CURB ALERT
-1-
There’s a buzz, low and constant, echoing deep within the walls of this aged house. Things have died in these walls, carcasses rotted away to only bones, brittle and gray. Still, the odor of decaying flesh remains noxious and thick like chemical fog. The decayed wood frame creaks and moans, teeth grinding whatever’s inside to dust as crumbling horsehair plaster rattles between lath and posts and scraps of wood, unceremoniously burying the bones. Years ago, these rooms, these halls were filled with life, now a faint resonance; the wallpaper, flowered yet faded, smells of stale tobacco smoke and mold. As it falls to the ground in thundering crashes, there’s a slight sense of relief that comes with accepting death. But louder. A cacophony of reverberating cries from fifty years neglect, chaos in folds and bends, caving in on itself as if giving in to the gravity of loneliness, its arms folded across itself and wailing in abandon. Chirp. Knock. The oil furnace screams like a locomotive furrowing through centuries, laying waste to the souls of Chinese immigrants once thought too weak to lay the cold steel tracks across miles of desolate land. The dust circles and billows, a swirl evaporating to nothing like the breath of snorting cattle left to roam.
At the roadside, there’s a crudely made sign that reads: Antique two chair and sofa set Victorian. FREE. We have been driving this country road for what seems like hours, past long stretches of nothing. But there the sign sits, weather-worn and hand-painted in farmhouse red, staked into the ground at the foot of the entrance beside a shabby mailbox with shiny decals on the side. Next to it sits a transparent oversized garbage bag, tied at the top in a careful knot, covering pink and light brown shapes that bulge at its seams with spotted areas of deep red moving slowly beneath the thin milky white plastic. Through a tear, an imperceptible incision, the hair-like strands reach out dirty, brown and rigid, pointing varied like blades of grass. This insulation, this wadding that used to hang from water damaged holes in the ceiling, now slumbers roadside, a nest for clawing, filthy rodents. The flies that circle above move in unison up, up, and away and out of sight living out their brief lives with intention, not waiting for destiny to come to them.
A few minutes later, the road forks. We pause, idling among the thick trees lining both sides of the dirt road, which rises up into the horizon and disappears under sagging mountains, purple and gold. At the center sits a scrapped hot water heater, rusted and dented. Someone has added other scrap metal to it, arms of dryer vent ducts and a red toolbox for a head. A makeshift Tin Man rusted stiff from wanderlust, waiting for validation from its own personal naked megalomaniac, under a thicket of thorn-covered veins. The arms are crossed and capped with hay-stuffed gloves, fingers pointing in opposite directions. We choose left. It chooses us. We split in two. We choose both, right and left, simultaneously. We board the train and we enter the house. We walk down the echoing hall and we pace on the platform. We look out through the window and we see ourselves standing there impatiently waiting, red toolbox and all. As we move through the thicket, trudging as slow as fingernails, the sun is at full height. This is before. Before, when outside was safe, when shimmering beams kissed glistening skin, warming layers of thick flesh and core, some becoming crimson, others the bronze of honey. As the train leaves the station, I am amazed at how slow this engine moves.
-2-
In the deep, dank darkness there’s a smell of bitter almonds and sulfur. The Gentleman, his back to us, drifts through the halls soundlessly pointing to spots on the wall where photographs used to hang, dark rectangles of missing memories. When he finally came to the door, after thunderous knocking like a tongue clicking in its hollow cavity of extracted teeth, his bent wrist dangling long cyan bones shown through translucent skin and pointing downward swaying uncontrolled, waving us in, he looked as though he was expecting us. Indecipherable purling exhaustedly puffing out under sparse white bristles and through thick mucilage seemed to form the word “in.” He guides us to a great room with deep scarlet walls, furniture covered in yellowed sheets, dust thick as blood. Uncovered, in the corner under an ornate brass floor lamp, sits a light green, overstuffed loveseat that years later, after her husband died, after her only child disowned her, after the anxiety and agoraphobia took over rendering her panic stricken and unable to leave, the cushion would be hard to tell if it is there at all. Flat and discolored, this was her spot. All around, piles of newspaper and old magazines with ads, articles, and coupons clipped out. On the floor, dirty pans, caked-on food and colonies of ants and gnats. She had taken to simply eating straight from cans of green beans, if at all. Next to the love seat, on a wooden chair, a child’s car seat. In it, a porcelain doll with blonde hair, perfect as if brushed constantly, and with one black eye opened wide the other permanently shut, its plastic eyelashes charred together. “Would you like to lie down now, Queenie?”
A voice, lost in the din of this large room while cherubs with hushed giggles and fear strapped to their small backs being dragged behind them like rows of emaciated corpses fettered together, rotting flesh torn asunder scraping along loose gravel, chase around annoyed felines among the clinking of glass and silver, and the Boy’s brown, secondhand coat smelling of the skeletal air. The men are shaking his small hand, shaking their aging heads; the women are looking through him with sympathetic eyes. They slowly move forward, kneel, mumble to themselves, and return to their seats. The Boy looks down at his shoes, avoiding their stares, repeatedly curling and releasing his toes, kneading the tissue paper that his mother stuffed in the tips; his father’s shoes. “You’ll just have to grow into them.” He darts his left hand into the coat pocket, rubbing his thumb over the face of the medal he took from his father’s dresser the night before. His mother had walked in and caught him rifling through the medal case, her Manhattan spilling with the uncontrolled shaking of her liver-spotted hand. She put her drink down on the nightstand as she sat on the bed. “You look just like your father.” She fixed his tie and straightened his shirt, aligning it with his belt buckle, her hands, cracked and cold, lingering slightly too long while tucking in his shirt. This day, acid etched yet buried under mounds of resistance, curdles and froths until lashing out unexpectedly. Memories like mercenaries acquisitively holding hostage the evolution of enlightenment.
The Gentleman sits in the Victorian slipper chair angled carefully in front of the fireplace as a smoldering fire lights the great room with flickering warmth. His legs are crossed and the slipper on his dangling foot hangs partially off. Behind him, a woman, critically thin and hunched, wraps the long cord of a vacuum around her spotted, tremoring arm. He doesn’t seem to notice her as she straightens her back, stiff and rigid, takes the last stretch of cord taut in her hands and loops it over his head, around his snakeskin throat. Gurgling gasps escape through his thin, white lips until his limp body slouches in the chair, his grey tongue protruding and bit through, bloody and fat. The woman loosens the tension of the cord and raises it in the air above his head. It sags in the middle, an awkward smile pinned up on either end by spotted, lucent hands. The ambulance sirens outside are all too late, moving in slow-motion compared to the restless spirits, who impatiently soar past the window, through centuries, lost and haunted. Nestled into the nape of his neck, I feel safe. I am a lotus flower. I am a fucking lotus flower adrift on the tranquil waters of this fucking day spa commercial. Some front for human trafficking, no doubt. The women in this commercial are slaves. Smiling out of the corner of their mouths, looking slightly off camera to assure they’re doing it right. He lets out a small seep of air from his mouth. It is warm and moist and I can feel it on my bare shoulder. Awaking on the floor, through blurred eyes, I see smoky entities hovering over me. It’s cold. They disappear when my eyes finally focus. Up against the cracked, faded pink walls, a box spring leans, its sides torn to shreds by the claws of some animal, strands of fabric like fringe move in the air whispering. A light, wide and white and bouncing off the shining and shivering edges at angles in all directions; quivering in the air like gauge needles, loud as metal, time bent in arcs bulging out in ribbons, flowing from a sharp point projected through a hole in the wall revealing particles, a whirling vacuum of suspended specks, texture in the firmament. Under worn floorboards, beneath the cold earth, worms prepare for their uprising to once again come to the surface in droves, only to be squashed between the toes of mindless wanderers or used as bait on the hooks of the lonely, desperately seeking other grave, blank expressions.
This is my least favorite self.
-3-
Beyond matters of the heart and far from the swollen well wishes, the Boy, now Man, grates through days weighted down with faded relics of someone else’s past. Memory is a palace, an unreliable lie retold until rooted, growing branches that reach laterally, never forward. Or, fatty bulbous tissue metastasizing in fissures, relentlessly filling any open space. If light were able to, it would say it, but darkness decides, choking on thick words, tense like piano wire. “It’s the air now. Used to be able to stay outside hours at a time. Now…now, well, there’s no room.” And factories drift by, billowing labor into the atmosphere while beyond the pink night there are actually stars still, yet they move. Move like a swarm. Still, I remember standing there, in the midst of it, transfixed by the blinking, neon sign. They all stop too. We lift our right arms, in unison. We lower them. Our arms raise once more and hold there, as if tied at the wrist with string. A deep rumble. Flash. One track minds. A flash...you never hear it until it's already here and either it got you, so you didn't hear it anyway, or the chaos muddles the explosion with the medal, stone, scream that seems to have been ringing in your ears since childhood. “They gather. Flying cardboard wands in the air. Tonight, there are 5,000 wanderers.” They lift themselves into the air in a great thunder, monstrous beasts hovering, swerving to the east sun, and then, in a blink, reverse direction, turning inside out as if steered by a single mind. A swarm possessed whining in a centerless, loud drone, a flickering halo drifting slowly away.
"I've never lost anything unintentionally."
"Never lost anything you didn't mean to?"
"Then it wouldn't be lost"
Like machines that chew other machines, they feel nothing but a dull ache. They see nothing but a dim grayness, or is it blackness? We are released and time propels in all directions. A steady hum soon melts into a steady silence of colors, streaks of neon and grey and the questions we never ask.
