Workship

The empress towers above us, her mammoth curves blocking the sun's light. We labor in shadow, pushing her cuticles back with dull scythes, buffing paint from her nails with acetone-soaked towels. Demarcus faints from the vapors. I revive him with a quick slap. 'Wake up, fool. It's time to harvest the nail.'

 In a few hours the sun will crest, and work will become impossible. 'Marcus.' He rattles his skull around in his head for a moment, then picks up his end of the timber saw, muttering under his breath. 

It takes us half an hour to get through the foot-thick keratin on her big toe, pulling back and forth against each other with the weathered longsaw. When it falls with a loud crack, we pause for water and admire its abalone underside. 'Better than last month, eh?' I ask, noting the deep burgundy in the pearled curve. 'Shit, better than all last year,' Demarcus snorts. 'If we can get these clippings past the guards, we'll make a goddamn fortune.' 

In another hour we have finished the toenails of her left foot, with the sun threatening to crest. We rush through the right foot in silence, our arms like pink pistons, blurry in the gathering light. As the sun peaks, Demarcus is finishing the final buff, cursing with spite. I load our cargo into the wagon, surprised by its weight, and pause to finger the iridescent pits that flare now in the noon light. Looking up at the blinding halo ringing the empress's silhouette, I smile, running my tongue over my teeth. The guards will be asleep any minute now. We only have to wait.

And then the long walk home, down the sweating gravel streets. 

And after that, the feast.

Evidence

The bones are calcified and stubborn today. They refuse to be whittled.

I pull my femur out through a small incision above the knee. The yellow deposits scarring its length blossom like lichens in the dim light. I marvel at the bone's heft, the way its enamel chips and peels beneath my touch. In books, the bones always gleam, as if the anatomist polished them himself. But here, in my hands, the body is no gem, no painstaking work of art. The body is savage. The femur is a war club, not made for dancing or walking up hills, but for battle. 

88 Keys

Fresh from the shop and ready for a spin
around the proverbial soapbox.

Slog

Apologies my absence, children. I left cousin Cleve in charge of posting this past week, but it seems Scout's burial proceedings were arduous and ongoing. 

Fear not children, as I have returned, and will get back to whittling my bones into sap-amber gems for your consumption tomorrow afternoon.

Until then,

Nonfiction

Jenny like to faint when she caught him out there yesterday. Him with his shirt off, and his eyes all red and rolling in his head, digging with that shovel in the rock-dry dirt. Said he called the machine men with their diggers but they couldn't come today, said he would do it himself, same as he did every thing.

But he couldn't do nothing. She'd seen him standing in the field a week before, holding a shotgun to that horse's dumb eye and shivering in his sweat. He couldn't do it, and anyone could see that Scout's dick was eat up with that black rot, and someone had to do it. Doc Harper gave him cream, but he couldn't rub it on without it flaking scabs and dropping brown blood in his hand, and he would cry then and couldn't do it. 

Look at him out there, digging still and that blue-gray body swelling in the heat beside him. Neighbor Dan said he never slept last night, just hacked at the ground and made low animal sounds all night long. I tell him he'll never get deep enough like that, but he's not here, he's somewhere in that dirt already, pulling it over him like a blanket, that blue-black body a pillow tucked beneath his rolling head.

Farewellena

Helena on the grand staircase moments before her farewell ball.

Postscript

Today marks the end of an era in our small city. This morning, Ilena and I bid adieu to Helena, our elusive and enigmatic roommate of the past three months. She had that particular quality one so often seeks in a roommate, but rarely finds: absence. After the despicable reign of our former tenant Melvin Bosh, whose shrill and wet-brained voice brought terror to our neighbors and ourselves alike, she could do no wrong. But she did one better—she spiked the windows with hot pink tulle and bird figurines, hung animal bones and abstract threaded paintings from the bare white walls, and sat peaceably on our humble porch rolling her slender spliffs and carrying on in her singular, easy fashion. Now she's on her way to Athens, Greece, where her red-clay Georgia banter will no doubt enliven the stark landscape of bone-white on blue one finds there. We will miss her, and we will hold her possessions hostage until she returns.

Mountaintop Removal. Roastedpork Revival.

Out into the province of wild turkey and whistle pig, of turk's cap and blueberry and jewelweed, to wash the muck of commerce and its labors from our dusty skins. With nought but a slack pouch of water between the two of us, Ilena and I scaled a mountain peak in a single hour this afternoon, the humid air slick beneath the canopy of rhododendron. Not content with the fogged majesty spread out before us at the pinnacle, not sufficiently dwarfed by the domes rising around us on all sides (their hulking green bodies resembling nothing so much as the mottled osage apples I called brainfruit as a child), we climbed down into the mountain and shouted each other's names against the wet-sharp walls. I brought her hands of half-ripe blackberries—which tasted oddly of soap—and she bared her bright stomach against their red and ebon juices, the lone spot of light in that dingy, narrow cave. 

After our emergence and descent, we happened across a cramped cantina several miles from town. We stepped inside. Minutes later, at a tiny wooden table, I came face to face with a dish that leapt up like a woodsmoke memory from childhood, wafting its pendulous come-hithers beneath my nose. My friends, it was a barbecue taco, but it was no mere taco, no. Slathered with red sauce and purple cabbage coleslaw, the roast pork thrummed with bassnotes as playful as my father's drawl, while the hand-drawn sign claiming   humane, sustainable   thrilled every self-righteous bone in my meaty, hormone-free body. Even as it bound me exquisitely in the moment, friends, this taco sent me reeling with nostalgia. With the second bite, I smelled the black cauldron of "flea dip" in my parents' kitchen as they circled around its bubbling cargo, adding dabs and dashes in that timeworn family ritual. I felt the texture of cheap one-ply paper plates at Great Aunt Darkus's picnic table, the tacky surface of the flowered plastic cloth. And then, I saw the covered dishes rise before my closed eyes row on row, with condensation forming on their gleaming shells. These sensations echoed like a struck chord, and above the chord—gently at first, now gaining volume gradually—a melody arose, tickling out like the squeals of pigs cavorting in a muddy creek. Oh friends, I heard the age-old rustle of wax paper against gristle, but there was no gristle—only a chestnut-smoked succulence which ran its blackened fingers across my tongue. 

I threatened to buy three dozen, take them back to town and hand them out to passersby like pamphlets from some deep pit missionary. But then I realized: this is my religion. No one else will sense its proof.

Weekend in Review

Fame, Ho!

After you dance all weekend, after you gambol in the pulsing heat on a makeshift paper stage, after your pants soak through like a thing swum in and the duct tape holding your sleeves together gives way beneath the sweat's assault—only then can you commence with the cremes and heatpads.

Stretched out on a couchlet like the supreme martyr diva, you summon water glasses of wine from the next room, ply backrubs out of the odd passing visitor, and loudly lament your loss—this grand sacrifice you make of your body for joy alone, friends, for sheer, unbridled joy. 

After the visitors leave, you pull a dog-eared wad of bills from between the pillows of the couchlet—the true spoils of your sacrifice—and as you count them once again, their rustle takes on a kind of beat, and you smile down at your crumbled-in arches and your battered calves, humming along to that terrible beat, that godawful insistent and seductive beat.

To the Mall!

But before the dance can begin, you must lay in provisions. Costumes must be procured—fright wigs and bulbous pants, bits of shiny metal that glint and wink as you move them beneath sun- or strobe light—you need dancing shoes, dancing socks, wicking breathable dancing underwear, several faces worth of makeup, and by then you are just beginning to get underway. I know, I know, it's a shame you cannot just throw on a wrestling singlet and go at it. I have tried before, and the results were just disastrous. Perhaps this would fly in Sri Lanka, but here, in America, folks like their entertainment gaudy and overblown, an assault on the senses so entire that it leaves audience members whelmed and disoriented, filled somehow with a vague urge to purchase something, anything.

Humanifesto

I am learning to embrace that childhood self that hollers "Hey guys!" while gyrating on a tabletop in a too-small shirt for the camera's loving eye—the self that grabs his nascent crotch and thrusts into the air repeatedly, not knowing the significance of the act, knowing only the vague and odd sense of power that comes from it—that same self that again screams out "Look! Look!" before falling down a carpeted flight of stairs, pantomiming injury.

Somehow that self went sour and disappeared. It slowly closed up, grew humble, learned to listen, to quiet his chattering mouth.

But I must reclaim that self. Proud imbeciles parade about in broad daylight, shouting their knock-kneed philosophies, their numbers growing week by week, their voices growing louder, more obnoxious. Meanwhile, the quiet scholar sits at home, greedily drinking in his solitude, certain he's above the common fray. Both appall me. Let me find my place somewhere between the two, half-wise and half-mad, not overvulgar but no longer underheard goddamnit, not content to nod my platitudes toward another bit of blathery pretending at conversation.

After all, I owe it to them, don't I? These poor souls would rather be entertained than drone on about their latest breakup, their rough day at the workplace, the rising price of free-range eggs—I, for one, refuse to live in a world where chicken products dominate the conversational landscape! You—fools, boors, lovers, friends—you need me, you need this temporary joy I bring, even if it is mere escape, even if later we will sit down and rehash your latest break-up. For now, hear my song, delight in my dance, and we will both be carried off on the legs of this slight and fleeting ecstasy.

And when my legs break down from dancing, when my voice goes bald and wilts to a croak, I will still have these hands, and from the page I will scream "look at me" and then ask 3 cents a word to watch. To some I will be a carnival sideshow, to others a simple diversion, but for myself, I will be the author and mastermind of a life spent wallowing in sensation and recitation, an author in full, and never again a mere spectator, content to watch as life strides by in its imbecile parade.