I feel the tingling in my chest that usually signals the onset of a panic attack, but instead, your nakedness spills like a crackle of lightning across the sheets, and I’m suddenly aware of the difference that makes and how without it social constructs would collapse and there would be shocking new twists to ancient myths, lifeguards drowning in kiddie pools, churches embracing sin and heresy, and the patron saint of shopping mall Santas, accompanied by spooky background music, sucking at Christ’s wounds, and first thing in the morning, too.

The Clock Strikes Thirteen

Fleeing for their lives, families brave oceans in paper boats, only to be turned back on reaching their destination. Caw-caw-caw, white crows cry, but less as frantic warning and more as bitter recrimination or desolate testimony. The living and the dead, the real and the imagined, the seen and the hidden, merge in a mirey mix at the behest of the home audience. Smoke from distant wildfires blots out the sky. None of those responsible will be held liable. The ancient Babylonian spirit that murders babies in the womb clings to the souls of mothers and speaks through their mouths.

Gosh

While seagulls swirl in the bright summer sky like silver foil confetti, I’m trapped under a boat dock. The water is up to my neck and rising. My dead cousin Rhonda miraculously appears. She looks down at me through the gaps between the wood planks. By now I’m struggling to keep my mouth out of the water, which reeks of gasoline and motor oil. “Why would you do this to us?” she scolds. I can hear people walking around above as if nothing terrible is happening. The worst atrocities aren’t on the news. I’m beginning finally to understand something about it.

Criminal History

The children in mandatory attendance have faces like wilted flowers. Poor humanity, always preparing for something that won’t ever happen or that already has. Investigators assigned to the case plant false evidence, intimidate witnesses, solicit bribes. Then one night the chalk outline of the body is mysteriously erased from the sidewalk. It doesn’t change the fact that every street is a crime scene, every person both a suspect and a victim. No one is perfectly innocent. My own heart rattles with bottled-up rage. Just before pronouncing sentence, the judge wipes his blubbery lips on the sleeve of his black robe.

Post-Op

I start hearing loud clanging and wake up in the hospital, where a face floating in and out of focus is saying, “You’re lucky to be alive.” “Oh?” I reply. I’m not there even though I am. Chimpanzees living in captivity will angrily throw their turds at their keepers. I just lie half-dazed under a thin blanket barely big enough to cover me. Beyond the curtain surrounding my bed, I can hear the visiting dead conferring. The ceiling when I glance up is swarming with their gray shadows. Yes, I fuzzily think to myself, I’m all but through. I can’t remember the life I had, only the one I should have.