One Dozen Little Bits

#1: Ghost Poem

a ghost is no one’s favorite guest

at the party down on Golden Crest;

the boy i love is getting drunk

on cheap rosé and flirting hard

with anyone who drives a car

i bet he wants to get it on

in the parking lot behind the church

which by happenstance is where we last

(one could say we had a blast

doing)- hey what the fuck?

i was sure no one could see this ghostly frame

(though they clearly feel my shivery shame)

yet i swear someone just said my name!

and now she’s looking at my plasm stain.

there’s a genderqueer o’er by the chips

dipping them into the dips

while the boy i love is getting laid

in the backseat of a chevrolet

and this tattooed bookworm after me

can see me under armchair three

she’s waiting for the crowd to move

and when it does she’ll bother me:

“a ghost like you is wasting time!

you could be doing anything:

climbing mountains, scaring goats.

why are you here?

why aren’t you there?

you could be almost anywhere.”

she’s gone away.

where did she go?

and can you really blame me if

my un-fini-shèd busyness

is far less grand than poison, war

vengeance, secrets, saving lives?

what if what i wanted most 

was not to feel like such a ghost?

#2: Two Questions 

Can You Eat Too Many Grapes?

Can You “Kill” a “Vibe”?

#3: Eva Mae

Eva Mae stood at the helm eating a banana. There was a small fruit fly infestation in the pantry, which prompted her to eat her way through the rest of the bananas as quickly as possible. She brought the bananas as an early voyage treat, which she now regretted. There were other, more highly nutritious sources of potassium in the pantry that would keep for much longer. Sweet potatoes, for example. That evening she planned on wrapping a couple of sweet potatoes in foil, roasting them in the small galley oven, whisking together a greek yogurt dill sauce, and eating them straight up with the skins on.

It had been three days since she had last seen a bird of any sort.

The waves lapping against the hull were tipped with yellow-ish foam. Eva Mae watched, her eyelids still ringed with a crust of deep sleep in the same shade as the ocean foam. Later, she would make one of her speeches standing in the same spot. Her speeches were improvised and usually involved rallying her crew to survive a monstrous storm or charge aboard a rival’s frigate. Occasionally they were about political issues: primarily nuclear disarmament and, less frequently, civil rights. She spoke clearly and solidly from her gut center, which was sturdy from years of sailing and three square meals a day, the frequent snack, and the periodical dessert. 

Eva Mae appreciated her alone time.

The Atlantic was easier than the Pacific. She had already done California to Hawaii, and it was going to be another eight or nine years in her estimate before she’d have the time, skills, and money to circumnavigate the globe, but this would be excellent practice. And it was always a mistake to rush. 

She had seen something that she had not appreciated the previous evening. There was an iridescent green light floating in the water some yards off the port side of The Sunflower, which she spotted twenty minutes after sundown. Closer to shore, she would have ignored it. Out in the open ocean, it was strange. Stranger still was the cluster of seven dead fish floating a few yards off when she came topside in the morning. 

In preschool, Eva Mae had once pushed another child. They had been standing on a chair, and Eva Mae wanted them to learn that there were consequences associated with choosing to stand on a chair. The other child fell hard and, red-faced and in tears, ran off to find the teacher in another room. The teacher could not understand the child through their sobbing, and Eva Mae chose not to take responsibility. Even the next day, when the other child was able to articulate what had happened, the teacher brushed the incident off.

This was the first that Eva Mae could remember in a history of episodes wherein authority figures let her off the hook, likely because she was a charismatic white girl with straight teeth.

The noise started buzzing in her ears around 3pm EST. It disoriented her, forcing her to climb below deck and cover her eyes with a warm wet cloth. It stopped a half an hour later.

…wxx anything rrrrrung?

That was the message she heard on the radio at midnight EST. The radio flickered on by itself while Eva Mae was asleep, emitting first static and then a garbled drowning kind of distant unintelligible talking. The minute she sat down at the radio, the speaking focused itself just long enough to say again, more clearly:

…wxx anything rrrrung?

The first sound, she was sure was a “w”. This was followed by a brief hit of static followed by, spoken in a clean flat deep voice, the word “anything”. What sounded like an attempt to speak a second full word came out only as a drawn-out half-word with an upwards inflection at the end: “rrrung?”

The radio turned itself back off. 

The “anything” was clear. She knew without question that she had heard the word “anything”. But the “rrrung?” struck her as painful, laborious. It was that sound that stuck around, echoing in her ears all night; Eva Mae spent the next hour sweating in her cabin, which felt as though it had shrunk in half, trying every frequency between 156.0 and 174 MHz. For the remaining hours until sunrise, she sat in bed massaging out her tense jaw muscles and reminding herself that the only enemy she had on the open water was panic.

pigeons woke up

walked into public parks

and had their necks snapped by a raging wind

in the dream that woke her, startled, far too late in the morning. The Sunflower had drifted south. 

“This is not a problem,” Eva Mae muttered. “To panic would be the problem.”

Though, when she considered the situation honestly, Eva Mae really was beginning to panic. She had had problems sailing before, of course. A sail would tear or she’d be thrown about by waves and wind, but never had she felt as though she were going mad. And she wasn’t going mad, she knew that, but she also couldn’t explain the radio or the dot in the water or the fish carcasses.

After resetting her course (and with only a few hours of time lost; she was still days within her margin of error, she reminded herself) Eva Mae decided to eat breakfast. On a full stomach she might be able to relax.

She ate a breakfast sandwich. She kept english muffins in the freezer that she would defrost and toast, sandwiching them with two eggs over-hard, a little grated cheddar, a smeared avocado half, and a drizzle of hot sauce. A cup of coffee with a splash of cream, no sugar. Good, solid energy. 

Eva Mae was not going to panic.

Still, she couldn’t get rid of the image of that little green bead of light floating around in the blue. Her heart was pounding, but she wasn’t experiencing any of the other physiological signs of clinical panic. For Eva Mae, these signs usually included trembling, sweating, loss of appetite, nausea, light-headedness, and a tingling sensation in her toes. Her heart rate was up, certainly, but the fact that she still had a healthy appetite was proof enough that she wasn’t falling apart just yet.

After her first breakfast sandwich she did forty push-ups on the deck.

Eva Mae ate a second breakfast sandwich as she scanned the water for any irregularities. Nothing. She burped, cracked her knuckles, and tugged on the bandana around her neck. The palpitations were subsiding. She was reminded of her relationship with air travel. 

Her relationship with air travel was this: when the flight attendants made their snack rounds, when they would come by with their carts full of pretzels or shrink-wrapped stroopwafels or whatever, when they would ask the passengers about their desires regarding liquid intake, when the people to her left and right would order coffees and ginger ales and sensible glasses of wine, Eva Mae would ask for a Bloody Mary, and when the flight attendants asked her if she wanted one shot of vodka or two, she would always ask for two.

When the flight attendants came back around, Eva Mae would order a second. Two shots, please.

On the other hand, when Eva Mae was sailing, she did not keep any alcohol on board whatsoever.

“I am going to be one hundred percent fine,” Eva Mae spoke aloud.

The green dot appeared on the deck of The Sunflower, and Eva Mae felt the whole vessel lurch upwards beneath her feet.

Buzz buzz.

A little insect buzzed about, lit dimly in hard fluorescent red, its shell-thick exoskeleton causing it to slowly descend as it flew. With each landing on the chromium walls, it shook its wings together for a minute or two before launching itself back into the air. The woman bleeding from her nose in the corner of the room watched. In the red light her blood looked like ink.

She played a game that went like this:

Watch the bug. 

Clock the bug’s position on the walls.

Close eyes.

Listen.

With a bandana compressed against her nostrils, she listened to the sounds of her newest companion. She heard the way its wings flapped together at a hundred beats per second in flight, the tiny click that it made when it landed, and the muted chirp that came from the scraping of its wings. Right before she opened her eyes, she would try to guess the insect’s new location. After a couple dozen rounds, she was able to locate the creature with relative accuracy and precision. Now, after several thousand guesses more, her senses were beginning to fail her.

This was how Eva Mae began to measure time. She did not know for how long she’d been trapped in terms of minutes or hours or days. She did know that she was hungry. She believed she remembered that at least twice she had been removed from the room, but she had no memory of anything that happened to her before she was returned. She wondered where her sailboat was, whether it was floating around in the Atlantic without her or whether it might be nearer by.

“Listen up. You’re going to land. You don’t have the most aerodynamic frame. You are not the most graceful creature in the animal kingdom. But there’s a job that needs to be done, and you’re the only one in this room who can do it. You’re…” Eva Mae trailed off, staring down at the floor and rubbing her eyes.

There was only one other sound that Eva Mae could hear in her cold red confines: the deep and distant zoom zoom zoom of a powerful engine. 

The entrance to Eva Mae’s red cell slid open with a jagged shhhhhunk. The doorway filled with a mass of slimy, writhing tentacles. Eva Mae scuttled back to the far corner of the room and wrapped her elbows around her knees, whimpering. A dark object came forward through the slippery tubes and fell limp onto the floor. The door slid closed. Eva Mae sat motionless, watching the shape of what appeared to be another human being breathing on the floor.

They stayed this way for a long time, and Eva Mae drifted off to sleep.

She was awoken by a new sound. Bang! She looked up. The new prisoner, a short man with a long beard, was staring intently at the wall.

The bug buzzed. With three more sharp bang!’s the man pounded his fist into it. He stepped back, satisfied.

“What did you do that for?”

The man grunted.

“That was its life,” said Eva Mae, looking at the smear on the wall where the insect had been.

The man prostrated himself on the ground and turned around so that his face pressed directly into the floor, facing away from Eva Mae. He cradled his head in his forearms and meshed his ten fingers together. He began to pray aloud in a scratchy baritone:

We are servants to your tongue,

your heart,

your mind.

Whenever madness grabs us in our soul

whenever heartache prods us where we already hurt

you will come to us.

You will whisper in our ears:

“All is Well.

For You Are Mine

and Around Every Corner

Where There is Pain

and Suffering

You Will Feel Them Deeply.

As Will You Happiness and Love.

This is My Gift to You.”

We remember always that lesson.

You give us happiness and love

suffering and pain.

All.

There is no badness that will go on forever

just as there is no goodness that will not end.

We are not and were not ever meant to keep anything for long

for you are the Lord of Change

and every shift we go about

we go about for you

in sight of you

our trials staying on occasion longer than we expect

our happinesses slipping from our grasp

our broken hearts healing in an instant

our joys spanning years and parting as old friends.

We change because you change us

and you change us because we change

and we change because we cannot stay the same.

This is the cycle that you have imagined.

You, changing us and we, unable to resist

changing you

by showing you how we can change

adapt

when you least expect us to survive.

When our worlds cave in around us

that is when you give us hope to stay alive,

and in turn our hope makes us fear that we will die.

Every thing is every color

and every color

has every thing inside it.

You remind us to tell each other stories.

The story of Appleface,

for example,

the doctor who wanted to walk so far north

that they could walk all the way past the topmost point

and wind up right back where they began.

So they began to walk

and walk

and they walked past all creatures

deer

rabbits

snakes

humankind

tusked mammoths

owls

termites

doggies

naked mole rats.

Appleface walked for many many months

past everything 

and ice

and rock

and snow

and just when Appleface reached the very top of the world

from which point they could see their own feet dangling from the clouds above

a polar bear roared from the cave behind them.

The bear attacked, 

and left Appleface lying in a bloodied heap

all by themself

on a mountain at the topmost point of planet Earth.

You tell us that their blood sank into the Earth,

and now Appleface feels every step we make in the snow

every evergreen tree we cut

every living being that we hurt.

They feel every tear we shed

every laugh we laugh

every tickle of pleasure running up our legs

They taste every taste we taste

hear each sound as it lands in each

and every ear.

They smell all our perfume and all our body’s odors.

Forever, and so they achieved their goal

of winding up right back where they began.

You remind us of Nastrofodo

who,

when the Imperial Guard came to her village carrying war torches

and spears

chose to drown her only child in the Wandering River

in the pink light of dawn

so that the child would not be captured and reconditioned,

forced to join an army tasked with performing such cruelties.

How, when she returned to the village

to die at the hands of the Imperial Guard

she learned that the soldiers had lain their weapons down

and offered fruit and honey to the people of the village

as reparations for their past crimes.

How Nastrofodo wandered aimlessly along the banks of the river

for the next three hundred years

while the fish and bacteria and fungus consumed

the body of the child she drowned.

You remind us of the day you gave us tongues to speak your words.

How our mouths once contained only teeth

with which we chewed but did not taste.

How we saw you standing on a nearby hill but

without words to describe your shimmering form

could not share with other people

who saw you in your other forms

walking through the desert

rising up from the snow

soaking into the soil with the rain.

We could not recognize that you were everywhere

in everything

because we could not speak it

and so we wandered, uselessly,

without purpose

living only to survive.

That day you blessed us with our tongues

that day that Fel and Fulp

sitting on the rocky beach

watched you ride on every crest 

of every wave

when Fel tried to say aloud:

“Look there!

that is our reason for life

that which makes us sing and makes us dance

that is the reason we bleed

that is what made this beach

churned these waters

and all beaches

and all waters

and all else

how lucky we are to see,”

but could not make the words for lack of tongue,

you heard his voice trapped in that throat

begging to come free.

You rose up from the sands

reached your hand into his mouth

and forth from stomach lining

forth from throat

you pulled a fleshy tongue and let him speak.

you did the same for Fulp

and you said

“Henceforth The Two of You Will Walk

To Every Place Where Bipeds Shelter Up

You’ll Do The Same For Them As I Have Done For You

and Once You Have You’ll Tell Them

Who and What You Met Here On This Beach.”

You walked into the ocean.

you sunk beneath the waves

and disappeared.

uh. um. uh.

you remind us that all beauty is yours

and all monstrosities are yours

and

Here, the man’s voice broke. Eva Mae shivered. The engine sputtered and creaked and resumed its constant hum.

How vain are we to call them evil,

the darkest sights that you see fit to show?

How vain are we to second-guess

the tender parts of us?

How vain are we to lament

the passing joys that come

and go

away?

How vain are we to fight at every turn

the roughest patches of our lives?

We speak your book aloud

because we wish to remember

that you are not just our happy thoughts.

You are all thoughts.

You make us compassionate

because you make us humble

because you make us hurt.

Here the man with his face pressed against the ground fell silent. Eva Mae waited.

“What’s your name?” She asked. “Do you want to talk about your religion?”

The man did not respond.

“I was raised as a Lutheran but I stopped going to church when my…” Eva Mae fell silent when the man drew in a sharp breath. Rising above the din of the humming engine, she heard the sloppy sound of tentacles sliding across the floor outside. The pair waited, tense. The slithering went quiet and disappeared.

#4: Description of the Antler Room

There is a room where the walls are covered, covered, in antlers. There are antlers of all kinds mounted to this wall including but not limited to deer antlers, moose antlers, caribou antlers, and pudú antlers. The antlers take all shapes, sizes, colors, kinds. All kinds, all kinds of antlers. Good antlers, great ones. They are mounted on the walls such that, at certain heights, a person standing at a specific location in the room could conceivably appear to be equipped with a set of antlers befitting their stature and character. For example, mounted at exactly six feet two inches from the floor and located six paces to the right of a large desk built out of old ship parts and Moroccan leather are an enormous set of antlers, huge, the biggest in the whole collection, antlers, that used to belong to a member of a long extinct species known as the Irish Elk. Totally dead now. Great beasts. Dead. A person with a height of exactly six feet two inches would look rather impressive standing in front of these antlers or rather foolish depending on your opinion of that person.

#5: Boston, Massachusetts

(Lights up on a living room in Quincy, Massachusetts. STEVE THE CRUSHER sits in an oversized burgundy armchair held together with various checkered patches. There are ten potted plants scattered about the room, all of them wilted and dry. PATRICK, a stocky white woman with reddish undertones, enters. Her hair is wet.)

PATRICK

hey, you fuckin’ moron!

don’t sit in my fuckin’ chair!

moron.

yo, babe?

we goin’ to the Sox game tomorrow or what?

hold on for a sec.

gonna make these plants grow with my fuckin’ mind.

(PATRICK closes her eyes and presses her forefingers to her temples. Healthy, vibrant greenery comes spilling out of all ten pots.)

PATRICK

so I was walking around in the Boston Common

and I saw

I swear to you, babe.

I saw this man

he was feeding bread to pigeons

STEVE THE CRUSHER

that’s not unusual

PATRICK

there must’a been twenty or thirty pigeons around him

four or five on his shoulders and arms

and

I saw this

shut up

I saw this

he very casually reached down

picked up a pigeon by the neck

twisted

stuffed it into a grocery bag

dropped the bread on the ground

and vanished into the Boylston T station.

#6: Lover Poem

lazy,

the leftover hour of afternoon

whispers a secret to me in your room.

the secret is yellow and smells like a leaf

has little to do with leggings

or sheets

or latex that’s lying in dazzling heaps

leaving your lovely extremity weak.

the last time i saw you

your letter released

a lone lonely secret that smelled like a leaf.

#7: Wolf Poem

my calves are kinda sore today

i left them in a field to play

and when a wolf came by their way

he ate one like a french soufflé.

#8: Isaac’s Party

The pink urns on Isaac Fukada’s white linoleum kitchen table sat like sunburnt penguins protecting their eggs. The urns would, in a few hours time, be filled with cookies. There were various sorts of cookies purportedly on the way, including but not limited to: chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, snickerdoodle, peanut butter crunch, Tamaru’s Surprise, and gingersnap.

The evening’s party was programmed exactly two weeks before the scheduled end. It would be easiest this way, because Isaac would be able to tell everybody that he would see them again. In truth, he intended to spend the last two weeks alone.

He had dealt with travel, having visited a number of places in the last two years that he had always wanted to see. He had told the last of his deepest secrets. He had sat down for heart-to-hearts with anybody who wanted to, and even a few people who didn’t want to but who put up with it anyway because they cared about Isaac. He had dealt with all of the legal documentation. Now, with his arrangements made and no deadlines left to meet, he wanted to spend the next two weeks drinking coffee and staring at the trees in his backyard.

The dress that Isaac had chosen to wear to his party had a zipper down the back that he could not quite reach on his own. It was a close-textured, sheer, almost-black brown dress with mauve polka dots and a tight turtleneck. It cinched at the waist, giving his hairy torso the appearance of curves. His day nurse would be arriving for the party early to help him get dressed and, as she was a casual alcoholic with a fondness for dancing, she would stay for the party. Isaac was hoping that she and his nephew, the owner of a failing pet store, might hit it off. They both needed a little help, and Isaac believed in the redemptive powers of love.

There was little else that Isaac needed to do to prepare. His brother Leftie had already arrived and was at the moment rearranging all of the furniture to better allow for dancing and traffic concerns, and his brother Tamaru would be showing up soon with six dozen or so cookies to distribute among the five pink urns. The urns would then be placed strategically around the house.

Marina entered the front door without knocking at six o’clock pm. It was her custom not to knock, for she had a key and she liked to use it. Leftie looked up from the kitchen table which, despite being on the opposite side of the first floor, had a direct view of the front door by means of a very long hallway. She walked from the doorway into the hall, taking careful stock of the vast network of Christmas lights that had been tacked to the walls on either side of her. Leftie grunted.

“Not a knocker?”

“I have a key and I like to use it.” She stuck out her hand. “Marina.”

“Howdy. I’m Leftie. I’d shake but-“ Leftie showed off his hands, which were wet and glistening from the contents of the bowl that he was hunched over. “Birthday boy is in his room.”

“It’s not his birthday.”

Leftie shrugged. “It’s not anything else either.”

Upstairs, Isaac was putting on his makeup. He was naked except for a crisp white pair of boxer briefs. His legs were smooth and tight from decades of bike riding, muscles sliding along bone. His makeup was simple: foundation, mascara, eyeliner, an easy lip stain the color of the tide at dusk, and a little bit of orange color corrector to downplay his beard shadow. He drank a large gulp of seltzer through a straw. This would be his last opportunity to (moderately) overindulge, and he believed that a victorious battle against a hangover always starts before the drinking begins.

Marina appeared in the doorway. With a nod from Isaac, she moved into action, her hands powdering makeup, administering medicine, zipping zippers, messaging shoulders, brushing hairs, and suddenly Isaac found himself face to face with his face in the mirror.

“Ready?” Marina asked.

“Hell yes.”

And the party began.

The moons were in full that night, cutting a bright rift in the dark sky with their three yellow-orange facades. The littlest flickered faintly, nightly dust storms kicking up a fuss. Down below, illuminated in the moonlight, were all the boys.

There were many people of all different genders at Isaac’s party, but the boys were impossible to ignore. They were separate from the men not in age but in attitude; the boys were fun, they were flirty, and they wore their sensitivities as a badge of honor. There were white boys, black boys, brown boys, Asian boys, Latino boys, Middle Eastern boys, French boys, Haitian boys, all kinds of boys, librarian boys, gay boys, straight boys, bisexual boys, pansexual boys, zookeeper boys, baker boys, biker boys, lover boys, hiker boys, Jewish boys, tall boys, short boys, nonbinary boys, boys with hair, muscular boys, Lutheran boys, boys with their beautiful tummies hanging over their belt lines, Halloween boys, boys with teeth, boys without, one boy with sharpened canines, vegetarian boys, vegan boys, boys with cerebral palsy, omnivore boys, locally sourced boys, boys from the next town over, party boys, wallflower boys, trans boys, boys with cats, boys with hats, boys a-swinging their baseball bats, boys on boys, boys with toys, boys who made a lot of noise, boys who could hear and boys who were deaf, and even a couple with deep chin clefts, a boy named Frankie, a boy named Tyshon, boys who were there and boys who were gone, boys in dresses, boys in suits, boys in steel-toed combat boots.

Isaac’s nephew was a boy named Eido Fukada. Eido wore a fitted tuxedo with a bubblegum pink tie. His leg braces and forearm crutches were the same bubblegum color. He was smoking marijuana out of a vape pen and eating roasted chickpeas from a fanny pack lazily slung around his waist. He was experiencing an elevated heart rate, having just returned to the kitchen after tongue-kissing a bearded man near the a/c unit in the side yard.

Tamaru stood nearby, methodically eating cookies one-by-one out of an urn.

Eido rummaged around in the kitchen cabinets until his hand collided with the handle of a mug. He removed the mug from the cabinet. The face of the mug read FUND MALE BIRTH CONTROL! Eido poured himself a mugful of water from the kitchen sink. He considered the firm, dense tongue that he had just consumed, enjoyed, and returned. His penis tingled pleasantly.

Marina tugged at her septum ring. She was having a strong feeling of uneasy joy, as if something could go right at any moment. She was half-listening to a conversation about butternut squash between two people whose names she had almost tried to remember before deciding that the experience would be equally valuable without her knowing their names. She was nursing a lager and keeping no real track of her patient, who would presumably be fine. The worst that could happen would be that he would die, which was whatever, considering. All she had to do was have fun. Fun-having was a skill that she was attempting to sharpen.

The party was going about as well as she had hoped for. After all, there were all of these boys. Good ones, bad ones, sleepy ones. They were fun to look at. Was Isaac caught up in their amorphous clump, moving from boy to boy, asking them to bless his body with their hands? Was he seated somewhere, swapping stories with a wet-eyed family member? Was he riding a man in the basement sex dungeon? Was he outside, staring at the moons?

Marina could not see past two weeks from that night, as if the needle that she was going to press into Isaac’s right forearm would freeze the whole planet still on its axis. All of these boisterous boys would slip from her fingers into rivers, lakes, and oceans. One moon after the other would fail in their orbits and come barreling home to Earth, catching fire in the atmosphere and crashing down: one in the South Pacific, one in Normandy, and the littlest moon somewhere in Appalachia. What didn’t melt would burn, and all that remained would be carried off by the wind. What was once Earth would become a planet of ash and an ocean of boys.

In the garden out front there were six sunflowers. They were each about five feet tall, with deep orange petals and two or three heads apiece. A left hand with a birthmark the size of a stuffed olive sifted through the flowers, tickling their pistils and rubbing their petals between a thumb and a forefinger. A nose, attached to the fingers through a series of connective bones and tissues, brought itself down to the sunflowers and breathed deeply in. A billion particles of scent leapt from the flowers to the nose, carrying with them whole worlds with their own boys, their own moons, and their own snickerdoodle cookies.

It was just as a muscular boy with a face tattoo of a street map of Eureka, California began juggling three full bottles of pinot noir on top of the kitchen table that Eido and Marina locked eyes from across the expanses of the kitchen and living room. Marina had been watching the juggler intently, fruitlessly willing him to drop the wine bottles with the powers of her mind. Eido was staring at nothing and thinking about french toast. Their eyes met. Eido turned and walked towards the front door, and Marina followed. Though Marina could move faster, her only viable path required navigating around the juggler, who by that point had amassed a supportive crowd of spectators.

By the time the nurse was able to travel from the living room to the front hallway, the front door to the house was just closing. To get from one end of the hallway to the other was no real challenge; a few “excuse me”s and one or two gentle shoves and she was standing outside on the front porch, her ears suddenly full with the new pressure of relatively noiselessness. Eido was sitting in the bed of a dark red pickup truck parked in between two other vehicles in the driveway, watching her.

“What gives?” Marina asked from the porch.

Eido looked up. “Huh?”

“I said what-“

“I’m sorry, I can’t hear what you’re saying.”

“What-“

“Huh?”

“-gives?”

“My ears are ringing, I honestly can’t hear you.”

Marina stepped down from the porch and marched over to the truck. She took one enormous step up and heaved herself into the truck bed. She placed herself next to Eido with about half a foot of space between them, their four legs dangling over the edge. The littlest moon twinkled.

“Why did you run from me?”

“Why did you follow me?”

“I don’t like it when people run from me,” Marina said.

“You’re gonna pull the trigger on Uncle Isaac,” Eido said.

“Yes. An injection, but yes.”

“Have you done it before?”

Marina stared down at her feet for a minute. She breathed in. “Yeah. It doesn’t exactly get easier, but most of them want to be friends with whoever puts them in the sailboat. I get to see people at their best.”

Eido nodded. He thought about how small a person could possibly shrink, and at what point all other particles would fade from view and the tiny human become the only force in their universe. He imagined that he was holding the needle himself, poised over his bedridden Uncle Isaac. He imagined that he was in a sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean being abducted by aliens.

Several yards away, Leftie took another whiff of the sunflowers.

In the morning Marina awoke in the truck bed, her left leg nestled into the crook of Eido Fukada’s right leg, her skin cold against the metal brace. Her body vibrated at the memory of Eido’s fist inside her; the latex glove he’d used sat clumped near her right foot. She yawned. The sun was just beginning to rise.

The juggling boy woke up with an awesome hangover in a county jail, his night having gone downhill from the moment he left the Fukada residence and the police having been particularly hard on him because of his facial tattoo.

Eido Fukada woke up in the truck bed, Marina’s left leg nestled into the crook of his right. He heard her yawn. He craved caffeine and sex. The sun was just beginning to rise, and he could hear a robin chirping nearby.

Isaac Fukada woke up wrapped in a blanket on the sofa in his living room, his dress neatly folded on the coffee table alongside three bottles of pinot noir, one of which had been opened and nearly finished and the other two of which were still tightly sealed. Nearby, his brother Leftie slept on the floor in a pile of pillows and sheets. 

Isaac rose from the couch feeling, to his surprise, sprightly and refreshed. He took a quick tour of the ground floor of his house, which confirmed his assumption that there were several party guests who still remained in the building. As far as he could tell, all were asleep. He made his way to the kitchen, started the coffee pot and the tea kettle, and opened the refrigerator door. From the refrigerator, he took several salmon fillets, a carton of eggs, and a bowl of pancake batter he’d made the previous day.

He had successfully completed hosting his final party, and now he intended to host his final brunch.

#9: Kitchen Poem

the quiet humming of the fridge

the musings of a ceiling midge

the pepper shaker pops a squat

atop the granite marble top

and no one says that no one knows

who stole your neighbor’s garden hose

so in the basement keep it hid

beneath the bones of one dead kid

#10: Barista Poem

a lavender latte

a layer of foam

the line of a leaf

the lilt of her tone

she’s calling “drink up!” on the living room phone

she’s leaving the light in the lamp all alone.

#11: Statue of Liberty Poem

toss me a cigarette,

Lady Liberty.

#12: The Costume Party

Look around you.

Yep.

You’re at the costume party.

Over there is the Nosferatu who invited you standing next to the Black Panther you met on your way in.

It’s not that you’re worried that the chandelier above your head is going to fall and brain you dead, but you’ve been surprised before and by lighter fare.

Speaking of, the hors d’oeuvres you could have done without. Cream cheese and crab is not a combination you’ve ever understood. And fois gras? Fois gras is barbaric. In your opinion.

So this is the costume party. It must be New Year’s Eve.

The latex covering your entire face but for your eyes, nostrils, and mouth is beginning to itch. You’re not happy about the itch, but so far at least this costume party is going better for you than it is for the Mary Poppins who shat his pants forty or so minutes back. Though, actually, he got cleaned up and seems to be having a good time by now. So really you’re having the worst time out of anybody.

You’re not sure why you keep saying ‘yes’ to these gatherings. You hate crowds. You’re not even drinking tonight, since you have to drive home and you’re getting worse at stopping yourself after just one drink.

You’re planning to leave right after midnight, and you’re not going to say goodbye to anybody except for Nosferatu.

Maybe not even Nosferatu.

So that’s the plan. You’re going to avoid having any fun because that might result in a change of plans. And you cannot change your plans once you’ve made them. 

Still, if this chandelier were to crush you in the middle of this insufferable conversation with Frank from Donnie Darko and Frank from Frank, something exciting would have happened to you for once without requiring you to change any of your behaviors.

You receive a disturbing text message from your mother, which is less exciting than a falling chandelier. You turn off your phone so that you can, as you tell the Frank with the bunny ears, “live in the moment.” You cannot read his expression. You also cannot read the expression of the other Frank. They’re both wearing masks.

You may have to find another conversation.

You tell the Franks that you’re going to look for the bathroom which is, as all private bathrooms are, gender neutral. The truth is that you’re going to find another chandelier to stand under. This mansion has many chandeliers and, on a long enough timeline, every single one of them will fall. 

You ascend a marble staircase. You’re aware that you could really fuck this night up for Nosferatu, but you don’t intend to. You know that he’s watching you out of the corners of his eyes and that’s all the power you need.

Blackbeard the Pirate appears at the end of the hall once you reach the second floor landing. She walks quickly towards you.

“You,” she says, pointing to you. She’s taken off her beard and carries it in her tightly clenched left fist. “I’ve been looking all over.”

Nothing is ever simple for you, is it? You look to your left. You look to your right. Nope.

You’ll be having this conversation with Blackbeard. It’s not that you have any specific issue with Blackbeard, but she’s always made you a little uncomfortable, like you both weren’t saying something essential even though you barely know each other.

You find her strangely attractive. You’re afraid to say her name. Blackbeard. Your scalp is beginning to itch beneath the latex. You see all of the lights around you dim and then snap back into focus. Again, and again. You feel dizzy. Nosferatu’s costume party is not the place you want to faint, so you take a deep breath and you steady your gaze on Blackbeard the Pirate.

“Yarr,” she says. Goddamn it, you think.

“Hello, Blackbeard,” you reluct.

“When are we going to stop beating around this bush, landlubber?”

You do not respond. To respond would be to give Blackbeard the Pirate something to react to.

She points at you again. “You. Me. Tonight.”

You almost say yes. You’ve never been with a pirate before. Why are your nipples beginning to tingle? Your feet are baking in your knee-highs. Your knees themselves feel like paperweights. Why did you come to this party if you weren’t going to fully take on the experience? Did you really think that either a chandelier would not fall and you would go home after an hour, or that a chandelier would fall and you would never have to go home again, your brains relocated to a mason jar propped up on a mantle somewhere in this fancy place?

Why are you beginning to think about beating around a bush of a different kind?

You wish Blackbeard the Pirate would put her beard back on and walk back down the hallway.

“If ye want,” Blackbeard smiles.

You can see Nosferatu flitting around the atrium below. You wonder if Blackbeard is wearing a bralette. The thought is enough to make you wet or hard or something, and is it just your imagination or is the chandelier above your head beginning to sway?

You take a step forward. The chandelier creaks. Blackbeard the Pirate tosses her beard down the hallway and cocks her right hip up and back.

“Kiss me,” you hear yourself say.

The chandelier explodes and showers of glass rain down, each and every piece missing you and the pirate in your messy embrace, glass raining down onto the floor in a thirty foot radius with your collective four heels at the center, keeping you safe from the interruptions of Nosferatu’s New Year’s costume party.

© Marge J. Buckley, 2020