ft ground

[pdf]

enjoy this first full draft of the short fiction piece i have been working on [pdf]

There are long blank roads inside of his body enough, that before full dayswell, he coasted into a motel parking lot in Amarillo. A long, low, alone affair again, or for the first time, for in this ink he existed only in the secondary orbit of Jack, drawn by a blue fascia against the cloudless Texas sky, compressed the bank of motel rooms into a trace of cells that transient rogues could only sit or lay down in, or begin disappearing from their crown down. (more…)

In a breath of deep sickness you feel the appendages of your body as small stubs barely propping your thin shirt out into a windblown landscape, but in the mountain starlight rising, a faint speech of light, you see them fully formed and shading through the outerspace of desert evening, albeit slenderly like dried liquid flesh over bones. You sank below the crest of one last dune and the smoke above the reflected green of John’s white eyes hung in a corona over the dune and the empty straight line of his mouth cleaved your eyes. When you breathed you coughed sand. The green smoke rose to tie across the Milky Way in the sash of a foggy icon that you could only see by looking briefly, then away, so that your mind could tease its image out of the apparent emptiness. (more…)

Then you proceeded on foot and the scenes passed slower, painfully immersive after the rush past of the whole basin in an airless wind through the cracked car window. From far out in the sterile dunes John’s car glittered, the only defect along the shoulder, and you watched him from atop the crest of a dune as he walked from the edge of where the sand gave way back to the alluvial gravel of the valley floor toward his car along the rumble strip of the road. You measured the shadows of scrub and other dunes against the landmarks of debris or idiosyncratic wind prints to mark the time as the sun set. It dangled across the axis of the valley, still high enough to burn white, and reflected off of the dunes’ sand floor and washed back into the air as radiation that tightened your exposed skin noticeably.
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From a crouch of a fire stair John enters the hospital cafeteria like a paste extruded into a denim ensemble with paste still for hair, taking a lidded plastic glass of thin orange juice from a chilled cabinet, alights at a too large round table the color and texture of souse, where two ample black women in scrubs beam. From the distance, where every body can be seen from head to toe, the measure of proximity in a hospital, he could be seen as immediately shaping the moments as they came, with his arms speaking like a conductor or puppeteer to draw out voluminous shrieks, moans, exclamations, through the undulations and ripples of the womens’ squinting bodies. And also he spoke, with a singularly human distraction, in words that, from where the gallery sat around the perimeter of the hall, arrived in concussions on the antimicrobial air that blunted the nuances of the tale or fragment which had the women rolling out glee from the cavities of their legs and sucking his full excrescence of words from the air in their tremendous gasps. He held court. Daily immemorial and onward daily they danced. (more…)

After a black swoop through a wet slip of days, of unmarked time, the multiplied edges of walls and shadows and lines against the imperturbable sky creep toward their twins. Like sleeplessness and television hypnosis, the real edge won’t appear until those two questionable figments unite and you can reach out to trace a corner in its straightness and coolness. You try to ascertain which places those two manifestations are existing in, right at the moment you take them in. If one is in the haze of your sickness as it tapers, the other is waiting on the fringe of consciousness and clarity, but it is not more real, that tangible world of normalcy, because it is always out ahead and unattainable, like a man matching your paces. You only see his back, forever. You see things in a different way through illness. They become pure and separate from you, not stage sets enabling you to move through time, but existing in each second with you, both alone, both with questions for the other.
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From some nowhere inside of you visions slowly arise, first pastel petals to your eyes and then wallowing distant squealing lances pins through your stuffed ears and escalates as voices and sounds break through like you would have imagined regaining consciousness in cinematic replica. You felt the weight of the still air filling the hollow column of the hotel all above beginning to put folds in you. In the moment you were a crystalline figure locked in the thick fluid air that turned under slowly like a batter through gorges between glass castles in which you could see each inflection of time and posture of prop as you were trundled through the lobby to a service elevator. The wheels of the gurney exact and silent and the entire gullet of the whale hung over you, turning as your attendants navigated its ribs and stays, and when you stopped turning it began to turn for you as your breath spun circles in its steam structure. But as each second passed it didn’t depart with the criminal clarity which its occurrence might have forecast, it stayed in the moment and the perfect visions of damp surfaces and glimmering lines out to the sky began to pool into a kaleidoscopic forest of pure steaming ice. (more…)

Far away again in autumn. The sunlight through a flat cloud as you stood on the sidewalk outside a door without a handle flat into the glazed bricks was quiet. The one week of the year had come across trees that had enough leaves on them to blot out the southern sun and the shade was warm enough to sit out in. You spent the long afternoon in a plaza downtown sitting on the swept bricks. In the absence of those faces you couldn’t retain your eyes filled with the white sky. You worked your way back through the mosaic, around cavernous voids that you could feel between your eyes and your skull where whole weeks had been handed over to some black vessel willfully, intentionally. You rock back and forth in the gathered up twine of time hanging down from Atlanta. In some phrases you are there, like now, under a sparse pear tree in the plaza, or slipping back down, not as a journey into that empty Valley, but a plummet, or a twinkling transmigration into a moment. When you began at the end, as a human destination with a trail let out behind it, there was nothing concrete enough to withdraw from but the euphoria of the continuing tides of the hotel, to step backwards from your death and gaze upon it from life. You knew the debris that ended every story. The same things with different connotations. You felt like a bronze cast. (more…)

In the autumn you got an efficiency apartment, found the ditched car, and unpacked all of the contents, including a large, wise-eyed brown cat asleep on its roof. You hadn’t noticed how much had been left in the car. It seemed to be everything. Everything was just barely enough, for a long time. (more…)