Belief System

A religious zealot, hand-lettered sign on a stick. Make ye your soul be cleansed. Filthy robe. Ragged sandals. The zealot gesticulates awkwardly and chants in a secret language. Man or woman, impossible to determine. What brought the zealot here today. What inner voice provided direction. Where will the voice tell the zealot to go next. Will the voice provide instructions for a new sign to match the new destination. Will the words be as stilted and archaic.

The zealot waves at the bright morning sky and smiles inexplicably. Who did this person used to be before going mad. Where was this person’s family. Isn’t there someone out there to keep a leash on him. If it is a him. If it makes any difference once you lose your mind.

Coffee Can

In the evening her man friend goes off to do something with someone. Do what. With whom. Is it another lover. Is it an illegal activity. She doesn’t know, the man friend has his own agenda, he doesn’t bother keeping her in the loop. She has the apartment to herself, she sits on the bathroom floor and pries up a certain plank in the corner. The plank is slippery and mildewed. From the space underneath she removes a rusty coffee can. Tonight another handful of coins is added to the contents of the can. Tonight a few metallic clinks, last night a few, tomorrow night a few. Few and few and few and eventually the can filled to the brim and magnificently heavy in her hand. These are bits of copper and silver scoured from street gutters or taken from pockets of drunks in the bar where she works. The man friend has no idea about the plank or the can, otherwise the coins would go away and the saving would start again. The man friend is more or less without scruples. He tends to his needs first and hers a distant second. It is what it is. The can is the can. The money inside is the money. When she has enough it will be possible to buy a bus ticket to somewhere other than this city where there is no man friend and no one like him. The ticket will be printed on paper. The paper is the paper. Slowly she adds today’s coins. Today is twelve clinks, which isn’t thirteen or twenty or fifty, but also isn’t six or three or zero.

A pretty good night after all.

Seagulls

Outside the city are the fields. At the far edge of the fields there stretches a desert. The desert is bordered by mountains, and beyond them lies the gray and restless sea. The sea reaches for another shore. Who lives here in this unfamiliar land. The enemy. Not like us, not good like us. Not decent or fearful of the holy powers. These are terrible creatures undeserving of breath and blood. If the sea were to boil forth and drown the enemy once and for all. If justice should be served. But the sea does not care. Good versus evil. To salt water the concepts are interchangeable.

Ashen gulls hang by invisible strings on the acrid breeze. They scream and fling themselves down in search of fish. They know little about the shore behind or the one ahead. Gulls are not truly alive, they are illusions of the ocean sun. Spun like dirty silk from the haze and set to motion by deep hidden forces older then the earth itself. Who can honestly claim to have touched a gull and felt its down, its beak, its claw. Anyone says he has, that person is a liar.

Searcher

I remember seeing this dead woman once, I was dropping a letter into the corner post box and the dead woman came out of an alley pushing a rusted shopping cart with crooked wheels. The cart pulled her to the right and the left. The dead woman fought to control the cart. A better way to say is that she struggled with the cart. The best way is to say she warred with the cart.

Suddenly the dead woman stopped and looked all around.

Where is it she said.

Where is what I asked.

I’ve misplaced the damned thing.

Something fell from the cart?

I had it. I had it and now it is gone.

When did you lose it?

The dead woman made a strange sound.

I didn’t know what the dead woman lost, she never explained, she appeared to think I already knew every detail of her misfortune. She swung her head awkwardly, scanning. She began to weep and I almost offered to help look for whatever had gone missing. But it was getting late and I had things to do and the moment to offer aid passed. The dead woman began to speak quietly to herself in a language I didn’t recognize. She got down on her knees and crawled into gutter. She picked up loose change and discarded cigarettes and soiled bits of paper and held each item and sighed.

Another moment came and went. I couldn’t say what kind.

The dead woman crawled along the gutter. The dead woman crawled to the corner. The dead woman turned left and crawled out of my sight and that was all the time the dead woman and I would ever share.

Still. Some nights I dream of her. There she is, wandering though the vapors. I have questions for the dead woman. Did she ever locate her missing treasure? Was she still out there crawling in the darkness of the soulless city? Had she worn out the flesh of her knees? Was she scuffing along on bare bone?

I have questions for myself. If the woman was dead, then how could it be possible for her to return to life? And if she lived anew should I really consider her as having been dead in the first place?

“----------“

She opened a dusty box on a shelf at the back of her thoughts, she revealed to the love of her life a closely guarded secret, one locked deep inside for many years, I am ---------- she said, and ---------- was a word she feared to speak, and ---------- had long caused great shame, never in decades had she been free of being ----------, ---------- was how she identified herself, ---------- was a small agony firmly anchored to her soul, the only thing conceivably worse than being ---------- was to be *******, which is what the love of her life chose to reveal about himself.
In fact, I’m proud of it he said, and she knew not how to respond.

Roadmap

The veins in the back of his hand, thick and twisted and shadowed blue. Move across the wrist past a gnarl of ancient broken bone. Advance along the forearm and a constellation of moles. Lost temporarily within a forest of grey hair. Reappear again at a swollen elbow. Flank the scar shaped like a wingless bird. Vanish beneath the sleeve of the shirt he threw on before storming out the door and after saying to her four absolutely unforgiveable words.

Catching Up

At 11:33, shaking and exhausted, he finally went to bed. His habit was to end the day no later than 9:00. All right. 9:15 if a particularly good book had his attention. 9:30 at the very latest. But this evening a veritable parade of distractions kept him up long past a decent hour. Stopped-up toilet begging to be plunged. Phone call from sister. Neighbor and neighbor’s wife carrying on a drunken argument on their front lawn. Forget 9:15. Forget 9:30. 10:00 came and went, then 11:00. 11:10. 11:20. Only at 11:27 was he able to brush his teeth, drag on pajamas and collapse into bed.

Find a comfortable position under the blanket.

Reach out with one hand and snap off the lamp on the night table.

The clock by the lamp wearily blinked an unhappy message.

11:31.

11:31.

11:31.

11:32. . .

11:33 saw the onset of unconsciousness. 2 hours and 33 minutes late. Blame the toilet. Blame the sister and the neighbors. 2 hours and 33 minutes behind schedule. Was there anything he hated more than being behind schedule?

Little comfort that a cool and dim-lit day would dawn when he could catch up on this lost bit of sleep, forever.