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Two, Very Different(2004)
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It was a day between two, very different seasons. I held your hand and you wore your pink sweater, the one you recently lost. I remember the color so well because it matched perfectly the song you were humming, the one that gets stuck in your head all the time. Flicking your wrist free, you stood up very tall and turned your eyes down to me as you walked toward the lever on the wall. I naturally became very afraid even though we had planned and scripted the entire event down to the smallest detail, and had carefully examined each possible effect with great excitement. The trouble was you caught your toe on a sharp little tooth that was growing out of the ground and out of our sight: your sweater blurred red as you were pulled down and into the waste. Immediately, I released a hysterical guffaw while staring right around your skull into your cracked eye. “Fuck you,” you said, scraping the slime from your knees with your razors. Despite the living floor devouring your body, scars and all, you righted your 747 frame and produced two immaculate columns of flesh that started dancing exactly where they were. My bladder, connected to my fingers through the cheap plastic plumbing we installed together, burst miles beneath us, forcing ten microscopic urine crystals out from under my painted pink fingernails. “So what? We’ve got all day — I mean, the day hasn’t even started yet,” was the most assuring thought I knew how to convey, but it all dissolved into the air and formed a new layer of brackish dust about two feet above the masticating pit. “What time is it? You didn’t say,” were the words to our song you were humming earlier and also what you choked out from your throat burning with the lipstick you swallowed on the way down. I looked at my watch — the crucifix was on the 12 and the tiny green flower hovered between the 4 and the 5 — and replied, “I didn’t say because this damned watch makes no sense.” We both moved to the other chair, your legs hung over one arm and you leaned into my side as I sat perched upon the other arm. We looked at each other’s mouths and saw reflected on the oily surface the film of your fall and my inconsiderate laugh. I leaned in to kiss you habitually, but the image of your falling was too painful to touch. You seemed pleased to see my painted pink fingernails dig into your faded pink-white sweater. Willfully ugly, I ripped my skin from yours. I fucked myself up, saving a little energy for the chemical reaction that shot yellow flames out of my pupils and warmed the incubating eggs to their fruition. “Yes, that’s right, because it was the baby bird’s first cry that scored your escape” you now recall. At the time I didn’t notice anything other than my voice reciting St. Francis’s Prayer for the Animals. By the time I’d gathered up a clinched forefinger and thumb to rip out a gooey clump of gray feathers for the final “Amen,” you had your weight on the lever. I don’t know how you avoided being discovered by our assembly of acquaintances, all of whom we’d both kissed many times and who must have therefor felt everything we did with our blood, and who even while fighting for the remote and rewinding videotapes never took their needles from the seismographic record of our movements. But you knew all that beforehand. We had blueprints, storyboards and projections for each and every variable. And as you lifted your fuzzy slippers full of toes in casts clear off the floor, the lever’s position inverted and set our script on fire. The fish exploded as the water dumped onto our heads we fell to the region of the zodiac least polluted with human imagination, our holding hands embedded into the ceiling fan’s finite vortex. “I think we are both equally stupid,” you shot pointblank. “I want to get back up there but our cave has been sold to a major tele-communications company for use in a new cellular parenting experiment,” I stated the obvious. No one else had fallen this time; they just sold each other while standing on their heads in the residual firmament of vomit and salt. Our plan had worked so beautifully and predictably that it was instituted as the Foundational Law of the Universe (FLU), a universe laughing so hard it dribbled milk from its nostrils.
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