 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 There's something wrong with the shadow he throws. At sunrise he catches his dark silhouette looking down at the ground, when he thinks that his eyes just a second before were content to look up at a cloud. His miscalculation is one of poor timing. The first man -- the self-conscious child who writes on cream-colored paper and dreams of becoming Tolstoy with a stiff penis and a valid excuse to learn how to swim -- can't catch sight of the door leading out to the realm where his shadows long to stare back at him, and so instead he touches himself, which is of course a mistake, because his flesh leads him nowhere at all.These shadows are not part of his world, although of course they always stay with him. They lurk along cobblestone streets and crawl through bleak alleyways that smell of dawn's fried bacon, booze on his breath, old sex in his pants and cheap perfume mixed with cigarette smoke in the crook of the young girl's neck he bit the night before. They are unaware of humanity's claims to the land on which they live, indifferent to contracts signed by fat men with good haircuts and pressed suits, unaffected by the yellowed paper remnants of the work of minor poets. They don't care about clouds and well intentioned calculations. Witness the once opinionated matriarch, now lying craven in her hospital bed, dying from the latest brand of cancer. She gasps her last, and for a moment he wonders what it will be like, how painful, how devastating, how hopeless, how much without promise, how unreasonable and unfair. He is a child after all. Shadows frighten him, and so he turns away again to touch himself. He opens the hospital window, leaves his shadows in bed with her corpse, pulls a pen and paper from the pocket of his creased slacks and writes a poem to describe a cloud; how content he feels to look at a cloud, to realize that water and dust can sometimes make rain to wash the walls of his alley. It was the grey color of the sky that fooled him at first. Startled awake by the sudden backfire from a truck's exhaust system, he thought he'd heard a gunshot fired through his nightmare. In the dream he and his shadow are running the wrong way down the alley. The sound of the gun stops them both. The girl with perfume and cigarette smoke inside her blouse is pursuing them. Footsteps clacking on the wet cobblestones. The two of them -- shadow and man -- stand still and flat against a cold brick wall, arms splayed and extended like the tired wings of dead angels, an easy target for their pursuer's next squeeze of the trigger. Once the bullets strike his body, and he knows that death won't hurt so much as he'd thought it might, he lets go of the fear and moves from the wall, gets out of his bed, shuffles his way to the bathroom and wipes the sweat from his face. Heavy and greasy, oily and thick, mixed with the grit of two lifetimes' worth of anxiety. The image in the mirror leaves him feeling sick to his stomach. Not just the lines of age, the sag of flesh under his chin, but more the background dingy yellow poem mixed with the dust. He cannot recall the last time he lifted a hand to clean up the room in which he and his shadows sleep. The painted walls have faded to a somber shade of cancer. In places behind him the plaster gives way to cracks that remind him of a dead angel's wings. He dries his face, touches himself, turns to open a window, and just for a moment he catches the eyes of his shadow staring up at a cloud. *** Thanks for stopping by to visit us here at SpilledBeans.com. If you'd like to be notified whenever something new is posted to SpilledBeans.com, then please join the Spilled Beans notification list. -- Con affetto, Anthony V. Toscano, Editor SpilledBeans.com  |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|