Habit

I moved two streets over from my house on Free Will Road; now I live beside the courthouse. At midday, I hear the magistrates ring the gathering bell before they drop the gallow floor. 

My neighbors are all Calvinists. Every night, all the household fathers raise their arms and ask forgiveness for their foulness over plates of bean casserole. The Judge lives in the house to my right. He’s always shaking. He comes out of his door in a buckle hat and buckle boots– I stop him before he buckles up his bucking horse and rides away in his buckle-buggy: 

He says, Yer highlone in the world unless ye be of Abram’s lot. 

I say, How am I to know?  

He looks at me like my face is carved up in cuneiform, then he sees the house behind my head– my house, with its sliding-in roof and rats-for-brick– and says, May God be with ye.

…

So, I look at my hand. I follow the lines until they become my arm. 

Everything, 

on the surface and below– 

hair, skin, 

tendon, 

blood, 

bone– 

is contained in this shape. In the three letters: A-R-M. I spell it out, but it doesn’t feel right. I look again. I say to it, Hand, Arm, but then I start to think that my entire body is no different than a Tuesday; the word Cholesterol; an imaginary pile of banana peels– and I’m afraid to touch this thing growing out of me with its five-angled lines and its wrinkly bends. I try to hold still, in fear of the tiniest twitch that might make it spread apart and spill into a shapeless splatter on gravity. 

…

I hang from the day by my ankles over an inflatable plastic pool. I say, I don't know anything I swear. 

The water is still, from what I can see, but I know that every particle is moving like a herd of hydrogenated bulls toward a molecular matador. 

I pass out before I ever make contact. 

Not too far back, I remember, I looked in a mirror at my lined face, and turned into a single drip from the ocean–  lost somewhere at the bottom, or in the froth, or on the horizon. Now and then, I’d find myself on the sand with the mole crabs only to be pulled back in by a rip current; or, the sky would suck me up into a cloud and drop me into a new seashape far away from where I came, 

Sucking at a leg, seeping through a sailboat’s hull, making a sandcastle mush.

For now, I’ll keep a plastic bag over my head. 

Mummify myself in clear tape. 

…

I am talking to you. 

I pinch your cheeks and swirl them around. I put my fingers in your mouth. I rub the tops of your teeth, pull your tongue, press my nail into your gums. They’re sensitive. You might have gum disease. I have a friend who’s a dentist. I can call her if you’d like. Better to catch it early, you know. I’d call her right now, but I forgot her name. I suppose she might’ve dissolved into the air by now. Or turned into a house with a dog and a drawer full of forks and spoons and something like a ladle. 

So maybe I no longer have a friend who’s a dentist. 

But I have you, Soft Mouth. Twelve-molars. Four-Canines. So white… or green or the color of a dog’s belly. I can give you a nose and flip it upside-down, two eyes–or three if I please. 

And you can do the same. Picture me, go on. 

Bring me to life. 

Alright, that’s enough. I can wipe it all away. I can make you blank as breath. 

Even less, like a ghost. 

Even less, like nothing at all. 

Good God, I’ve made a monster! Mouth, come back! Come again! 

Ah, there you are with that smile. This time you’ve got a gap,

so I fill it with my finger.

…

Last night I lit a candle and watched the flicker bend and sway, stretching out beyond the wick– but never beyond its reach– into the empty air. Does it stay low because that’s all it knows? Surely it’s aware that its destiny is to fall from the sky like rain and eat the earth?

I snuffed out the flame with the candle lid.

In a million years or sooner, the world will dissolve like a grass stain in the washing machine. 

Mud on the heel of your boot in a flood. 

You’ll be gone, and you’ll have hardly made a speck of dust for the Great Housemaid to sweep into her dustpan. I’d like to be a cosmic agent. I’d like to be an immortal. I’d like to live and never have to breathe in the sick smell of human consciousness ever again. The smell of dead deer on the interstate, their bellies blown open– vacant motel rooms for maggot families. 

I relight the candle and put it out, this time with the power of a sigh.

…

It might be for the better if I ran away to some port town in Italy and lived out the rest of my life in a monastery by the neck of a volcano. Take up the habit. Make my time suspended in the lull of reclusivity worthwhile. The earth will spin, but I won’t feel it there, with my hands clasped, one over the other, around some invisible rock that I know is real and there. I’ll hold it until my hands are dry, then I’ll flog myself for ever letting it go.

Strike Out,

Parke Defriese Writing Director