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Decades earlier, this cabin housed the local sexton; a quarter-mile south: the white, clapboard church. Daily, that young man would pet the church's entrance railings like bowed cat spines and re-trim a central path through the golden maiden grass perpetually taller than most children, taller than most tombstones. Far enough in the background, tucked behind the church, the graveyard looms, hidden, like a nicotine patch under a smoker's shirt sleeve. At exactly five o'clock in the evening, the church's sheer shadow perfectly shawls the dead with the cool tenderness of a diurnal pillow fluffed-and-flipped; that's how the sexton imagined it as he marveled by the marigolds. Eventually, the priest died and the rural countryside was too barren to transplant a replacement. No longer tended to, the cabin and the church are little more than two geometrically piled tinders. Slowly, Mother Nature tightly braids green ivy up the steeple.
Today, inside the cabin, several iron-black lanterns cling burr-ish to the cedar-log walls; their swollen-red flames itch-etch every splintery groove of the room—unsanded floorboards and trunk-girth banisters and wide doorframes—like visual poison ivy. Kerosene gassily gurgles in their glass bellies; hydrocarbons twig apart like millions of crossed fingers after witnessing a billion-dollar lottery ticket simplify to zero¹.
Statues crowd most of the open floor. One particularly substantial sculpture, over a ton, has stamped through the dry-rot planks into the leveled dirt below. Hued by the stark-dark lantern-fires, all the statues adopt a two-dimensional, painterly chiaroscuro. Sleeping Cupid lounges on a tree-stump-table and the shadowy pits of his quaffed locks tint his roots a neglectful, overgrown ebony. Most relics here Johnson recognizes as lost and legitimate. Whoever is responsible for this... curation... will return.
Johnson waits. Amongst kindred forms: for one hour and thirteen minutes, he stands as motionless as the statues.
Demons reek. Worse than the dead rat by the sink curled in on itself like a yin-less yang. Johnson smells Elvis before he sees him (Johnson exhales: it is a forceful shove of air through his nostrils). The front door squeals open. In the doorway, dusk-light dribbles around Elvis's all-black ensemble like a melted-down counterfeit halo. For a demon, Elvis dresses well. For a human, too, were he one. But what soul once glimmered in that vessel, Elvis has dragged, bedraggled beyond recognition: keelhauled within their own body. Soul stinkily, sinkingly bloodlogged. Elvis is, therefore, appalling to look at. Johnson's gaze surveys the room at a smooth, uniform rate then accuses Elvis: harshly—perhaps humorously—reductive: "You collect rocks?"
[1.] Lee's nostalgia: Watching live on television with his mother and youngest aunt as the host pulls lottery numbers from the storming, swarming cage of white balls and seeing that brief, bouyant hope in both of them as the balls spun, the jackpot not yet unwon.
Souls bouy-bob in bodies like air pockets caught in dark-flat caves leagues below the ocean. Always lifted to the apex spot (typically, the dome of the skull), like a bubble compass pointing toward heaven. Whatever compound slowly fizzle-fills in there is the alchemy of one's life. A bottled perfume. Some naturally leak-secretes out through the tear ducts or skin pores. Most humans reek.
But not everything must be pleasant to be loved. The devil's neighbor would give almost anything to perceive their cat Stevie again. Even if all they were permitted was the canned tuna smell of their cat's fresh shit.
Whiff.
"What have you done today?"
You smell worse.
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Winter. Snow drifts. Opposite of summer pollen. Yet so similar in composition. White flakes mushily chalk Lee's beard. A few specks clot on his eyelashes like pigeons to telephone wires—shared messengers. Wind tumbles between a wheeze and a whistle; sleet apnea.
Above, as Lee crosses the street, the traffic light glows as red as his uncovered ears (he remembers, to the precise minute, when his third niece will be born, but forgot to grab his knit hat before leaving his apartment: hypermobile arthritic mind, he jokes). Snow (scintillating in the hell-hue of the stop light) streaks by, ignoring the color's manmade meaning. And—the mass delinquents—on every city block, at every slab of sidewalk, flakes jaywalk without looking as if in a busy-tizzy to arrive.
Lee clomps into a hidden pothole. Slushy asphalt (blown snotty grey car exhaust) slimes his back heel. Bootless. Sneakers. Wet wool sock is an unpleasant texture on skin: uncannily akin to the friction grit of teeth after eating a lemon. It dampens him, yes. But not his mood—his niece will be born in two hours and (he checks his wristwatch) thirty-three minutes. Almost to the other side of the crosswalk, Lee hops one-legged, slip-skids upright, trying to pet the sludge off his ankle. Go, slow, stop. Slow, ironically, is the fastest light. Little time for idle. And that realization makes his mouth twitch down, thoughtfully amused rather than grumpy—two hours and thirty minutes.
Lee huddles under the bus stop awning. Tall-ish, skinny body. Folded arms tucked so tight to his chest he looks ribbon-tied. His shoulders are white-chipped. Now stationary, he jimmy-shakes loose the lean snow slates. His hands, mittened, jostle his trimmed beard and the icy flecks spring aloft like ghostly, newborn grasshoppers.
Johnson, capable of avoiding the snow, does. A pocket of displaced air—hot—gusts beside Lee and warmly dews his oriented-to cheek like a huffy-buffed breath to just-about-cleaned eyeglasses. Strangely intimate. To feel someone's sudden presence that tangibly. Made stranger, too, for the added enjoyment of the momentary heat that quickly dissipates into the harsh, pinching air.
Lukewarm scolding envy: "The cold can't kill you." Unlike it can him, in theory. Two hours and twenty-six minutes, Lee encourage-urges.
Johnson isn't dressed for the winter. Black business suit. Unbuttoned and too thin to truly insulate. And unsettlingly still. Lee's gaze (upper eyelids indelibly sleep-sodden) skittishly excuses itself to the sign schedule—snow-plated. Times—listed there but swaddled in hospital-blanket-white—suggest: weather delayed. Two hours and twenty-five minutes.
Johnson continues the conversation Lee left (from his apartment) minutes earlier: "I will not lie if you don't."
His stare dusts Johnson. Performatively a curmudgeon (irritation as superficially deep and real as that 'snow-plated' sign is pure frost): "I told you I have somewhere to be." That doesn't feel as resolutely final as it should, being liminally stuck at the bus stop. Lee waddle-shifts to more directly face Johnson: "That's not a fair agreement. I know a lot of truths. And they span further than yours."
I wasn't there. Even if I was, I wasn't, because I never entirely am. I know what the carnival looks like; it's the same each year. Kaye once asked me (my modern Holden Caulfield) where do the tents go? after the last June day, having snooped on the workers de-boning the booths. I knew how I would answer a decade before she asked which was three long years before she was born. I told her, but I won't tell you. Sit. Wonder. What an indulgence I am never permitted.
I am selfish. I want to always be with her. I could tell you what I mean is I want to always be there for her. That's true. But some things are truer. Her honey-brown eyes shine like heart-shaped gold lockets that appear as if they carry you. You, who she is looking at.
I'll describe the scene before it is too dark to matter. Dual-striped conical tents blight the night like chicken pox. Mosquitoes stipple the bright, boxy floodlights: a small inversion of the starry sky. Crowds congeal and heel at carnival rides and game booths. With every passing hour, and every passing step, the tamped field balds more and more. Grainy pant stains; people too engrossed to complain. Elvis walks along the greener edge, avoiding the muck as—Kaye does not say, so I am left to suspect on her behalf (and she has a fine mine-sweep detection that she uses not to avoid the calamitous but collect the luminescent)—a mother-having child would a sidewalk crack. She likes to view Elvis kindly. A toddler shoves between them with a pale blue cotton candy tuft-stuffed into a thin, paper cone. The fluff catches on Elvis's cufflink and yanks free like a cheap toupee.
Someone tosses a red ring—the size of Kaye's dainty, bird-bone wrist, of the beaded friendship bracelet she made me when she was six—at a honeycombed grid of empty milk jugs painted-white. It jitter-chitters around a rigged rim, glassily drum rolling its own suspense. Kaye, seeing this, fists her hands: as full of life as the day she was born when that same tinier, pillowier palm balled around her mother's index finger. Inertia ridden, the small hoop slows into one last loop and stoops on the bottleneck, winning, not duped. That has a sound, too. Wooped hoopla.
Kaye looks up to Elvis. Yes, in more ways than one. "You're nicer." She says it because she has the contractual privilege to believe it. And because she knows Elvis does not. "They don't have to give a person what they want to make a profit. Just the chance for it." She stares at him and I imagine she imagines him in the jointee uniform: a red and white cabana-striped shirt. She laughs. Lungs wringing-singing like church bells chiming Mass; everything, to her, is momentous and worth an orchestral broadcast. "Sorry. Sorry." She dressed as a carnival worker for Halloween when she was eleven. I carried her pillowcase. Anyone would. She carried a mommade wacky wizard wire for the doorside candy-givers to try.
ntries.
orld.
lursed niece.
uture memory.
ngel.
evil.
yself.
uestbook.