Borger, Texas.

I remember this place

smelling stronger

when I was a boy,

sentenced to live in the

Texas Panhandle

for a year.

Though now when I drive

through this place, I feel a strange

peace, and an odd longing to have a safe

home and my own family,

though

that ship

has decades ago sailed,

sank,

and rotted

on the ocean floor.

The family went to

Borger once

though I don't know why,

maybe to see my father's

new place of

work,

the Phillips 66 plant,

where he was a pipe

fitter

or a grunt

or whatever else he

and my second oldest brother did there.

Who got who the job escapes me.

My niece was quick to remind me

they were most

likely contracted through whoever hired

them to work for the plant,

and not

actual employees,

her disgust for her

father,

and mine, for that matter,

resonated across the living room.

It was

thick,

and it floated without the chance

of going any higher

or any lower.

For our

own reasons,

the hate cloud was on

permanent reserve.

My niece, now full with a great husband,

grown children, and a new little boy in

the house is a nurse who works from home:

One patient,

a little boy of five

who has

Fox G1 Syndrome,

a rare genetic disorder

a version of it that has completely

erased a chromosome within the life

chain.

She had mentioned the word hospice

a few times last night, but I was too

tired from the drive to register the

weight.

Asked about the syndrome, she

explained it to me.

"Like a missing linkage in a transmission," I said.

"Yep," she said.

"What's his timeline?" I looked at him on the couch.

When I had walked out from

the room with the dogs, first light, he

had looked up at me and smiled what

can only think of as a beautiful, loving,

gapped-teeth smile,

limbs flailing,

completely adorable

completely oblivious

to anything

that fucked

with anyone

completely rare,

and I had sat down next

to him and he had eyed the color of my

tattoo, whatever shape it made through

near blindness, reached over and

palmed it

and I gave a spot on his ribs

a light squeeze just below

the tube and

machine

that was used to keep his lungs

stray from pneumonia

since he can't walk.

She looked down at him and smiled as if

what she was saying about him was alright,

on the off-chance he might sense

the meaning in the words

or on

the full chance

that my heart was breaking for

the boy.

"Well, he's in Hospice, so it could

literally be any day now, any

moment."

"Fuck. That is just fucking awful."

"It is. I've had him many days a

week for four years."

My border collie

walked over and licked his face and I

called her off even though it appeared

to us that he liked it.

I reached down

and scrubbed her head and watched the

boy as I held my coffee.

Hard not to love

those who have no evil

those who shine

through the darkness of everyday

survival, everyday mistrust,

worry, fear,

and even the thoughts that keep us

pinned to the room at 2 in the morning.

The love is almost always instant.

In the actual town of Panhandle,

I drove around and remembered, like a

home movie, my time going to school there.

I was in the fourth grade or fifth grade

one of those

but aside from that fog

my memory of the place was still sharp as

new glass:

The full names of the children

in my school, the park, the old house,

and

all of it hadn't changed

it was a time

capsule

I'd been through once before in

my late 20s and back then I thought

living here would be Hell

but now at 54

it looks like heaven to me,

like a place

where I would sleep right

I could wake

up and write

I could record in my booth

I could get away from all the

bullshit for good

from all my bullshit.

I really can't describe it, yet

I can

though it's filtered

the reasons

why I ran to the the road as a young man

a nomad

a writer

and the reasons it has

changed to fatigue and something like

tracing a picture from memory you once

held so lovingly sacred

but lost to the

attrition of years between.

But there's something else

something waiting

something beyond the

shore and over the curve

of the sun-torn highway

something in each place

I want to uncover

with words and images

for no other reason

than I feel I must.

The winter wind of North Texas is

coming in strong with the onset

of December,

but I won't feel it

good or bad,

I will be

west of this

place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS5qSERw1i0

I didn’t want to walk into her work looking like I did. I hopped her fence and fell asleep under the trampoline.

I woke up sweating from the heat of the black rubber. I found a corner of the yard and threw up. Under a palm’s short shade, I went through my bag and found my Walkman far at the bottom. I played my music until my batteries went dead. I thought of ways to get my four hundred and sixty-two dollars back from my father, though I knew it was spent already. I laid my head on a pillow of shirts and closed my eyes. Since the sudden death of my mother, he was bound for what he did. The pain of his chemical life was easier for him than dealing with his guilt for treating her like dirt, for ignoring her. Only thing was he still had a son. I wanted to hate him but I couldn’t. I thought about my mother reading her Bible from her chair under the big lamp. She was with the faith but never once pushed it on us. I thought about the old man now, a husk of waste on the floor, while I tasted my vomit and blood. My throat grew thick with bile and I leaned to my side and let it go on the grass. The Sun reached through gaps in the palms and gripped my swollen eye. It burned with tears but my eyelid wouldn’t open for anything. I covered my brow with a shirt and remembered back to my old life, to my mother reading the word, and my head burned beneath the sky that was once full with stars, which was now bright with sickness while I tried to breathe. All of nature’s passions spent, all of her God’s forgotten grace descended and rotting, the failure of His plan and the bloody tears of war-torn angels. All the mysteries of children lacerated.

Chapter 38

Out of the quarter. No feeling of change as it had been, the stranger,

when they had passed the café, the lights were off in back.

No feeling of change.

What that did mean, the seams blending for those to enter.

One of the last lines written to make way for the quarter to become

what it would. The work of them.

This, out of his thoughts, for Aria alone.

His mind for her tonight, only for her.

Where she would be the time after the next dusk, he would only

hold on to hope.

Up the street, her hand in his. The beauty of the city.

Love shining down.

Into pubs, into the cafés.

Live music of the free.

A thought from her, while they listened to the saxophone of a man

to play. The quarter, a change. Passing the tattoo shop, the only one

she would go, one artist inside. Boarded up now, dark. When they had

walked past. Her thoughts, further back in the quarter. The floor of the

building, their floor. They were the only two on it. The rest of the

tenants below. The quiet of them.

In the room, the sounds of music. Out the windows, a filter for neon.

His kiss to her neck. The applause between songs.

The people in the room. She had not seen them in the quarter. They

lived in the true city, graced by chance to not know the pull of the

quarter. Her mind, understanding more from the body of the stranger.

Pieces of mystery, they floated upon strings in the night. Her man, a

man she would kill to die for, the crescendo of song on the stage before

them. His hand holding the two of hers.

The love between them, strong

throughout time.

When the stranger thought of this. Something inside to take him

deep down into the past, into the changing of heart at the table.

It creeped upon him there, held his heart.

Encased in her stomach, what he would feel under the night. The

stars above. A celebration of swirls, the love from there.

Come what would, between death and the time before it.

What he had with her, the time from their first night alone to what

was waiting after the dusk of tomorrow.

Aria, her long ghost. From a hole in a door, he had waited for her,

to let her know who she was for the time fixed ahead.

He was successful in the dream of it.

Her hands in his, what he saw.

Something he would know and she would not believe.

What the quarter had done to her. How it had moved in, through

her skin. What he knew from their first drink outside the quarter, in

the place across. The table by the window.

To understand the lengths of what the quarter had done to her,

blocked from him. If she would go west, he knew their time together

had meant as much as the love from soil to the space above, the swirls

of dust and dream.

---From The Velocity of Ink. I read from it this morning for my channel, if you want to listen. This is just a small part of this morning's session.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O5H15bsUGg&t=1354s

{Audio and commentary linked below the story.}

A lot of ex-cons and drunks lived in the building. My room was the corner spot on the 3rd floor. The old man in the room next to me was deaf. The girl in the room across from me was a diagnosed schizophrenic. She almost never wore clothes. She was maybe 25. The government gave her 500 dollars a month. She kept her door open. Big black men walked in there and shut the door. It was a shitty place to live. The bathroom was never occupied when I had to use it. I was the only one in the building who showered regularly. But the toilet was well used. Every time I walked in there I came face to face with a bowl full of dead shit and sometimes a syringe on the floor. The bathrooms on the other floors were worse. I had a sink in my room. I pissed in the sink late at night. I was the youngest tenant, and the only one with a job. I had to walk past the landlord’s office to get up to my room. I’d walk in and deal with him.

“How was workin’ tonight, young man?”

“It was work.”

“Anybody asks you anything about this building you tell them you don’t know.” “Right.”

“Don’t tell them my name, neither.”

“I’d rather die.”

“And don’t bring no girls up there, neither.”

“Alright, Dave.”

“Fact, don’t bring nobody up there.”

“Got it.”

It was almost the same scene every night. I’d get in my room and shut the door. Then he’d knock. “It’s Dave.”

He’d sit on my bed. Dave was tall and slim and black. Dave smoked menthols. He was fifty. He had the job and nothing else. I never saw him laugh. The world was out to get him. He sat down and lit up. I leaned on the desk. “Feels like I just saw you, Dave.” He nodded to my typewriter. “You writin’ stories ‘bout me an’ this hotel?”

“No.”

“See to it you don’t.”

“Let me have a menthol, Dave.”

“Can’t do it. I have one every hour. I have the pack timed.”

“Bullshit. You’re on your second smoke since I walked in.”

“Still can’t do it.”

I lit one of my own, “Dave, and don’t take this personally, you need to get out of the building once in a while. This place is getting to you.”

“Can’t leave. One a you might try somethin’ on me.”

“Like what?”

“Sneak somebody in, move out without notice. I run a tight ship here.”

“The place is fucking destroyed, man.”

“You have any stories about me here?” “Seriously, Dave. Take a walk down 23rd or something. Ease your mind.”

The front buzzer sounded. Somebody had walked in downstairs. He jumped up and ran out of the room. I locked the door, closed the blinds and laid in bed. I listened to the street and the wind, the hours taken by the jobs and the rain, the repeating day and night varied only by a new tenant getting the boot or a new story that I would start and maybe finish. The winter and the cancer air of the hotel had become a morbid process, and my job was another tumor that had grown from it. I closed my eyes and thought about hot sand.

My manager was worse than my landlord. Her name was Shelly. Shelly was 6 feet tall. Once I called her Michelle. She told me she wasn’t a Michelle. I’d see her in Chinatown once in a while with her boyfriend. Her boyfriend worked in the kitchen. They lived together. She had to have a spotlight shining on her. She’d walk back into the kitchen with her long bird legs and long black straw hair.

“I wish these guys would leave me alone! I keep telling them: I HAVE A BOYFRIEND!”

Which she never did. She never told them. Her boyfriend was short and muscular. I didn’t like him. His brain was propelled by jealousy. He threatened me every other day. “Hey, man, when you talk to Shelly you keep it professional.”

“Give it a fucking break, Manny.”

“You just keep it professional.”

There was nothing professional about the job. I was either sick from the food or I was dodging the old gay men who lived in the smoking section. One time a professional basketball player stayed at the hotel. Shelly was on fire. She was going to his room and bothering him. She came into the kitchen. I had just turned in an order. Manny took the ticket.

“What the fuck’s this word?”

The word was Benedict.

“The word is Benedict. Eggs Benedict.”

“You sure?”

“Poached eggs over English muffins with hollandaise sauce.”

“Don’t tell me how to do MY job, motherfucker.”

Shelly came in around the corner. Her face was weak and crazy. A film of sweat formed tiny beads on her make-up. She was playing with her hair.

“Manny, can you handle things down here for a minute?”

Manny’s eyes lit up. He looked around and pressed his tongue against his cheek, “Yeah, I can handle it, baby.”

“Good. I’m taking Jamal Dupree a fruit basket. His team lost the game. I want to make sure he stays here next year.”

Manny was horrified. “Why the hell you doin’ that? He’s just a big dumb ape. He’ll get over it.”

She tossed her hair behind her shoulder. “Manny, I don’t appreciate your tone right now. We are working. I am the manager. I am trying to secure this account. You have nothing to worry about.”

She took off. Manny went to work. Half an hour later Shelly hadn’t returned. I walked into the kitchen and folded napkins. Manny was on the other side of the wheel. He talked to me through a skillet. It hung there between us.

“Don’t you say a fuckin’ word, prick. You so much as give me one of those smartass looks of yours and I’ll break your fuckin’ nose.”

I’d been putting up with him for two months. I never said anything to him because I didn’t want to lose my job. But the job wasn’t worth it anymore.

“Tell you what, you sorry sack of shit, after your girl gets done screwing that big black cock I might even take a shot at her.”

“Your fuckin’ order’s up, dead man.”

But after work he had a fight with Shelly. I was waiting for him by the back door. He walked by in a huff. “Your lucky day, motherfucker.”

I never got to fight Manny because he had narced me off to Shelly about what I’d said to him. Shelly kept me after work. I sat across from her in her little office downstairs. “We need to talk about what you said to Manny.”

I lied through my teeth, “Shelly, I only said that to get to him. I don’t think you would fool around like that. Manny’s just worried that I’m going to try something with you. I would never do something like that.”

Her face changed entirely. It was pathetic. “Why not?”

“Well, for one, you’re with Manny. For two, you’re my boss. And for three, let’s face it, you’re way out of my league.”

Her eyes lit up like Manny’s. They both had dull and dumb eyes.

“I was going to fire you. I called you in here to let you go.”

She raised an eyebrow at me. I sat back and lit a smoke. It wasn’t worth it. Her and her long bird legs and long black straw hair. But it was mostly her face, the way she needed attention. She would dry up and blow away without it. But sitting there facing the end of my job it occurred to me that I didn’t want to look for another one. It also occurred to me that I would have sex with her, if I had met her in a bar and I was leaving town the next day, some circumstance like that. For a second I thought of walking in Manny’s shoes. I’d rather eat a bullet.

She crossed her bird legs and smiled at me.

“I never knew you felt that way.”

“I’m just saying.”

We heard the back door open. A pair of shoes came running down the hallway. There was a slip, a grunt, and then walking. I shook my head at the desk. Manny peeked his head around the corner. She stared at him. “Sit down, Manny.”

He sat down next to me. She cocked her head at him, “I don’t want any more trouble between you two. Shake hands.”

I smiled at Manny and put my hand out. “I ain’t shakin’ his fuckin’ hand, Shelly.” “Manny, shake his hand.” He did it. It killed him. She told him to wait in the car. She had to tell him a few times. He left. I asked her, “How’s Dupree?”

“Oh, he’s fine. We had a good talk...”

I put out my smoke. “I guess I’ll be leaving.”

She uncrossed her bird legs and sat forward.

“I should go, too. Listen, you were wrong about my being out of your league. I want you to know that.”

“Thanks, Shelly. See you on Monday.”

She watched me leave. I walked down Burnside and bought a coffee. I walked the river and sat next to a sleeping bum. There was another bench empty, but it was covered in bird shit. A boat hauling a barge floated by. The bum shifted and made a loud honking sound. I got up and walked into downtown. I bought a drink and watched the people on the sidewalk. It had been a short summer. There was a week of frozen streets. It was getting ready snow again. I walked into Chinatown and ate a cheap lunch. Down on the street two cops were walking up on an old man with a string of shopping carts. He had the carts tied together. One of the cops nodded to him.

“This your train?”

The old man lit a rolled cigarette and smoked through his long beard.

“It ain’t no fuckin’ train. But, yeah, it’s mine.”

I heard them going back and forth behind me. Portland was soft but it was hard. I didn’t know anybody anymore. I had been there six years. There was sometimes a flurry of people, then it would die off, then there was a girl here and there, and she would die off. I hadn’t had a girl in almost a year. I mostly stayed in my room.

I opened the drapes and wrote about the job, the building, Dave and the schizophrenic. For some reason, I laid down and jacked off thinking about fucking Shelly. I had her on her desk and her bird legs were wrapped around my waist, her thirsty hair soaked with sweat. It was a good one. I shot over my shoulder.

The phone rang. It was her. “Hello, Kurt.”

“Hello.”

“It’s Shelly.”

“I know.”

“This is awkward. Listen, Manny just put his fist through our living room window and walked out. Apparently he was lingering by the door after he left and heard everything I said to you. Pretty low, if you ask me.”

“Oh, he’s a fucker.”

I wiped off with my sheet and pulled my shirt back down.

She sighed. “You really threw me for a loop in my office, what you said to me.”

“It’s alright, Shelly. No need for me to go back there.”

“Thank you, Kurt. I really appreciate that. Listen, why don’t I stop by for a little while?”

I hung up. It rang back and I unplugged it. I heard Dave knocking on the door across from me, yelling about someone being in her room after ten pm. It had cost me next to nothing to live there, but next to nothing is what it was. I sat up and found my sweater and pulled my duffel bag from under the bed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkaxy2-7Jqc

{...audio link below}

The red bird was her favorite. Reminded her of old songs from her youth. The blue was the wiser. Never preened for anyone but her. The morning her old man stayed gone, she went ahead and fixed the glass. From his time gone, four days followed with what could be, had the heavens heard her wish. When the detectives came in to tell her the news, she had two words for them: You sure? They glanced at each other, and one of them asked her to come down with them to identify the body, to sit for questioning. She looked at the birds. A tear broke loose over its edge. Once and big. Long crawl down. Inside the tear, the years of it, over. She breathed and looked skyward. Swollen heart. The joy in her. The detectives stared at each other. After she had viewed the corpse, grey room, two-way glass. Never a suspect, but her relief at the news caused intrigue in the lead detective he had not felt in years. Heartbeat aside, he needed a recorded statement. He set the coffee in front of her. Before he hit record he had squeezed her hand.

“Just protocol, sweetheart.”

The apartment between them, empty. His on the end of the hall. Hers two down on the left. The Sun gone from the city, the last moments of light, gold. A knock. Nobody knocked on their floor. Out of bed, the dream pulled pack, a café blurred. Feet to floor. Eye through the Jeff Stewart 30 doorway. Two men in suits, talking to Aria. Her door open. Her body unseen. The men were sharpened. Linear men. He listened there nude. The detectives, there by word of the bartender. The body was discovered a week after death, they canvassed. Easy work led them to Aria. Her voice from her place. The sound. Satin over chalk. The music. She had nothing for them. She had neither felt him walking behind her nor heard a sound. Blade broken off in his head, teeth kicked out. In that order. They waited for body language. Aria, stared through them. She asked them how the landlord was holding up, and nothing more. They left, locked out. A beat of three on down, and the shower turned on.

At the counter, she watched them leave the lift. Across the lobby. The lead told her they were still working the case, but after this much time, absence of outside prints, and the fact nobody in the area knew anything, to have no expected miracles. She smiled at him. This one was plenty. Done with the floor upstairs. The face and body behind the door up there. The ink behind her robe. The hardness of the widow facing him. He gave her a smile, loose. He left with his partner.

Night in the city had swallowed day and any trace of the case. The city kept him busy for its own reasons.

The old man was prepared for nothing, and he remained that way. What he wanted from the city was easy, a blank space from which to breathe. On his bed in the dirt, when the city called to him it was nature now. Servitude, hungry. Involuntary. Never enough love from the skyline, from the base of his fathers looking down on him. When the night covered the city, the old man could even see the tops of the buildings bent down, slight, glass eyes watching his blood.

—Four nights back, a long thought up into the stars, he had been pulled to his feet. A degenerate moved west down the boulevard to pluck their flower. The old man in dirt, he was a fix for the city. Nothing he would do more. Where the silhouette of the stranger would walk east, across the street moved the beauty of the city, a song of life everyone heard but her. A mass of silhouette following. The old man reached down his side and gripped the handle. When he moved, he moved to hunt. The warm voices in his head, what was needed, and what he would give.

Unlimited love:

Leave the blade inside, son. Take his teeth for fun.

The kill was not the first, the last, or the slowest. He had done worse to others when the city called him out.

At the counter. The landlady sat, younger. A reverse lift of burden, Schopenhauer. Her old man, dead, the city out there in her consideration. Her birds in tune with her. Well-slept, bellies full. Songs of the streets, audible now. She had tried to feel for him, to feel the loss, any type of semblance to sorrow. It fell dead upon conjure. The wish for him to feel long pain, fear until his end, was the only stone in her faded. Her fridge bulging with health. Skin on the mend. Lotion on her face, lemons to her elbows. Unlimited moonrise, a kind Sun. The faces crossing the lobby almost beautifully. The fridge became full on the afternoon of the letter from the holdings company. A condolence, and praise for her work. She was full management now. All checks would be paid to her name. It arrived with one, made out with an extra month in full. Hers. Signed with a stamp. She sent the post office box a card. A message of grace, of gratitude. She dipped her wedge in honey, sucked it off the end. A slow bite into the meat of the fruit. Life had not been as bright as this dark truth. Age set aside, she could breathe and live like the others did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhSmgRd50d8

I drove down to Tijuana and went to jail. In there I was beaten repeatedly. I was arrested for absolutely nothing. One minute, I was walking past a prostitute after I had parked and locked my car, walking around Mars, past the strange billboards and faces destroyed by poverty, in a town destroyed and dependent upon lust and drugs. I was walking around people who hated me for needing me. The poor sat in file on the sidewalks, their palms out. The faces on the necks reminded me of shrunken fruit. The owners of strip joints and street-side booths were happy to see me. Their English was broken and desperate. The prostitute followed me. She was offering me anything. Her face was a novel. It was carved throughout with lines of grief, with angry knuckles and damage from the sun. Her hair was like black straw electrified on its post. Her eyes were sorry. Her whole self almost brought me to tears. I reached into my pocket in the middle of that dark orange sea and handed her a fivespot. She handed me a crumpled baggie with nothing in it. She hustled off. The next minute, I was dropped on my face, cuffed and stuffed and wiping the blood from my forehead onto the back of a torn leather headrest.

In jail the big Mexicans pummeled me in turn. One tried to get my pants off. I fought them wildly. After a while they gave up, from time to time walking by the corner I was thrown into and kicking me, spitting on me. The cops held me for nine hours, took everything I had and kicked me in the ass, out into the dark. Back at my car, my rear windshield was gone and the whole car was gutted, save the driver’s seat. They even got the mirrors. My bike was gone, my music, my books, my backpack, my life. They had my keys back in that dungeon. I could feel the Mexicans laughing at me behind the rusted bars. They were sitting on that diseased, urine stained concrete with no windows, sweating and laughing about me. I broke off my ignition switch with a rock so I could turn the wheel. I had never jump started a car before. I learned quickly. The guards at the border showed no interest in my face.

I drove to Yuma, bitterly. I was low on fuel. It was December. The desert was cold but my face burned with a heat I’d never known. I pulled into a gas station and explained to the Indian behind the counter what had happened. He shook his head. I asked him for ten dollars in gas so I could get to Phoenix. He said nope. Up the street I found a Shell station. The old lady said that I could gas up and she would treat it like a drive off. In the bathroom I locked the door and looked in the mirror. I looked like a mask. My whole face was twisted and swollen. I looked diseased. I fell back against the door and sank to the ground.

I drove north with a sympathy cup of coffee and a full tank. The wind from the opening in back chilled my neck and shoulders, the exhaust billowed inside and choked me, made me sick. The smell flavored my coffee. One of my eyes had just swollen shut so I drove the limit, confused.

I reached Phoenix before dusk. At a stoplight, two girls stared at me like I was an animal. I could feel them. They honked. I looked over. They were laughing with the two guys that were in the backseat. No mercy. By the time I found my sister’s house I was sick from the exhaust and the desert on top of the germs from the floor of the jail spreading under the cuts. I was certain I could not go on for another second. The house was empty. She had moved.

I called one of my brothers collect in Illinois, woke him up. He gave me her new address. He asked me how I was and so on. During the conversation I would throw up while he was talking. I told him everything was fine and that I was home for a while, at least until after the holidays. He told me he loved me. I threw up. I made it back to my car and used up the rest of my strength finding the address.

I parked. Her house was bigger. I could see the Christmas tree in the window. I had nothing to carry inside. She lived in a better part of town. I hadn’t spoken to her for a long time. I thought it was funny this would be the second time in a row I showed up at her place badly beaten. Only this time was worse. I had long hair and was older, taller, a little heavier from working labor. I didn’t want her to see it. I made it to the door and pushed the ringer.

One of my nieces answered. She stared at me. I asked her why she wasn’t in school. She ran back down the hall yelling for my sister. I walked into the doorway. She came out dressed for work. When she saw me she screamed. I broke out laughing. I couldn’t help it. She pulled me in. I stank. When she tried to hug me I stopped her and told her I was in too much pain. She wanted to take me to the hospital. I waved it off.

“Who did this to you?”

“The Mexicans.”

She wanted to stay home from work. I told her she didn’t need to waste a day’s pay watching me sleep. I was glad she wasn’t crying. If I never saw a woman cry again it would be too soon. I told her not to make too much out of it. I asked her not to tell anybody I was in town. I made her go to work. I walked into the living room and fell over the arm of the couch and landed on the cushions. I passed out instantly.

I saw the last two years float by on a string. I saw Los Angeles, Venice, Kim’s mouth opening larger than my head and swallowing it, coughing out a tear. I saw Cliff riding an altar boy in the jacuzzi, I saw subdivisions being erected by slaves in loincloths. They hoisted the walls into position by long, heavy ropes. I saw a baby being shot out of a cannon into the middle of the ocean. I saw Kim in profile smoking a cigarette. She took a long pull and the cherry opened up into a flower that expanded backwards into large flames and reduced her face and the rest of California behind her to ash. My mother rose from her coffin and danced a half skeletal dance. Then the dream darkened, a sheet was pulled over my head and there was nothing, not even a graveyard.

I woke up dry as a bone. The house was dark. I had shit and pissed my pants. I made it to the bathroom and washed, scrubbed my only clothes clean and tossed them outside to dry. I had never been so sick in my whole life. My ribcage was painted up and down with bruises from being thrown against the bars. Every moving part of me was stiff. I crawled back under the blanket and fell asleep in shame, hoping that whoever covered me while I was sleeping did so before I lost control of my functions. I slept hard, and woke up older.

I could hear the television. I felt my nieces standing over me. They were talking about me. I reached out from under the blanket and grabbed a leg. They screamed and laughed. I pulled her down on top of me. It hurt. She was bigger. She got away. They ran down the hall then back to the couch. I asked the youngest if she would be a sweetheart and go get my clothes from out back. She brought them in. They were stiff from the sun. I pulled the blanket from my face and dressed underneath. I laid back and asked them where my nephew was. “At his little girlfriend’s.”

I thought about how long I’d been gone. Janie was the oldest. She smiled, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“I have a boyfriend.”

They yelled and ran back to the room. “Mom! Mom! Uncle Jeff has a BOYFRIEND!” I sat up slowly. My nieces sat around me on the couch.

“What happened to your face?” Lily asked.

“Nothing. What are you talking about?”

She looked at Janie. “He’s lying.”

I sat forward and rested my head into my palms. They watched me. “You tired?”

“Nope.”

Janie shook my leg. “You’ve been sleeping for 2 days.”

“What’s today?”

“Saturday.

-excerpt from Breath Upon A Burn. I read some of this for the audiobook version, coming soon. Here's the link, if you want to hear it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9LIkiNobH4

Aria. Awake in bed, arms above her head, stomach rising and falling with breath. Ginger on her tongue. Abdomen, rye. Her mind, steel. Blackened. The pills only hurt, so she kicked without any help. Four years back. Four days of dread, brain snaps, tingles in her fingers and toes, palpitations. Heart on edge. Four more days of a hole in her chest. Withdrawals. Synthetic. Four more days of recovery, and four more days to clear the way.

Withdrawn.

Without synchronicity.

Always kick on a Monday. Allow Sunday to be the gate.

She kicked on a Monday. Midnight to end Sunday. It had been that way with liquor, with cigarettes, with sugar. She put nothing in the way of feel. Her walls were plenty without help. Her father built the first one, but she had learned control with the first line of ink. Lightning strike, once to remain alone, forever. No other line would be so new. No other pain shocking. Graffiti for the walls, for her own understanding, for her understanding of alone. For her love with it, their affair. On her back. Quilt over glass. Moonrise.

 —Four years back, she kicked on a Monday. Midnight. Sunday behind her to show the week it would give itself over or lose her. Wild pig days, itching blood. Taper Sunday to midnight. Clean sheets. Showered and in bed. Breathed up into the night, remembered a story of stars up there, the belt of Orion, the burning of light. Eskimos whose souls would find Heaven stepping up the stars of his belt. Three on the rise up. Open arms of somebody never dead. The story of it, the sadness.

Her sadness. A psalm of the city. A flower filled with blood. Unmoving.

A plant in her heart. It grew only when she shed what was not needed.

She was a flower grown from the city, and it was proud, so proud even death would not usurp her. Her skin graced by the city, the design, the product it pushed. She was vindicated through crawling up a victim. Now the faces of the city were there to keep the flower strong, to keep it alive. With the city as her only love, the nightmares had stopped with her addictions. The city saw to that. When the sadness would punctuate its reach, the city only moved faster to heal.

Her face in the mirror. Sunfall. The lights along the awnings breathed possibilities into the sidewalk, breathed sleaze. One stroke of eyeshadow twice, one carton of juice drained, and the elevator spat her out. The landlord smiled. Lobby. Aria gave her a nod, a late-night-at-the-office sigh, and the landlord laughed, watched her walk away, to someplace offering risks meaning memories. What she would not give to be in the skin, the youth of her, the years facing forward from her. Behind the counter, what the old woman would never know. The eyes of men and lesbians would mean much to her, the smell of the stage, the degenerates, as long as they would want her, she would give herself to them. The years behind the counter. The city was her thief, but she knew nothing righteous. Her eyes clung to the coat of Aria. Long, black. Her hair blue and white, the city opened with neon, prostrated in wait, when her boots would touch the concrete, the city would begin. The landlord looked away.

Aria disappeared through the door.

Tall Jack Coke. He drank half. Two drunks sat facing the bottles blocking the mirror. One drunk spoke to him, but the other cut him off, a pat on the forearm. The stranger spoke to no one but the bartender, and even now the words became one nod: Two shots, a pint, and a tall Jack Coke down the road. The drunk shrugged it off, and they focused on the two women. The bartender looked over the shoulder of the stranger, out the window, while Aria walked past for the place next door, where she would remain until four in the morning, where she would pull in more than any attorney in the city. The drunks and the women followed his stare. The drunks laughed at the bartender, his lust, they laughed along. They knew her silhouette as much as the others. Aria went into the building next door. The bartender shook his head and uttered one word.

“Beautiful.”

Beautiful. The stranger stared into his glass. The word rested upon his lips, a dead thing. Beautiful. Did not come close. The word could not approach her. Aria. Beautiful. It cheapened her. Diluted.

Beautiful.

A useless, shiny adjective.

The name was not lost on him. She was a flower reborn by the city. His. He would wait for the time to tell her what she was, when she would listen to him, when he would make the connection fixed for the time ahead. A flower. His. A child risen from the city, into his own. Like the plant from the blood of Robinson Jeffers, the line from the book had scratched him. Long scar. Unmoved beneath the sky her ghost set over him. The flower in his blood, Aria. Her fingers set in ink, born from the city, meant only to move through his hair. Moving through obsidian. Burn the film off his body. Nothing smelled as sweet as blood.

Her blood. It sat in his, trapped by him. When she would move he would feel it. Next door she would work the stage, the faces. When the other girls would spray and wipe the pole after their time, it made her sick, so she never went near it. Aria. No inversions, no slow slides down, no ascents to communize her, no bills handed to her or placed upon her. Their money, on the foot of the stage in front. The faces in the crowd, the look from them. The bodies beneath her. On stage, in dream to get her through, she would watch them burn to bone and ash. The other girls, how they went nude and often beyond, rejects of the city reaching for its grace. Outstretched, ignored. Aria, not once exposing her body as nude, not having to. Her mystery piped in from the city, the Moon on high, the lights and the sick things filtered for her, for the view of the city to keep it for its own. The city. The air as flesh, the rain as veins, the night sky as blood. Aria, her flesh as rain. Next door, the stranger finished his drink and walked out.

Silhouette walking west. The old man watched and it was no more. On his back there, dirt cooled, the night receding lighter. Torn back by dawn, when the city put him to sleep, when the light would bore the artists, the thinkers, the hunters. Light in the city, the expansion of lungs, only levered because it had to be. Tolerated. Daylight for the adopted. Loved just enough. They had to be there for business. Landscape and lifting. Commerce and order, base work. When the Sun would fail, the real blood woke and waited for the naked stars.

—From The Velocity of Ink, a book I wrote, and one I'm reading for Audible. Here's a link for the narration of the chapters above, if you want to hear it. Thanks to @Mamba for creating the photos to go along with the read on YouTube. Here's the link.

https://youtu.be/nCNPIuBK_uw

Here's the link to the book.

https://jeffstewartauthor.com/the-velocity-of-ink/

The red bird was her favorite. Reminded her of old songs from her youth. The blue was the wiser. Never preened for anyone but her. The morning her old man stayed gone, she went ahead and fixed the glass. From his time gone, four days followed with what could be, had the heavens heard her wish. When the detectives came in to tell her the news, she had two words for them: You sure? They glanced at each other, and one of them asked her to come down with them to identify the body, to sit for questioning. She looked at the birds. A tear broke loose over its edge. Once and big. Long crawl down. Inside the tear, the years of it, over. She breathed and looked skyward. Swollen heart. The joy in her. The detectives stared at each other. After she had viewed the corpse, grey room, two-way glass. Never a suspect, but her relief at the news caused intrigue in the lead detective he had not felt in years. Heartbeat aside, he needed a recorded statement. He set the coffee in front of her. Before he hit record he had squeezed her hand.

“Just protocol, sweetheart.”

The apartment between them, empty. His on the end of the hall. Hers two down on the left. The Sun gone from the city, the last moments of light, gold. A knock. Nobody knocked on their floor. Out of bed, the dream pulled back, a café blurred. Feet to floor. Eye through the doorway. Two men in suits, talking to Aria. Her door open. Her body unseen. The men were sharpened. Linear men. He listened there nude. The detectives, there by word of the bartender. The body was discovered a week after death, they canvassed. Easy work led them to Aria. Her voice from her place. The sound. Satin over chalk. The music. She had nothing for them. She had neither felt him walking behind her nor heard a sound. Blade broken off in his head, teeth kicked out. In that order. They waited for body language. Aria, stared through them. She asked them how the landlord was holding up, and nothing more. They left, locked out. A beat of three on down, and the shower turned on.

At the counter, she watched them leave the lift. Across the lobby. The lead told her they were still working the case, but after this much time, absence of outside prints, and the fact nobody in the area knew anything, to have no expected miracles. She smiled at him. This one was plenty. Done with the floor upstairs. The face and body behind the door up there. The ink behind her robe. The hardness of the widow facing him. He gave her a smile, loose. He left with his partner. Night in the city had swallowed day and any trace of the case.

The city kept him busy for its own reasons.

The old man was prepared for nothing, and he remained that way. What he wanted from the city was easy, a blank space from which to breathe. On his bed in the dirt, when the city called to him it was nature now. Servitude, hungry. Involuntary. Never enough love from the skyline, from the base of his fathers looking down on him. When the night covered the city, the old man could even see the tops of the buildings bent down, slight, glass eyes watching his blood.

—Four nights back, a long thought up into the stars, he had been pulled to his feet. A degenerate moved west down the boulevard to pluck their flower. The old man in dirt, he was a fix for the city. Nothing he would do more. Where the silhouette of the stranger would walk east, across the street moved the beauty of the city, a song of life everyone heard but her. A mass of silhouette following. The old man reached down his side and gripped the handle. When he moved, he moved to hunt. The warm voices in his head, what was needed, and what he would give. Unlimited love:

Leave the blade inside, son. Take his teeth for fun.

The kill was not the first, the last, or the slowest. He had done worse to others when the city called him out.

At the counter. The landlady sat, younger. A reverse lift of burden, Schopenhauer. Her old man, dead, the city out there in her consideration. Her birds in tune with her. Well-slept, bellies full. Songs of the streets, audible now. She had tried to feel for him, to feel the loss, any type of semblance to sorrow. It fell dead upon conjure. The wish for him to feel long pain, fear until his end, was the only stone in her faded. Her fridge bulging with health. Skin on the mend. Lotion on her face, lemons to her elbows. Unlimited moonrise, a kind Sun. The faces crossing the lobby almost beautifully. The fridge became full on the afternoon of the letter from the holdings company. A condolence, and praise for her work. She was full management now. All checks would be paid to her name. It arrived with one, made out with an extra month in full. Hers. Signed with a stamp. She sent the post office box a card. A message of grace, of gratitude. She dipped her wedge in honey, sucked it off the end. A slow bite into the meat of the fruit. Life had not been as bright as this dark truth. Age set aside, she could breathe and live like the others did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4r9OztHPs4