upon the dead earth

If it weren’t for the man jerking off in the Rite Aid parking lot, I wouldn’t have noticed. He had his hands in it. 

Spare some change for something to eat? Asked the man, eyes rolled back, tongue circling chapped lips. Shoppers came and went, eyes averted.

I rifled through my jacket pocket for my wallet, pulled out some cash, and that’s when I saw them, in a crack in the brick wall behind the drug store—a pair of massive tits, without a body.

What are you—? I asked, just as he was jizzing all over them. Steam rose in the air around his frostbitten flesh, and then dissipated. 

Look, he urged, and I was—at the tits, which were now hardening, toughening, turning into bark, a tree, which blossomed and then sprouted green apples, all in seconds.

He tucked his dick into his pants, tugged at a broken zipper, picked an apple off the tree. 

Well, thanks, he said, taking a bite, before limping out of the parking lot into the street, singing. 

YOU HAVE LIED TO MY BROTHER AND I FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR ABOUT THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS

This was when, I was starting to lose faith in things. Which I will say is not unusual, it can and often does happen even within the span of a day, I’ll wake with a sense of life’s meaning and at some point before nightfall misplace it. I was in the midst of a particularly rough spell, three months had quietly slipped by with little participation or consent on my end. I was, taking a break from loving. I was, a hammered down slab of meat, awaiting my roast over the spit. My problem is that I am always waiting. My problem is that I am always ready. For the sky to open. 

GET IN HERE. COME, BOY! COME! GET IN HERE YOU STUPID FUCKING DOG BEFORE I BEAT YOUR ASS! GET IN HERE! GET IN!

The wind howled through the barren trees lining the parking lot, and the little ration of light that had been allotted by day was now dwindling, and I stood before the crack, a six pack of toilet paper under my arm. 

Hello? Came a voice, from inside the crack. I looked but only saw darkness. Hello? It came again. I walked home briskly.

HI! YOU ARE NOW BEING RECORDED.

And the sky did open. The next day, while walking to a friends house.

I heard the voice again, this time while passing an open sewer vent. Hello?

I knelt down. Hi? I asked, and then I saw her, and then I was inside. 

It was a small farm in some sort of dust bowl. For miles around the little house I could only see flat beige earth. The sun beat down on every surface, and nothing grew. Intermittently the wind would pick up and fill the air with debris, placing the entire world inside a single dirty cloud. It was impossible not to squint. To breathe.

The woman was showing me the house. She was middle aged, wore a tight V neck t-shirt, and had bleached hair that cascaded down each side of her face like rainbows stripped of color. We were standing in the living room. Everything in the house was soft, pastel, and covered in plastic casing—the couch pillows, even.

QUESTION: WOULD YOU SNITCH ON YOUR COWORKERS FOR ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS?

My husband moved us out here, she whispered carefully. Just then a tall teenager walked abruptly out into the hall.

Hughey? The woman called. Hugh, darling? He shut the bathroom door.

The woman cranked back towards me, positioned her face into a smile.

This is it, she said, out back. We stood, looking. Then she wrapped her arms around me, held me snug to her large, firm breasts, which smelled like the mall used to. Over her shoulder I could still see the farmland’s empty sprawl. One hundred shirtless men crawled in neat rows, their necks wrapped in chain, pulling a monstrous metal machine that tilled the earth. As they moved along on hands and knees they deposited seeds. Seeds which would not grow.

Shh, it’s okay, it’s going to be okay, the woman cooed into my ear. Shh, she held onto me, tight. I would have fallen over if it were not for her strong, sad arms. She would have fallen over if she had no one to hold upright. And so we stayed standing, together. 

clean pillow

Back when I was living in Philadelphia, there was this guy, his name was Jacks (yes, plural), he would walk around with his head cracked open. Each morning started out the same, he would wake about 6:30, feed the cats, make a pot of coffee, then sip it on the porch while reading the news, out loud to himself, from his phone. He usually did it after that, that is, he would trudge down into the basement with a hammer and bang it against his skull as hard as he could over the slop sink. Jacks lived off social security checks, was the kind of guy who knew everyone on the block, spent his days either walking up and down the street or tinkering out front with an ever evolving tree-like sculpture with branches made of blood stained PVC pipes which extended from his porch out over the sidewalk. The area was old fashioned like that, that is, people were still eccentric, sat outside, talked to each other. He was well liked, and no one seemed to mind the bleeding much, it was just the way things had always been—Jacks, the guy with the tree sculpture out front, the guy with his head cracked open. He was polite, too—kept rags in his pockets, always made sure to clean up the little pools of blood that were left after a visit to a friend's stoop. By about sundown each evening, after a day spent outdoors, the continental pieces of Jacks’ skull began floating closer together until merging again into a single Pangea, clean pillow, and the next morning would start the same. 

It was August, I had just returned from a two month stint in the woods, and the city was complete purgatory, hot as hell, frustrated, existential, as anticipated. The only place to be was in your bedroom with the window unit on, and that’s where I was, sprawled out catching up with a friend via phone. We were having the same conversation everyone was always having, centering on dissatisfaction, on precarity, on disconnection. This friend was never making their art because they were always working and always depressed and didn’t have the capacity for much else. 

I just, I feel like I need to get out of here for a while, they were saying, but I don’t have the money to, I can’t figure out how to not be working. 

That makes sense, I breathed. 

I’ve been so tunnel visioned, they continued, I need to experience something, I need to have my head cracked open. 

When they said that, I thought of Jacks, and the house I’d lived in in Philly, and all the people I’d loved there, and the person I was at that time, for the first time in a long time, and it all felt like a past life, and it was, the way past lives always are, close as your nose, and also, very far away.