Facsimile August 2010

The Physical Encyclopedia of Human Emotions for an Age of New Living

...A partial excerpt of the section "E"

By Margaret Wappler

Embarrassment

Mostly hot, right in the back of the eyeball, where the visual scroll gets projected upside down against a mirror of green. This one is a hard lurker that bullets in the stomach first. It represents what you thought you knew becoming what you didn't know until it breaks open everything you want to know but will never have the drugs to properly sort out.

Empathy

The rescue of children, puppies, paramilitary op specialists, runaway despots, cripplingly hateful mothers, your own ugly wounded peppery shithouse attitude when confronted with challenge, fear, sadness, miscellaneous aches and pains, vertigo. Reserved for people who do things in elevators to impress strangers, like sing loudly or forge witty banter.

Eros

If I draw a point the size of a prick – your choice what kind - on your wrist and then it blossoms over your entire arm, and deadens out the capillaries and arteries but grows a couple new sets of veins for transferring worry, warmth, bankruptcy, night terrors, beautiful confused babies, stifled bedtime laughter, viscous offerings of questionable disease potency and starved planets of ambition, is that so bad?

Exuberance

In the spine, a rabid tingle, a scarlet fire up every notch till it swoops over the top of your skull and blesses your entire head like a celestial cap, warm and dominant. New grass guarantees a certain never-can-tell feeling about time. The first instant we all felt exuberance was in childhood, staring in the mirror, pulling down an eyelid like a scene from the California suburban wastoid version of Un Chien Andalou. The nearly violet eyeball registered a dull existential click – here you are! Have you been listening to this roar all along?

Sliver Subtext

By Peter Darchuk

Menagerie

By Dwight Tudor

The interrupted silence of a palm orchard at night, whereby disquieted chirps could be heard here and there stirring behind the sound of boots, their soles not used for stepping but instead skidding helplessly over dirt and stone, hanging off the edge of a makeshift stretcher, their heels splayed and occasionally kicking like two recalcitrant plow blades poorly earthed and dragged backwards. The arm of an old man reached tired and long over a bony shoulder and tugged at the taut young wrist pulling him.

- Stop. This is it.

- Here?

- Goddamit child, stop. This is it. I didn't drag my father a foot further.

The young man bent his knees and set the handles of worn plank gently in the dirt. The old man turned to sit up and the stretcher buckled under the weight of his elbows. He watched the boy pick absently at a splinter in the heel of his palm.

- How d'you know?

The old man cocked his head as if the night might require some show of reverence, then thought better of it and spit the dust from his lips. When he spoke again he was surprised to find himself in near whisper.

- How? You take a good look at that palm there son, and burn it in your head...

The boy followed his gesture to the weathered tree. It rose above them with its dark fronds tethered to the crown and cascading down from the shadowy nimbus in long strips butchered by the wind.

- You'll know it, mark my words, when your time comes.

A moment of silence stood between them.

- Alright then. I guess I'll be taking your boots.

The old man looked down at the boy's bare feet.

- Indeed you will, it's a long way back.

- I reckon I can make it.

- I reckon you might as well try.

The old man passed him the boots and laid back into the stretcher.

- You'll see son, just yourself and strangers from here. Don't settle too far in that body, it's not yours to keep.

The boy took the boots by the laces and slung them over his shoulder. He looked out upon the morning night, now a dim sliver of opaque rose that lowered flat and beholden beneath the empty void of planets and stars. He turned to say something but the old man was already gone.

Tyson Daniels woke from his dream to the unseemly poke of a bottle prodding him in the ribs.

- Hiya boyo, wakey wakey.

He was cramped in the passenger seat of a pickup, the seat belt blistering sweat against his shoulder. The driver, a delinquent and inveterate liar named Jack, was veering the truck wildly along a poorly pitched corner of mountain highway, steering with the fingerless stump of one hand while the fully intact other proffered a near empty fifth of whiskey, one scarred knuckle of thumb standing between them and heaven.

Tyson took the bottle and held it up to the sun.

- That's it boyo.

- Where are we?

- Weaverville county, welcome home.

Tyson gently swished the bottle around and watched the light brown liquid sway against their momentum. He took a swig. He was wary of the fact that Jack knew anything about him, crazy dumb bastard. He claimed to have lost his hand to a bomb in Iraq, but anyone with eyes in their head could tell by the clean cleave of scar that it was much more likely he'd passed out with his hand lying on a railroad track. Jack used to boast that if he could diffuse a bomb, he could play the piano.

Tyson held the bottle up again and watched the humid sun sparkle bronze through the bourbon. He sunk languidly back into his seat. When his old man had passed Tyson decided to skip the funeral but stopped in to take a last sweep of his house. He took two things. One was an old portable film projector. It had the faded brownish finish of a copper penny. His father used to set it up late at night. He had this collection of other people's home movies, little film reels that looked like toy versions of the ones you see in theatres. He'd pick them up randomly here and there at yard sales, auctions, and kept them locked up in his liquor cabinet. When he got drunk, he'd sit up alone and watch them, other people's lives, other families, their birthdays and vacations. Tyson had a room off to the side of the house and he could see out his window sidelong back into the living room so that sometimes he'd sneak up late at night and watch his father drink, reel after reel, into the early hours. It was just about the only regular thing they ever did together.

The second thing he took was a pistol that the old man had inherited from his father. He showed it to Tyson once, said it was a German officer issue from the Second World War, collectors item. It didn't work, the action long since locked up, but Tyson took it. The only real girlfriend he'd ever had once told him, upon hearing this story, that she loved him. She was great, and he probably loved her too, but they grew up differently and somehow let that become an issue. But she'd been really into movies and used to call him after some French actor she liked. She had one of his movie posters hanging in her bedroom. Tyson allowed there might be a slight resemblance but she claimed it was because of his life and who he pretended to be. He never really understood what she meant, but at the bottom of the poster was this great quote, "All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun". He loved that. She was the girl and he'd be the gun. He'd always wanted a tattoo that somehow expressed that, even long after they broke up, and when he got out of juvenile detention the first thing he did was go to a tattoo parlor and tell the ink man about the quote, but the man just laughed at him and said if he really wanted it he'd put that on his arm but it was just about the dumbest thing he'd ever heard. He definitely loved that girl, thinking about it now.

They skirted another steep shoulder and Tyson steadied himself with his hand on the dash. His arm was sunburnt from days of hanging it out the window. He passed the fifth back to Jack, who hollered something lost in the wind. Tyson settled back against the seat and closed his eyes and when Jack started talking again, he remembered something that girl had once read to him: Who could ever be forgiven for interrupting a dreamer?

A boy pushed a deflated soccer ball across a yellowing and dusty lawn. His lanky frame was held aloft by two adolescent legs dressed in cut-off khakis, and when he planted his leg to kick, his knees stuck out from the frayed edges like awkward knobby things that threatened to snap and collapse.

His playground was the front yard of a single story millhouse, one of a dozen or so stretching down the dead end, all of them tied together by a thread of jaundice that spread across their lawns in a thinning quilt, one that had been ripped down the middle by a swollen and cracked gulf of asphalt. A sign at the end called it Devereaux Street.

The boy flicked the ball up and kicked it through a hedge of azalea failing in the late summer sun. He stumbled after it and struck it again, falling to the dirt. He raised his head as the ball swerved into the street and just missed the tire of a white pickup speeding by. An airbrushed effigy of a bald eagle stared back at him from the tailgate, its talons outstretched as if it might just lunge unpainted and swoop his flailing soccer ball.

- Joseph, what did I tell you? You watch that traffic, I swear. Like talking to the… And how, in one and right straight through the other... I tell you...

Joseph nodded his head without getting up or even turning to acknowledge his mother standing on the porch, an infant swaddled in one arm and a phone tucked up against her shoulder. She turned and went back in, letting the front door slam behind her.

Joseph rolled over in the dust and snuck behind the azalea, taking cover with a bed of crunching dead flowers. The pickup pulled to the curb several houses down and sat there, idle in the July sun. Tyson Daniels emerged from the passenger side and stepped onto the lawn. He took a long look around, and then kicked at the ground, scuffling the reddish-brown dust up around his boot. Joseph rustled under the shrub and Tyson turned to find him. They stared at each other for a moment before Joseph stood up and brushed the dirt from his khakis. Tyson watched him, then waved. He tried to force a smile but Joseph just stood there and stared. Tyson lowered his hand. Jack jumped from the cab laughing at something and nearly fell flat. The empty bottle of whiskey tumbled with him and smashed on the asphalt.

- Hey man, there's that fucking retarded kid. Hey kid, did you miss us? What's for dinner? Why'dnt you have your mother come on down here and make us something to eat, tell her to wear something skimpy, like one of them...

- Shut up Jack.

- Why? That damn woman's nothing more than a damn whore.

- Shut up. He's a kid.

- He's a retard. And that mother of his aint fit...

- Stop. C'mon, he can hear you.

- Fine. It's your world, brother, I'm just living in it.

Tyson tightened his face and tried again to force a grin but Joseph just continued to stare with a hollow and blank expression. He watched as the two men walked up the steps and entered their house, then turned to his ball sitting in the gutter, its worn backside upturned to reveal a threadbare underneath of gauze.

He walked over and collected it and punted it into his yard, then set off back past his own house and into the woods behind, following the line of a small trail worn into the underbrush. He followed it deep into the woods, well beyond sight of any house and came to stop at a large granite stone sitting exposed from the dank soil. Dried moss covered the top of it in a crust that fell off to the touch and left mangy patches where flecks of silver mica swarmed with tiny red insects glowing in the dappled sunlight. Joseph sat on his heels and watched them until a breeze swept through the pine needles and sent a chill across his skin. He got up to pee and then rounded the stone. On the far side, facing away from the trail, was a hidden nook dug from the soil at the base of the rock. It held a longish bundle wrapped in newspaper. Joseph knew it because he'd placed it there the day before. It was covered now in flies, and he swatted them away and gathered the package with careful hands. The contents were limp and malodorous, lop-sided and rotting, but he gathered it gingerly and tightened the newspaper around it. The nook left empty took the appearance of a small empty grave.

Joseph tucked the package carefully under his arm and set off again, this time diverting from the trail and following a less obvious line that meandered through a fern grove and then rose up and over a section of squat pine that became first thick and then attenuated to open on a small clearing that sunk away from the forest. The field was about a half-acre square and sat flat with a dilapidated battery house covered in kudzu rotting off on the far end. The ground looked as though it had once been tilled but was now mostly overgrown. Joseph strode through the brown grass until he came to the edge of a patch in the center of the field. Here the brush had been meticulously cleared in the measured shape of a circle, about sixty feet in diameter, and starting at the center and radiating outward in all directions was an intricate and symmetric arrangement of metal debris. All manner of imaginable scrap and rusting junk: bicycle parts, small discarded pieces of farm machinery, corrugated gutter, corroded tools, some of it so rusted that it was hard to tell what it was. But all of it strictly placed, according to size, color and shape, in a fastidious pattern of tight circular design.

Joseph stood at the circumference and studied it with a critical expression that evinced neither pride nor awe. He walked along the perimeter, the newspaper cradled in one arm, inspecting his work, occasionally stopping to perfect the position of a loose piece here or there with his foot, until he reached the battery house which stood like an oblong and disheveled keystone on the far side of the clearing.

He stood for a moment, solemn as the afternoon sun, then reached down and stretched the neck of his t-shirt, tucking it up around his nose. He folded the bundled lump of newspaper with both hands and pushed the creaking wooden door with his shoulder. It was dark within, the only light trickling in through windows covered with generations of weed and wrapped inside by tightly woven and rusting cage. He crossed the threshold and flies swarmed to greet him, buzzing with a rage.

Joseph sidled into the kitchen back home and watched his mother feed his little brother from a bottle of formula the way she always did in the presence of company. Diluted milky liquid trickled down his chin and she caught it in a crisp new bib decorated with the image of a child kneeling to pray in cartoonish cross-stitch.

Judging from the look of satisfaction on her face, the bib was a gift from Ms. Tobin, sitting on the other side of the table. Joseph noticed the way she graciously pretended to ignore the trash bag at the wall by her side, preferring instead to study the polished patina of her loafer as she swept it back and forth across the buckling linoleum. She raised her head when he entered and watched him quietly round the table and stop by the sink.

- Well, Mrs. Yancey says her husband Nate, you 'member Betty and Nate? Well, he said it aint no fox likely to try a dog that size. That cat and them chickens was one thing, but a big ol dog like that, uh-uh, no way.

- Well then where does he think it got to? What with that blood you said?

- I know… I declare, I don't want to think about it. But I aint lettin Tamara out no more without me. I don't know what I'd do. Did you know Betty and Nate used to live out in California? She said they had those coyotes, used to come right up in the yard and stare at you, like no man's business.

Joseph leaned over the basin of dirty dishes and turned on the water to wash.

- Joseph, there you are. How many times do I… are you gonna take this trash out before we bury ourself?

- …

- You… Mind your manners young man. Make a face like that in company.

- Oh come now, Caroline, don't be so hard. Joseph, why don't you come and see me next week? We've got vacation bible school all week long.

Ms Tobin looked at him with her dark brown eyes opened wide like two dilated craters. He turned off the water and his mother made a face to imitate him.

- Oh no Ms. Tobin, I don't need bible school, all I need is to kick my deadbeat dads old ball up and down the street all day. Hauling that old junk up and down who knows where. God knows… I swear, what am I gonna do with you? Don't you see somebody's talking to you young man? I have half a mind to take you…

Joseph swiped the trash by the top of the bag and dragged the plastic can banging around after him.

- Joseph? Joseph.

Outside the sky had amassed in twilight and the shadows fell down into the darkened woods behind his house, the depth defined by fireflies.

He heaved the plastic bin onto the dented rim of the large metal can and leaned back to offset his frail weight against the trash spilling in. The lid toppled back into place and let the light from the kitchen spill down on the surrounding grass. A glistening red fleck caught his attention. He followed a trail of bejeweled spatterings to the tall grass at the base of the house, where an eviscerated mass of feathers shivered in a small clump behind two little black beads. The tiny head shifted rapidly back and forth, swinging a beak that dangled on a cord of coagulating gristle. Two gashes, no thicker than a nickel, ran down its breast. Joseph stepped back to the trash and rummaged until he found a clean sheet of newspaper.

His father had once taught him that all you had to do to catch a bird was sneak up and pour salt on its tail. While it stopped to lick the salt, you could grab it. His father had told him this and laughed.

Joseph turned and surveyed the yard. The near night was quiet, nothing moved. The sky had turned a fiery red over the line of trees. The shadows too were silent.

Red at night, sailors delight. Red in the morning, sailors take warning.

Tyson and Jack set off at the crack of dawn. It had rained sometime in the night and the tires spit a fine mist off the road onto a grey web of rhododendron creeping up the precarious shoulder. Tyson was about to fall asleep when he felt the pickup swerve and accelerate. Jack sped past a logging truck. It responded with belated and coughing airbrakes and the sound rolled over the steep blue mountain like a snoring giant. Neither of them spoke, but it was clear that Jack was hungover.

Jack lit a cigarette and rolled down his window. Tyson pulled the old mans gun from his waist belt and held it in his hand, weighing it. His thinning hair slapped an ash around in the wind. He remembered the night once when his father had caught him up late watching him through the window. He was drunk and dragged Tyson petrified into the living room. He said he wanted to show him something, something he needed to see. Tyson just stood there, too scared to move, and the old man pulled a cloth out from behind the stack of movie reels in his liquor cabinet. He slowly unfolded it to reveal a pile of teeth, human teeth, clean as the day they were born. The old man looked at him, and said-These bodies of ours, they're not for us to keep, I want you to remember that.

Tyson slung the gun into the glove compartment and turned to the window. The morning sun was coming up through a grove of drenched and glistening hemlock. It flickered between the trees and he closed his eyes to feel the heat stipple forgetful across his lids. The smell of wet bark and ionized air, the cigarette smoke, it all strobed and mixed into a musky scent that reminded him of a childhood he preferred to remember. But then the pickup veered violently and gravity shifted beneath him.

He opened his eyes to watch Jack's face go blank and white. A semi swerved across the road in front of them and cargo buckles flew from its bed. A thick piece of unwieldy sheet metal flew off and seemed to float in the air for an interminable second before the wind grabbed it and sent it screeching in through the windshield. Joseph sat on his hands on the edge of his bed and felt the lump of his fingers slowly going numb beneath his thigh. His feet dangled just above the floor and every now and then he swung them in rhythm to the wailing crescendo of his brother screeching down the hall. He waited for his mother to get off the phone, and once convinced she was preoccupied trying to pacify his brother, he hopped off the bed and knelt down beneath the box springs.

The space under his bed was stuffed with plastic bins, old clothes and such, but he swept them aside. He pulled out a small wooden cigar box and set it at his thigh, then grabbed a random bin and set it open beside to provide some excuse should his mother interrupt him. He listened for her, then spread himself squat.

The top of the cigar box was a fading palimpsest of stamps and seals and little Spanish emblems. Inside it was a small folded cloth stained with chalky yellow clots. He pulled it out and set it between his knees, carefully unfolding it square within his lap. It was folded over multiple times, and the center flap stuck to the mass wrapped in the middle like a suppurating bandage. He peeled it back slowly to reveal a pile of little pills, their yolk-colored coats in varied stages of dissolution. He reached into the breast pocket of his pajamas and pulled out two more pills, glistening and covered with lint, and placed them amongst the others, then returned the cloth to the box and pushed it back under the bed.

His mother was in the kitchen and he could hear her talking on the phone again, his brother now quieted. He lifted the sheet and reached back under the bed, carefully obscuring the cigar box with another bin that moved easily in his fingers because long since emptied. A piece of labeling tape affixed to it read 'family photos'.

- Joseph? What are you doing? We're gonna be late for the doctor. Stop fooling, c'mon now.

Tyson felt his chest expand when he impacted the ground.

He went immediately out.

When he came back, it was cloudy, or overcast. The sky was hued with a pale shade of bluish gray. He felt his mind slipping through an erratic permutation of memories, each of them rising up disjointed and confused in welcoming tangents that seemed certain to distract him from what he was sure must be his body trying to die. He fought against them, a tempest of uncaged memories, and surfaced for a moment.

The sky was in fact blue. A plume of smoke spiraled up and pointed straight to it. He turned his head and the periphery of his vision began to flicker in concert with a tickling numbness that spread from his chest out through each appendage. He fought again, and slowly it dissipated into place with a light palpitating nausea.

He could see the pickup sitting surreal off the shoulder, as though it had casually pulled off the road for a picnic, a gigantic sheet of rusted metal poking out the front of it like a piece of burnt toast. He tried to sit up but the numbness resurfaced and he relented. The gun was lying on the pavement just a few feet from his face in a sea of sparkling glass, an image in abyss.

He lifted his head again and this time his body complied. He rolled onto his side and tried to rise on his arm, only to be greeted by a sensation of searing heat. He looked down his left side: The arm was intact but the skin from shoulder to hand was red and raw and studded in hundreds of tiny pieces of glass that stuck from the skin so that his arm looked like the curved gum of a shark, row upon overlapping row of sharp chips of teeth, each of them tingling in a burning socket.

He had to get up. He could smell gasoline and imagined the sound of a siren in the distance. He rolled to his right shoulder, pressed against the pavement with all of his strength, and sat up. His body was clumsy but it worked. He coughed and blood came up in a salivating mist. He stood up and vomited again, and then stumbled on his legs for a second before recovering enough to finally look around.

The smoke was coming from the cab of the semi, jack-knifed across the road. He could smell gasoline but didn't see any fire, just smoke. He turned back to the pickup but then thought better of it. He vomited again, harder this time, and spit a glutinous red bile. The shock of it cleared his head and he realized that he did hear a siren.

The mangled mass of the semi abutted against the upper shoulder of the mountain, the bed torqued and slung over the opposing shoulder to block the road. The siren reverberated over the hills as if approaching from no particular direction. He wondered how long he'd been out.

He bent down to pick up the gun and the smell of gasoline filled his head. He was covered in gasoline, it was everywhere. Overwhelmed and dizzy, he hobbled across to the lower shoulder. He crawled across the guardrail and was about to descend the embankment below when a loud hiss spit from the direction of the semi. He turned around one last time as the cab erupted with a whistling thump that bent the air around him. The sound, he thought, stumbling headlong down the embankment toward the ridge and the valley below, of a small animal sucked into a vacuum.

Joseph's mother sat gaunt and prim with her legs crossed stiff beneath an artificial palm tree in the waiting area of First Baptist Medical. His infant brother was silent in the car seat next to her. A flaxen plastic frond limped over the both of them.

Joseph sat on the couch across from them, pulling a bit of stuffing from a hole in the cushion. He pulled it out slowly, then coaxed it back in, again and again, his fingernails capped with little black crescents. His mother kept eyeing his fingers with a nervous tension, but she said nothing. She uncrossed her legs and Joseph watched as she noticed a hole in the knee of her panty hose. She leaned over and pretended to scratch at her calf so as to get a better look at it. A distorted silhouette of her head reflected back from the waxen floor and Joseph stared at the ragged contour of her reflection. The longer he looked at the floor, the more he began to discern a pattern in the pale green linoleum. It was covered in scuffs and streaks, little skipping striations, the residue of soles and heels and black plastic wheels and rubber crutch stops. Some disappeared neatly down the long desperate hall and into the bowels of the building, but others meandered restlessly between the magazine rack and the vending machine, hesitating beneath the TV, pacing back and forth from the nurses station to the waiting area, a gigantic swirling portrait of the forlorn patients and ignored loved ones who waited as their desperation was reduced to a world of vortices. The slender fluorescent tubes overhead also reflected back from beneath, completing the spectral pattern in elongated and luminous tombstones.

- Joseph, why… look at me young man, why are you crying? Pull yourself together. C'mon.

It was late in the day when Tyson finally stopped and turned to look back. He was in the valley now, and though his eyes naturally followed the steep green line of the ridge he'd just descended, there was really no reason, he could see clearly the site above: The wreck itself was obscured by the ridge, but a rolling funnel of pillowing smoke rose over it. The smoke dispersed in the lee of the mountain above, and trailed across the lower altimus in a long grey arc of flickering orange that looked to cradle the hidden conflagration in a taut but wispy arm. In the intermittent wane he could see a weak beating of red and blue, overlapping lights that danced across the slopes on either side of the smoke.

He sat in a small patch of fern, the shadows of their tattered fronds already growing long and crepuscular, and looked back at the mountain floating in its ashen nimbus, his eyes glassy and dilated. It occurred odd that the fire was still burning, but reason came to him in scuttled dispensations. He recalled crossing a stream earlier, somewhere near the base of the ridge, but did he follow it back up to a spring, or was that the memory of his grandfather pulling an old mason jar from a branch and forcing him to wash. Had that happened, had that old man come and grabbed him shaking in the night, as he lay supine with a girl, had there been a girl, on the side of a stream somewhere, some when ago. The old man handed him the mason jar and he clearly remembered drinking from it, mica shining in the silt at the bottom of it and flickering in the sunlight like the fireflies that surrounded him now, throbbing, with the mosquitoes stinging at the rivulets of sweat that meandered through the dust-caked glass memory of dried blood. And then he remembered, he'd never met his grandfather. But indeed he would, it was a long way back.

He rose to his feet a bit too suddenly though, and stumbled his arm against the trunk of a dogwood. The shock of pain shook his head clear, and he felt himself surface for a moment from the maze of delirium.

He had to find shelter, there was no use wandering this way in the dark. He looked around, but in the time he'd sat the foliage of the woods had gone from green to grey to a twilight blue that fell off quickly and went to pitch in the distance. The woods looked to open on a smallish hollow and he set himself in that direction. Dried pine needles crunched under foot and he could smell the familiar musk of pine rosin ripening in the July heat.

When he reached the clearing the maze of delirium had started to overtake him again and he groped like a shipwrecked rodent to try and stay afloat. He was standing in a large field surrounded by tall dry grass. When he decided finally to set himself down, he took to the grass as if it was a cozy bed of straw and went immediately to sleep.

Night descended thus, pushing away the remnants of the day and opening the sky to a pitiless and stark abyss.

Joseph remained tucked beneath the covers and listened as his mother's footsteps disappeared from the kitchen to be greeted by the deep voice of a man waiting for her in the living room. The slow music seeping down the hall receded beneath the closing living room door. Joseph could still just hear their muffled laughter rise and fall as he crawled from the sheets and settled at the foot of his bed. He pulled a tattered afghan up around his bony and pimpled shoulders. Outside his window the night was moonlit and quiet and he leaned slowly forward to touch his nose against the cold pane of glass. He rubbed his face slowly back and forth across the surface and sat back. Two exaggerated and hollow sockets stared back at him and beyond them he saw out and across the yard to the house next door. It was dark, dormant, and through one of its windows he could see clearly through to a window on the far side and out onto the yard beyond. He tightened the afghan under his chin. The tiny dot of the moon reflected in the warped and glossy scales of paint chipping in his windowsill, a hundred little stars caught in concave cages.

A short rolling giggle erupted from the living room and distracted him. He chose to ignore it and looked back out the window. He watched as the condensated likeness of his face slowly evaporated to leave a faint and distorted residue. And then something moved in the dark window of the house next door. Joseph leaned back out of the moonlight and watched. Two human shapes were moving in the shadows, their movement lurching, their silhouetted forms fluttering the way the shadow of a candle flame wavers and sputters under a dropping moth. They seemed to be dancing, entangled in one another, a man and a woman, and as they swept into clear view of the window, brushing and rubbing violently into one another, the moon revealed their nudity.

Joseph clinched his toes in the stitched holes of the afghan and closed his eyes tight. He stayed that way for a few minutes and when he opened his eyes, they were gone. The window was empty, the shadows still.

He lowered the afghan and slipped back into the sheets. The only sound was the slow music drifting from the living room. He tried to sleep but couldn't, and when he did finally close his eyes, it wasn't pleasant dreams that rose to greet him.

Tyson woke to find himself lying in the field of grass. His body was covered in dew and he could feel the heat of the sun steaming on his back. He tried to move, but his body was stiff and numb and his head started to tingle. He lay there, watching the flies gather on his arm. He watched them crawl across the dust and scabs, probing, perching on the little bits of glass. The glass glistened in the sunlight and mingled with a deeper and more threatening flicker, a swoon that swept across his vision and overtook him.

When he came to he could see just enough to know that he was lying in a different place. The tall grass sat off back away from the rock and red clay where he now lay. His vision was blurry, he felt dizzy. He couldn't move, his lips felt dry and cracked. But he could blink, and he did so, rapidly, as if his crying eyes might force tears to run in a coat over his lips.

His sight cleared and he saw how the grass grew around the clearing he was now in, surrounding him. The sun beat down relentlessly. At the far edge of his sight he could just barely see a small and dilapidated structure and he mustered enough strength to pivot his head.

The building looked like a small barn, long since retired, and in his delirium he imagined himself inside of it, cradled in its shade, lying in straw. He imagined the musk of it, and somewhere in that imagined aroma he could detect the hint of something he'd maybe forgotten long since, something maybe conjured by his withering condition, but he remembered it clearly, it was real to him: Himself, as a small child, playing in the straw loft of a barn as his father and his father's father worked outside in a bright and infinite field, a field that seemed to stretch out peacefully in every direction, surrounded by distant hills beyond which the sky hung in limitless blue possibility. The day gave way to night.

When he came back to he still lay on the ground. A few feet in front of him stood two skinny legs. They turned and walked away to grow into the figure of a boy standing with his back to him. He held Tyson's gun, curiously, as if contemplating its shape and design with practiced hands. He held the gun out from him and studied it against the backdrop of something Tyson couldn't see clearly. The boy leaned down and placed it confidently amidst what appeared to Tyson a pile of rusting junk. He tried to raise his head in protest but the heat of the sun and the blue of sky melded and sunk down on him in a sharp burst.

He slipped in and out, the sky going dark and overcast in bright flashes that skirted his eyes with silent lightening. He felt himself being dragged across the ground and looked up with just enough reason to recognize the face of the boy that lived down the street. His limbs were numb, his body cold, but he could feel the pressure of the boys hands pulling him under the arms. He slipped off and came back as the boy was struggling to pull him over a threshold. He saw his dangling legs kick against a door of rotting wood. They were entering the barn.

Inside it was dark, and Tyson thought he was passing out again before he noticed the windows and the light coming in. The boy lowered him to the ground and Tyson was able to see around, and it was then that he realized where he was: Beneath the crown of the palm tree, same as his father, the tattered fronds now smaller but hanging dark and weathered and swaying all around them, silhouetted against the windows like shredded strips of meat. The last thing Tyson felt was the subtle pressure of the boys hands on his ankles as he brushed away the flies and carefully removed his boots.