The badgering put her in a mood to peel the skin off fruit, to tell him she was walking along the shoreline when someone called out her name from the cliffs and when she turned around all she saw were stars bounding around so slowly in the heavens you might have missed their movement entirely if not for the sounds they made, the whistling and the exhalations. She said our minds form themselves of something other than the matter from which everything else emerges. The wicker furniture, the albatross on the wing. But this doesn’t mean they ought to seem other. All such boundaries are transcended by the notion of boundaries itself and the harder we exert ourselves in the attempt to preserve them, the more stubbornly they dissolve. Then turn up again, partially formed, around the corner. One day, she cut holes in the sheet they kept over the window to better allow the breeze to get through and subsequently those on the opposite side of the street began to squint, pulled out their phones and started clicking. This is probably why he left, why he packed the car and drove for an hour and then another and so on until they had stacked up on one another like a child’s plastic blocks and when it was all finished he sent her a postcard that had a picture of a pinniped on the front of it, baring its yellow teeth in what we were supposed to imagine was a friendly manner. But our take on the situation has already been explained. We never meant to interfere so much as insist on our own relevance precisely when the question of that relevance had become so unimportant, had been outflanked, as it were, by one involving the age of the sewer system, say, or the manner in which one person deceives another when there is no reason to, when all things being equal, the truth would have sufficed. Her reaction is the same as when they first met, when she looked at him as if he were so far away she couldn’t make out a single detail. Not the contours of the face, not the lint stuck to the arm of his jacket as if it had been placed there strategically, by someone (she knew now) with a flair for the mundane, and maybe an appointment in an hour to get the radiator in his car replaced or a foreboding dark spot excised permanently from the  skin.

She borrowed the shawl you see in that photograph, from a woman she met on the county chain gang. It was all a big misunderstanding with weapons at the root of it and cherries and the mispronunciation of certain verbs that are no longer in fashion. Her brow was more defined then, a line straight as any object you wish to compare it to, but not as pronounced as the sunlight and shadows made it appear. I think there’s a name for this effect, but when you use it the other people in the tavern or the shopping mall where you happen to be all turn around and look at you askance, if they can hear you at all over the violin music and the shouting of good wishes (and threats, though not simultaneously) from one end of the place to the other. It is, finally, something as innocuous as the sneezing, though, that gives us away and there inevitably follows forty five minutes of trying to explain ourselves as if we believe there are tape recorders running and flowers blooming in the nearby window boxes, blooming in the entirely adequate light cast by the moon. Our energy (if you could call it that) came from the nutrients in the clay and that in the food we managed to scrounge up after the clay, persimmons and shrimp, mostly, thrown out with the cabbage that had gone brown. We knew better than to complain. The issue wasn’t really whether or not our needs had been met but if we were going to admit to having such needs in the first place. To announce to all and sundry that we were, in effect, human, much the same way they were. The flesh on the back of her knee began to ache so severely that you might have been tempted to diagnose it as an actual ailment of the sort that lands one in the hospital for an extended stay, but any such prognostication was bound to smack of too much knowledge and not enough wisdom of the ancient variety , too many days packed away in the library, for instance, studying up to be a shaman. By the same token, her powers of recuperation were, if not astonishing, at least noteworthy inasmuch as she took very detailed notes on it and tried to pass them off as the opinion of specialists called in from Toronto to have a look. Maybe we were all supposed to turn our heads around then as far as they could go and endeavor to catch a glimpse, because she was pointing as well as moving her lips. But I for one had had enough of the histrionics and the out-and-out deception that had this habit of looking like actual affection at first, a genuine interest in who you were and what you were feeling but turned out in the end, on closer inspection, to be merely a kind of gazing into the mirror, a way of seeing her own profile better than she was able to see it in photographs or in the drawn-out descriptions left behind by her innumerable suitors.

The command to show ourselves resulted in a discussion that lasted far longer than it should have, if you consider the insects were already numbering in the thousands around the window frames and under the doors. They made a sound that didn’t so much disturb one’s sleep as take it over and transmute it into another entity altogether, something that shared no distinguishing properties with its original but still managed to get lumped in with it under the same category by those who were paying attention. And felt the need to categorize, to draw maps with symbols on them and keys to deciphering those symbols in case anyone was unfamiliar with how these things worked. The first shots rang out around noon but no one paid them any attention because they had been expected. We had prepared ourselves by alluding to them without using exact terminology and this process continued until the wee hours of the morning when everything was effectively shut down by a power surge and the effects, direct or otherwise, of a moon that wasn’t full exactly, but appeared to be, and the only way you could tell for certain was to break out the charts and the atlases and go over them as carefully as might a scholar his treatises on The Gospel of Thomas or that other one that treats of similar themes without all the complex allegory and mythmaking, I can’t remember the name of it at present. It will come to me. She flew down the stairs at a dizzying rate precisely because they were stairs, because they all but tempted one to speed and recklessness by their very design and when she reached the bottom she was out of breath but this didn’t stop her from exhaling. Part of the problem is we never know when we are being followed or watched or even spoken of by those who have no business even knowing we exist. They take their cues from the investigators who investigated the theft of fine art from the museum where most of the art was, let’s face it, mediocre, and when everything was returned as mysteriously as it went missing, a lot of people suspected the foul play had really been a publicity stunt of some kind, though who would have benefited and how anyone might have conceived of such an elaborate plan in the first place were questions left mostly unanswered. 

Exotic tobaccos opened our airwaves then closed them gain almost immediately and the retching was so commonplace as to be given a particular name. We threw it about like a paper airplane and then spent the rest of the afternoon painting circles on the concrete, which, at the time anyway, seemed to represent the movements of the solar system and the enormous distances between objects there, though any discussion of this beyond the elementary smacked of schooling and was punished abruptly with wooden canes and admonitions. The block was elongated and bulbous on one end so you couldn’t see around some of the hedges and when we startled pigeons they rose up into the sky with a squawking intensity that didn’t seem to fit with their otherwise calm, even regal demeanor. I chocked this up to the way they had been portrayed in the movies which played almost around the clock downtown, and if you were lucky, you might stumble on a double feature that quit halfway through the second bill, due to the projector overheating or the escaped marmosets getting in once again. Our patience has limits imposed on it from outside like a fence under construction, or the boundaries of the skin, made up of millions of microscopic replicas of itself, so that you can’t point the finger of blame and incrimination at any one agent but must point it at all of them at precisely the same time. Which is of course impossible given the mathematics on either side of the equals sign, or the barrio as the case may be. We loved to grab terms at random almost out of thin air, or at least from the newspapers that had hit their stride at about this time, had ushered in a new golden age of journalism that looked a lot like the previous golden age, only there weren’t so many men at the center of it with comb-overs and expensive jewelry around their wrist. What you found instead was a faceless mob willing to flow in any direction it was pointed and frequently got confused with an actual mob of the sort that carries with it unexpected implements of destruction like two-by-fours and manual typewriters and those rubber masks designed to imitate the facial features of visitors from other planets, or at least what we had been led to believe their facial features might look like by the experts and the non-experts alike, by artisans and the charlatans and the ordinary businessmen who stood to make a killing so long as we didn’t get too curious.

Tufts and whole feathers, the stainless steel knives, the rain caught hold of the edges of everything in eyeshot and held on to it as if it were afraid of centrifugal force, the movement of the planet itself. By that time, our calendars had filled up so quickly we forgot what they were good for. The sunlight poured in afterward through windows we had left open so as to be able to catch a glimpse of whoever marched up the driveway intending to warn us of the machinations of the town council or wag their fingers in our faces due to something our children had done, or were suspected of doing. It was enough to cause the flesh on the back of the hands to turn an unusual yellow and make the library books on the end table seem suddenly fascinating, the trips downriver in search of those who had made the trip previous and were now missing, the charts and the arguments for the spreading of wealth like the invaluable contents of a newly-smashed barrel of molasses. I made it half way up the side of the river bank before gravity and the fear of falling were too much for me and I would probably be there still but for the assistance, the bravery and the surprising physical strength, of the boy who lived up the street. His formulas were immaculate and should properly have led to a scholarship and a life of, if not leisure exactly, then moderate exertion, but he died on the road that led out of town and you can see the makeshift memorial there to this day with its dull gray ribbons and its plank boards nailed together to form a haggard-looking cross. Time has made it crooked. Which is the proper configuration, if you think about it, but you’re not supposed to think about it. Our sentences run from three months to a dozen years and we serve them as if they had never actually been handed down at all, as if we simply woke up one morning and realized it was to be, in each and every respect, the same sort of morning as the one that had preceded it, and when the time came for the shadows to blacken and obscure the corners of the porch, to spill in through crevices and cracks in the plaster, we refused to treat this as something ominous or even particularly meaningful. It was something we studied as we might study the contours of the twilight or the David of Michelangelo (in photographs of course) – as something to put your eyes on for a moment before you decided to put them on something else, maybe a soiled length of rope.

Lethargy was a constant companion, the deliverer of unexpected benefits and the assassin of grief, compared favorably by those who caught a glimpse of it to the hedgehog which surrounds itself with its very nature and therefore survives. Our footpaths found solace following the river which had become so polluted as to give off the smell of insecticide and honey and we bathed there sometimes just because we knew we shouldn’t, because the water held riches dear to the imagination. Crustaceans mostly, and diamond jewelry tossed in a fever of rage. Part of the problem was the music which kept pumping in over speakers situated in the corners of all the buildings and all the markets, music with words that were mostly unintelligible and instruments that had long gone out of fashion like the lute but which still spoke to the romantic in us who otherwise might have perished. For lack of sustenance, lack of recognition. Our bald spots became more pronounced and someone suggested it might be the fault of the stars pouring their poison down onto our heads from on high, from the places where they had been fastened into the fabric like rhinestones, and half those present registered their frustration with all explanatory narratives by penning some of their own with deliberately exaggerated heroes at the center of them who obeyed the least whim and bias, who scuttled off to the shores of distant islands and promised never to return, only to return again the following week because they had been bidden to by someone else who looked just like them and who had himself only recently arrived from another land entirely  full of desperate people looking to him for hope and maybe even some financial wherewithal, if not outright salvation. This particular regress, like all chains of a certain speculative nature, gets old and brittle and falls apart before you can get to the end of it, before you even get half way, and it makes us wonder out loud if maybe it’s time we stopped searching endlessly for origins and stories with ogres in them. For the answers to pesky metaphysical questions that have been asked for generations but which, in our case, should probably have been left to their own devices, at least until we were finished putting the flooring down in our houses or shooting at the neighborhood elk with our expensive, precision store-bought bows and arrows.

Peddlers found her loathsome, wrote home in codes they had fashioned themselves for the purpose, hoping to forgo the embarrassment of public ridicule, of conspiracies multiplying like locusts. Her shirt opened up down the back with the merest accidental brush of the hand or even a forceful exhalation like that which occurs when your airwaves fill up with mucus. She stated on record that her name had changed from the time when we knew her, but we thought this an almost unforgiveable transgression and went about making our feelings known by spelling them out with letters clipped out of magazines and arranged on yellow sheets of paper big as a window, the stars clumping together overhead as if they had only recently discovered our presence and wished to observe us before anyone else got the chance. Visions become so common in circumstances that might seem at first extraordinary because the air is thin or the sirens have been wailing for twenty minutes, but really they are a record of the human mind from the time of its inception to just before its annihilation, and when we heard that the twilight was more than just a meteorological phenomenon, our hands began to shake and any empathy that had, to that point, accumulated, was run through like water in a sieve. Or the syrup one finds in a can of pears. Which is to suggest more slowly than you might have at first anticipated. I bought her a ring that looked brilliant under artificial light but lost most of its luster early, in the pre-dawn hours when the sun isn’t so much ascending as hovering in place like an insult and she told me the bark on the trees had been speaking to her again but she knew better than to take what it said seriously because she had gotten in trouble like that so many times before. Our reactions slow over the years until they can’t really be called reactions at all and their replacement is something like the instincts placed naturally into butterflies which make them veer about from one place to another from birth (or, at least, their emergence from the cocoon) without ever really lighting on anything for more than a second or two, this being, apparently, the most successful way to keep them from getting consumed by whatever is immune to their toxins.