6.09 / August 2011

Do You Understand, Perfectly, The Weeknights? Positively Mean Them?

I.

The worst days were the ones when I could hear everything.  The best, nothing.  I spoke out loud when my heart jumped its start, and the sentences sent people’s faces contorted.

It is scary to think about, though.  A blending of language.  Something private.  It was not the loss of language but something was lost.

We slotted maps in between our toes.  The weathered geography of their surfaces and bent up corners.  Purple lines of longitude running the pale length of our turned up toes.

I was strange with her and not nearly myself.  It went like first rehearsals only with darker ties on our eyes and velvet white gloves fit tightly in our mouths.  All the while that huge red oak was falling through our roof.

It got too tough to take heart.

There was a way, a path, if you will.  This path a nautical one thick with shaded contour lines and all.  I told her, shivering, freezing, “If anyone wakes up lost anywhere there is the way your shoulder blades can rise like two towers, sharp shores, the low in between.”

II.

Did you understand, perfectly, the weeknights?  Positively mean them?

It’s like all we ever do is what is with you.  Chewing on your teeth like that after blowing the whole thing.  It’s a conversation you can’t get out of, when you are in it.  You were hair-raising.  Your ringlets stood on end, still plump and with the dark orange of your mother.  Your mossed-up heart was something to make up to. But it all could stand to calm down a little too.

What was needed was a guy, some faith in a guy.

He said, Your mother and I, we are together on this.  It’s where we can meet up, discuss every bit of your honesty.  We are the absolute biggest fans of you.  We’ve earned that much, haven’t we?

III.

My hand in yours in the suicide blast like being welded together now but malleable too.  Shouldn’t such things be a bit discomforting for what you had started calling the modern age?  Movement in the fire and glass and falling apart and our matter fitting a different pattern.  Everything is still in appointment for you.  If you’re like me you just thought of that time at the kitchen table after we had moved, after we made best friends of our own and drank wine until late almost every night deep in the mosquitoes of summer, after that one Wallens starting calling in the middle of the night, before they took him away and you painted the house yellow.  You were great.  You said you, too, could have a lawyer played by a higher intellect.  Yes, it was very tiring.  All we ever did was what was with you.


Gary Sheppard lives in Oxford, Mississippi where he edits the The Yalobusha Review. His writing can be found in recent or upcoming issues of New York Tyrant, Word Riot and Everyday Genius.
6.09 / August 2011

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