Shaven, I Purchase More Garments

As I stood in my home with my body oriented away from the 37-year-old man in my kitchen whose presence I wished to unconjure, I tensed all muscles and felt all of the interacting forces that served me. There was water pressure and rivers of electrons and gravity and the opposing strivings of wood and screw. I felt like an intruder and a weak pimple and a decomposing gourd.

When the 37-year-old man had been been unconjured and his face was a whispered description of a historical event I felt like something no one had ever thought of, like a person imagined by a writer or sketched by a teenage girl in a the margin of a notebook and lost.

Thus began the Quiet Months.

Help the One Under You

The 37-year-old man stood at my sink in my kitchen which held my shoes full of their diminishing suds. He was wanting more of my gruel but I did not feel comfortable feeding him more. He was never an invited presence. The day he was first present, it was due to an unlawful climbing over my fence and though I felt urges to care and comfort him in the darkness and uncertainty he bore, my feelings of charity were now faded and ratty like bad socks.

There was an incident in which the 37-year-old man sleeping in my chair was abductied by a creature-like woman with no face and incomprehensible strength in her body which had an appearance of weakness. In the morning I woke from an ugly sleep to find that her feet left a glittering trail, and my perceived duty in the life I would live that day was to follow her to ensure that the 37-year-old man who had been my ward was safe in a comfortable place.

Had he not been safe, had his comfort been eroded, had he been in danger of bodily harm or mental anguish, it would have been my somber task to pull him from the situation by whatever means necessary using the intellectual tools and physical prowess I had accumulated in life to that point, either by effort of will or chance and unchosen circumstance. The spectrum of possible outcomes I pondered was without boundary, and I thought of houses in trees, roofs of public high schools, and other places more unsavory and now a burden to conjure.

What I felt was that it was a greater confusion to come to terms with when I discovered that the glittering footprints took me to my own home, where the 37-year-old man was lounging in the same chair from which he was abducted the night before, perusing the classified ads for free pets.

Though the result of the day's searching was indeed that the 37-year-old man was safe and in comfort, his unwillingness or inability to account for his whereabouts, to divulge specific details about his day spent with the creature-like woman, struck me unable to feel a sense of relief and satisfaction.

So I did not want to give him more of my precious gruel, which was a source of sustenance and warmth in the soul's dark moments when thoughts of the inevitable erased the nuances of a life enjoyed and connected to a web of other lives. In such moments, all existence seems to be a useless parade circling a block of condemned buildings and never concluding; the ingestion of my self-concocted slurry of grains and the exotic blend of spices integrated into it is a renewed connection to the secret physical world and its sensations and pleasures I hide from the dark hand looming.

So I did not want to give him more, and I frowned with a hard chin and I turned from him hoping that his presence would cease and the impression of the light reflected from his body would fade from my eyes, my hardening eyes.

The Source of Ambulance Voices

I sat on the small blue stool facing the chair in which the 37-year-old man sat with the newspaper, perusing the classified advertisements, and pulled off the shoes. My feet felt relieved and cooled by the air and the day's worth of sweat, heat, and pressure resulted in a funky odor. The odor was tucked into the shoes I wore, the sneakers, but with no prompting it brought itself into the room and immediately it offended the 37-year-old man who lowered his newspaper slowly for comic effect. With his face, he displayed a lopsided frown and furrowed brows and I felt bashfulness on my skin and I apologized silently.

"Where were you today?" I asked him.

"You'll see," he said. He rose from his chair, took my shoes gently like puppies or bunnies, and put them in the sink and sprayed water in them and squeezed a big dollop of dish-washing liquid into them and stood over the sink staring at the foam pouring out. He looked up at me, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, and with a rakish smile asked if I had any more of the pasty grain concoction I recently fed him.

Held In Chapped Lips

After leaving the cemetery, the glittering footprints of the creature-like woman, who presumably still was carrying the 37-year-old man who had eaten a slurry of grain with me the previous day and returned to my home the previous night and then had his slumbering body carried away by the creature-like woman, spread out and lost their habit of forming graceful curves and loops. Past the Serbian laundromat they led me, past the Mammal Rehabilitation Centre, past the home of the retired comedian. Finally, they led me to my neighborhood, my street, my walk, my porch, through my front door, and to my living room. The smell of cinnamon was thick in the air.

The 37-year-old man sat in my recliner, reading a newspaper. He had flipped out the optional foot rest, and bore the attitude of a well-leisured gentleman. He looked up and smiled to me nonchalantly as if he expected me, spoke the customary monosyllabic salutation, and turned back to his paper.

"What are you reading?" I asked.

"Classifieds."

"What are you looking for?"

"Free pets. I'll let you know if I find the right thing."

"Okay."

"I'll let you know," he said in a sing-song manner.

The soreness of my feet after a day of walking around on varied terrain was acute.

Snow Loop Origami

The glittering prints of the creature-like woman's feet now led me to the cemetary, and I was awake in its placid greens and the ripeness of its floral gifts to the dead. Here the tracks took on sharp turns and knotted up near graves as if the creature-like woman had stopped in confusion or elation, to wonder or to dance, or to do both, for all I knew.

I touched these grave markers because they were smooth and hard and polished to a shine that wasn't dulled by the elements. Polished stone is one of my favorites. I have polished stone bookmarks that I adore and I dream of a coffee table made of a polished slice of petrified tree, but I do not know if there exist any undiscovered petrified trees of adequate size. They have all been found and cordoned off or cut into morsels for souvenirs. Souvenirs are proof of the world because memories are not.

With the enthusiasm of smooth polished stone on my finger tips, I continued my following and my feet bore the beginnings of soreness but still I continued my following.

Deathly Bargain Bin Scarves and Gloves

The sun in the afternoon brought its protons to the earth with such sincerity that my hunchbacked, crook-legged gait was no longer necessary to adequately follow the glittering footprints which it was my voluntary duty to track. It was a fulfilling feeling to engage in this research and fill my mind with possible outcomes. Here were my favorite imaginings:

1. An apartment in a brick quad-plex, warm with radiated heat from a seldom entered room nestled deep within its body.
2. A wooden house built in the boughs of a fine old tree scarred with the marks of lovers eager to leave evidence of their deepest passions in the moment they were felt.
3. A barge laden with pastries from recently renamed countries across oceans.
4. A serious blackness in the depth of the Earth's wounded mantle.
5. A high school with a rooftop greenhouse where a popular but misunderstood student with athletic proficiency seeks solitude for introspective times.

I awoke from a daydream looking up at one hand at the end of my arm against the richness of a blue sky and the involuntary smile I felt on my face receded as if its hourglass was up and a new smile on a new face was summoned somewhere else and my time for smiling was over. I walked and soon became aware that I was following a great arc and it was looping back on itself and it came to an intersection that wasn't there before and with calculations I figured out that I was close to the creature-like woman, whose progress with the 37-year-old man in her arms was slow, slower even than mine. My daydreams about my destination were doing me no harm and it was here that I opened my first granola snack bar and gratefully felt its sweet nutrition in my mouth and in my body.

All Juice, All Juice Is Mine

I walked through the whispering place, and the flowered park, until I came to the last of the food vendors, the brothers with the blanket covering their radishes. I found them on their knees, dirty rags in their hands, furiously scrubbing the concrete. But though their hands were raw and their rags were shreds, the footprints were not disappearing at all and glittered on the concrete like they were new and fresh.


The younger brother looked up to me and with tears in his eyes said nothing at all and I shook my head at him to let him know that he was a pitiful person attending to a futile chore.


"Your radishes are creating a moronic humidity under their blanket," I said.


"In that case, they are similar to the brain in my skull."


"Stop before there is nothing for you to do but languish here forgotten by all whose love you've let fall away like flakes of dry skin."


"Sir, help us. My brother is mute and deaf and nothing else will bring his current madness to its end."


"You are not mine. No."


I stepped around them and the interminable trees were hushed around us and as I strode away with unblinking eyes I balled my hands into good fists and let myself regret my lack of useless charity for only a few seconds before swallowing all empathy in my mouth, swallowing it into my throat and into my abdomen where it would be converted into fragrant pellets to be discarded quietly in a sweaty moment out of the sight of other human eyes.