The Scene: A Darkened Living Room

Two lovers confront each other slowly, and not wanting to bring up the situation at hand play with their fingers, crack the joints, look around vaguely then say “It’s raining pretty hard, isn’t it?” The third person in the room, whom neither of them can see nor hear, replies, “Yes, it is.” He exits the room through a gaping hole in the wall into an alley suspended fifteen feet in the air above the neighbor’s yard, and asks unanswerable questions from all the mosquitoes that venture near him only to be stymied by his black aura. Below him an alcoholic, wet and shivering mutely pleads to be shocked out of the life he is living and to be taken back to when he was seventeen and just starting to fuck up his life. If he got to go back, he said, he would do it all differently. He wouldn’t have gone to those parties, he would’ve made curfew, he wouldn’t have started stealing those beers. He forgot to take off his watch when the rain started, and it is soaked through, black shivering emptiness where a sense of punctuality used to be long ago. The golden hands deftly twirl light from the streetlamp into needles and pins of glimmers. A deer starts running, is on some level hit by a car, but never stops. A great animal, the size of a military tank, wanders the monsooning city streets. I look out with a sensation of do-goodiness, and the feeling of luminescent ants covering my hands and genitals. I take another pill and sit down to read a book about about D.H. Lawrence’s life. I read a sentence, look up, and it is now DAYTIME. Light streams in around me, and a small child runs through my front door, wielding a hatchet and wearing a backpack inside which I can tell lies a pristine waffle-maker. Inside the walls of my house run streams of blackened hypersensitivity. We have questions, yes we have questions, but in our ear canals there are oceans, and if we turn our heads too quickly they will spill out and drown the world.