for a little while, soon moving on to taking their swords into the pastures beyond the horse stables where one of the Arabian stallions, Stone, silently watched the boys play. Their swords became machetes as they whipped the boards periodically to slice weeds and stands of tall grasses.
A faded Pentecostal hymnal. The frayed hardback is spattered with ancient white wax, the droplets pockmarked like tiny blasphemous moons.
The boys made their way through the field as the sun fell slowly toward the horizon behind them and found themselves near a particularly tall stand of green grass next to a small oak tree near the barbed and electrified fence line. They hadn’t been to the spot before and were naturally compelled to investigate. The ranch was old and of fair size and they had found many secret places around the grounds.
Glass figurine of an angel covered with old dust, its white grainy eyes staring into oblivion as if in shock.
The grass grasping the boys’ legs was greener and began to touch their shoulders as they approached the spot in the field. Within the tallest part of the stand of grass, tall green reeds could be seen within, growing from around a small pond twelve feet across, still and smooth as glass. This was new! They had never seen this before. Are there fish in there? There might be. They couldn’t see the bottom. There were crayfish scattered around the waters edge, and fat clusters of tadpoles swarming. Michael ignored the other two boys as they explored the possibilities of having their very own pond, fascinated by the tadpoles swimming about near the shore.
Bulb in a banker’s lamp blinking in the library, its haunting uneasy light illuminating an unattended newspaper. Missing girl found dead. The City of
Angels is burning. Hatred. Anger. Fear. Beautiful brass music box, the filigree tarnished with age, its notes strike with a painful psychic toothache pain.
“We should get a boat,” the boy said to his brother Alex.
“Uncle Jake has a boat,” Alex answered excitedly.
“Yeah, but it’s too big. There’s that old boat by the shed but I don’t know if we could get it all the way over here,” the boy said doubtfully picturing the small green fiberglass boat piled up with other old forgotten things.
“We could drag it, it’s not that big.”
“Yeah but it’s kind of heavy and it’s a long way.”
“We could get one of the horses to drag it!” proclaimed Alex. The boy stopped and thought about that. It wasn’t as silly an idea as it sounded but only their aunt would help them do something like that with the horses.
Unreadable names and signature on a stained installment contract evokes an immediate involuntary threat response. The world has become still around a flat block covered in interwoven layers of unreadable graffiti like an altar to urban decay, waiting patiently for the next ritual. The stars are gone. Every creature and wind has gone.
Both of the boys jumped with a start, a splash heard on the shore to their left where Michael was. A chill instantly shot up the boy’s spine, reflexively thinking the worst. Michael was hunched over the water on the shore of the pond, his right hand elbow deep in the water. He cried out gleefully, laughing at the ripples interrupting the perfect calm of the lonely pool. The boys just stared at him, at first startled, now annoyed.
“What are you doing!?” they exclaimed in unison. Michael looked at them, still laughing, his face shining red with excitement in the waning afternoon light. He drew his hand from the water, fist closed as if grasping something. He had managed to grab some of the swimming tadpoles. His youth knowing nothing of restraint, he closed his fist over them, all but a couple dying instantly. Two of their number wriggled from between his fingers through the liquefied gray-green viscera of their siblings running in slimy rivulets down his hand and forearm.
The other boys stared now in shock and disgust. Michael, feeling the wriggling tadpoles running over his fingers, screamed and threw the grisly contents of his hand at the water, a small formless biomass of fluid and abducted tadpoles striking the water with a plop. He started laughing again.
The boys were silent for a second, then started to laugh nervously along with him.
Tiny perfect hole in the flower petal — I can feel the weight of the universe being pulled through it, a worm of sadness. Please help me.
They couldn’t think of anything else to do but laugh.
Originally published at https://dissidenttower.substack.com on May 7, 2022.
