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28.9 making love in a silo
62 a woman with a straight back playing a grand piano
62.3 a woman with a straight back playing a dulcimer
62.8 a woman with a straight back playing a tuba
57.9 being killed by a fish across the face
671 a child of young years eating an orange rind
6,421 being blinded by strawberries in winter
92.4 a dog on the outskirts of town
109 slicing your tongue on a pop can
587 death by ingesting fizzing candies
838 getting to touch the hand of a loved one before death
2,876 gnawing off a limb to escape
offer it daily at set hours
on the night’s spine, at breakfast, by the washing post
90 my hand in the mud
91 mud upon your chest
Even after a careful sniff, swill and spit you cannot discern whether it’s the curative chemicals, the plain death, the shucked-out bodies resting somewhere below the floorboards that you sidle over, the airy hollow homishness of the décor (in tasteful mauve and teal tones), or the stiffly be-suited employees perpetually scurrying off behind pine doors to drink coffee, chew crullers like cud, and yam on about hunting and groceries that dominate the bouquet of this funereal habitat's opus of violent, defiant antisepticism. Whatever it is, the towering opposition to the living, in general, manifests itself quite specifically in a marked hostility towards germs, bodily functions, as well as any and all biological liquids and solids. This hostility is so great that in the bathroom you don’t even feel like you’re shitting. Menstruation is still conceivable here, because at its root, to menstruate is merely to eject the possibility of life’s formation by expelling it into the world possessed of only mucus, membrane and blood. But shit, shit is far too full of breeding life.
There are only seven mourners in the assigned “Windsor” parlor of the chain funeral home. The tall red candles framing the head and foot of the coffin are the only objects that signify ceremony.
The bag of bones does not appear to know who any of the seven mourners are, with the exception of herself and her handlers. She is wearing fleece pajamas and a robe with snowmen on it. Elvira, the old lady, is replete with the smell America has come to expect of their old and institutionalized; ‘Old People smell’ is the most easily identifiable smell in the free world, with the possible exception of ‘New Car smell.’
Her bombed out eyes haunt around their fleshiness trying to name these others. Her gaze slides after each of their movements sailing from one body to another, casting ashore on their pink lips, coming about on the curves of their spines, lighting upon their round cheeks, their buttocks, and their bellies.
She pines for them to feed her. All she can think about is hash browns. One must have some structure, something golden to move towards. She already inhaled three on the way here and will have three more on the way back to the Veteran’s Home. That morning at McDonald's she lucidly announced to her handlers that they better get some extra because breakfast ends at eleven.
As the younger woman in black leans down by her chair and looks into her face, ‘What an over tragic little fool and plump to boot,’ flashes like closed captioning across a blank screen. And the bag of bones groans softly, gurgles a little and then whispers, “Who, who...”
The plump little fool doesn’t hear the old lady; she is too busy pondering the formation of her spine, reflecting on and then perfecting – through minor doll-like adjustments – the angle of her head. She is melting down her face to attain the softness appropriate to mourning. It ain’t easy to hold a posture of sympathy under these circumstances. The old lady’s breath stinks like grease and rotten salmon and summer melons. As the little plump fool looks down, fighting the instinct to recoil, she is struck by the remembrance card with the predatory floating eagle emblazoned over the flag; the red and blue do battle with the tissue paper spanning the musculature of Elvira’s skeletal palm.
The seven mourners have placed four high back chairs and a love seat in a semi-circle. The handlers hope this will give the environs a more personal feel. Locked into this half-moon formation (because forward is casket and backward are rows of folding chairs for people who just couldn’t make it) the mourners catch up on life: graduations, koi ponds, investments strategies in this market, new jobs, car troubles, other illnesses, allergies. Only occasionally interrupted by a peculiar pause when their joviality is cut down by the ever present overly rouged corpse.
Elvira, the bag of bones, holds the death card with the big bold eagle and shoots glances at the coffin. Her eyes are trying to sneak out of her own skull. They are sick of this crap. She has had her hash browns and she is sated. After all, they have been living apart from each other in the home for years; he hasn’t opened his eyes in months. It was rumored that she had a boyfriend on the side, in the other home, the first home. That, and the cost, is why they moved her. She exhibits no reaction to this death thing. The only anomaly her handlers have noted is that three hundred and forty dollars is missing from her bank account; they postulate that she used the cash to buy new underwear and probably some hash browns when on the weekly group trips into the Wal-Mart.
The deceased brought her to this country in 1952. They had no children. They lived in the same dark apartment with high windows and a galley kitchen for thirty years. It was a bitch to clean out when the handlers moved them to the first home. Elvira was not much of a homemaker; she never dusted. She dyed her hair with Egyptian Henna; they found cases of it on the closet floor and under her bed. The plump little fool keeps one of the containers on her dresser at home in some sort of infantile offering. They found a lacy black teddy under his bed.
The priest appears out of the chemical air and performs the most unceremonious ceremony imaginable. He mutters something about how the deceased went to church on Tuesdays, body willing. Then another prescient personal observation about how the deceased, a military man, would salute our holy Father whenever he passed his darkened room. The Father is all dolled up in a horrendous mantle, circa 1970s, struck heinous with abstract geometrical shapes in primary green and yellow, a pox on its polyester surface.
Father so-and-so deploys that calm pattern of speech that religious officers often use. The emissaries of higher powers must believe that this cadence makes people think they are connected, closer to some source of the divine. As if they are fooling anyone with that crap. As if people don’t know full goddamn well – and better than most contemporary men of the cloth – that if there is a divine, said divine, bears no relationship – whatsoever – with a performed sense of calm.
Elvira is inscrutable. The handlers like to think it is her sadness or her delirium, perhaps her oblivion. It might just be this place. In here everything leans toward something without being anything – old Sundays, old friends, worn chairs – tasteful not wasteful – nicely done up, but not ornate.
The two women that are not Elvira perch awkwardly on the edge of the fatted love seat trying their best not to recline or sink down into it, trying their best to behave as if they are on a hard wooden pew while the small group haltingly prays out the Lord’s Prayer. Then it's off to the burial.
“What is it you want me to do now?” Elvira asks the handler leading her by the arm to the casket’s edge.
It's all pretty dignified in that suburban sprawl sort of way.
The funeral procession travels to the Veteran’s Cemetery. Used to be farmland, but now in this part of the county the only Great Harvest is a Target. There is a tremendous amount of construction at the cemetery. Bulldozers have stripped clean the hills, there is a thin layer of red dust over the graves, the equipment, the small stuffed animals, the figurines, and now on our cars think, in unison, all three of the peeved men who are driving at the behest of their sentimental wives.
The procession waits. They are eight minutes early and even though there is no burial before them they will not be permitted to start until their designated hour, lest all be lost to chaos then.
The deceased receives a full military send off. All of them are impressed by the guns, what a treat. During the part with the bugle and then when they hand her the flag and the spent shells a thick molasses sadness founded on ritual conditioning pours out from the souls of all present. Everyone tears up. The transcendent attractiveness of the moment is only lessened by the awkward nose-blowing of the cemetery liaison in the back left corner of the room.
And then it's really done. Outside everyone says how surprisingly touching it had been.
One of the handlers turns toward Elvira and motions to the small plastic Ziploc packed with shell casings, “Isn’t that lovely, really special, that they gave those to you?”
Elvira nods, and then, “What are they?”
The other handler speaks up, looking woefully into Elvira’s eyes, “They’re the shell casings from the salute they did for Tom, Elvira, for you to keep with you.”
“Oh,” Elvira says turning her walker with precision towards the hot car where her hash browns wait. Flat-out refusing to be handled, “Oh, I thought they were batteries.”
During the months of late March and early April, round thereabouts, I had a reoccurring dream. Each night after this bout of dreaming I would awaken to find tears streaking down my cheeks.
The dream almost always – except once when it didn’t – it almost always began with me lying across my bed, not asleep, listening for something. A car would stop in front of my house, an El Dorado. It was a beat up maroon color. I don’t know how I know ‘cuz I never got up to have seen. I would hear footsteps on the front stairs. I would rise from the bed. I would go to the door and open it to find this Preacher. How I knew he was a Preacher I don’t know ‘cuz he was dead ringer for a tall redhead I used to know. Anyway, there he stood, his hat in his hands.
He would look at me and say, “Old Gold Joe there’s been an accident.” And I would say, “Bad how, how bad?” and he would answer, “The worst. _______ is dead.”
At this point I would turn from him and park my rear in my old green rocker. He would kneel at my feet and hold up his cold hands, as if hands meant something, and say, “Let’s pray.”
I always awoke in tears. I have said nothing about this dream.
As much at home in the kitchen as in the parlor, Madame is a famous hostess. But there is not much entertaining to be had these days. Madame eats porridge. At one time she had spent the balance of her days pressing her nose and brow against the middle pane of the east window on the top floor of her tall house. Gazing out, she would simply subtract the mountains from the landscape so that she could see the sea. Madame had never thought about sailing on it. For her the sea contained neither port nor passage, nary a demarcation nor a beacon. The sea was what she saw. That body of water was what compelled her to clap her palms firmly to her thighs and rakishly urged her to suck shamelessly upon her sugared, peach and fleshly finger.
Now that their children had gone, she and he, had rounded out their lives. After years of subtracting the mountains it came, that inevitable day, the day when she could no longer see the sea. Gone. The sea had packed up and picked up, moved on to other, younger windows. Poor Madame, the loss of a good lover is a rough roll.
Madame eats porridge in the morning in the kitchen. She prefers her porridge hearty; her spoon standing at attention. She imagines her spoon is a soldier decked out with the most exquisite silver buttons.
On one irradiated white morning, Madame sits with her porridge and her soldier, searching for a spiritual sensibility in his metallic countenance, but it is the reflection of her own eye that she finds in him. And around the corner of her amber eye rests the finely crafted lattice work of a mayoral husband, the loss of her children and then her lover, the solitude of sunlight, the dryness of yellowing paper; in short, Madame makes acquaintance with the physical manifestations of loss. This, she reflects, is the whole of it all: her spoon soldier, Madame herself, a gas burner and a bowl of thick porridge. So she rises and to the stove. She grasps her soldier firmly in her fat hand above the blue flame. Lowering him inch by inch. She half expects him to speak to her as she believes God should have spoken to her. Madame heaves up her heavy skirt and presses her spoon’s whispering head to the cool flesh of her glacial thighs.
Once: a kiss and a cry.
Twice: a kiss and moan.
Thrice: a kiss and a wail.
As her eyeballs rollick back into her skull, Madame beholds the enduring grayness of her brain. Her life has seemed to go on as if one side of her face - cheek, ear, eye - had been perpetually ground into the pillow during the commission of a rough (yet boring and interminable) sexual position. It had been hot and she cold. It had been quick and she slow. It had been loud and she muffled. Life had stolen all her petty cash. It had, however, left her this strand of three remarkable jewels upon her thigh, a sin as blue and promising as a nest of Robin’s eggs. Madame is left the markers of this singular action, which she will forever call by the name of adultery.
The mayor at dinner:
There were warm traces of mint on his breath, Madame reflects as he rockets off her ample stinging thighs. At this instant it strikes him solidly both in the loin and in the logic – her hips quivering in wait atop the table – that her big bare thighs atop the table are not thighs. They are Portuguese Men-of-War compelled hither out of that green Hellenic sea to settle revenge upon him for his boyish fantasies of colonial invasion. His wife, a traitor; this very lovemaking contrition. She is a secret, trading in more than the pricks and pangs of duck serving and lace making. The red roast ebbing under the bridge of her arched back is no more a rare roast. The windows not windows; his bed is not a bed. His linens no more are linens; the forks and the flowers have made an irrevocable foray over metamorphosis’ border. He throws open the doors to the dining room, exits the house and heads up the mountain. The mountain is always and only a mountain.
She refuses to cry out. She bites down on the lining of her cheek. She has never been that type of girl. She longs for her soldier’s touch upon her thigh. She calls that touch by the tender term 'our Spanish sunset.'
Madame had always been a beautiful specimen, but these days she stands nude before her glass both day and night.
