Paper boy
glides in/ leaves his number in porcelain leaves, dust, doorstep. He clambers
down the steps.waits.clambers – and from the crackling shutters, showers of
loose paint, the tenant calls out
She: Wait, hold on.
The boy
turns around.waits.and-but the tenant stays behind the wall of shutter-showers.
He: Yeah?
She: You're supposed
to ring the doorbell, you always ring the doorbell first.
He: I thought maybe
it annoyed you, thought I wouldn't this time.
She: It doesn't
annoy me. I'm used to it.
Paper boy
smiles his back-up smile, pulls out the rock he's keeping in reserve.
He: I left my
number, thought that might cheer you up.
But the
tenant hadn't wanted cheering, she glowers down on him, and Paper boy crumples
the rock into loose molecules, flings it up – it flies – and settles in the
dry-paint shower/ the tenant grips the rock between its pieces and somewhere in
the boy they blur into gravel mountains full of hillside dugouts
She: Next time, ring
the bell.
He: Alright, sorry.
Paper boy
leaves/ his number draped in flicks and flutters, paint, beige, tenant's nails
dig through the floorboards and through the seven-layered paint jobs, finds it
in the rainbow it has bits of maths
She: I don’t have
paper.
To herself/
and then she searches, flips aside the sofa and the many bits and pieces of her
attempts at an artistic life (easel, paintbrushes, empty paint cans,
strawberries on the ottoman) for a canvas on which to scribble the number. She
doesn’t find a canvas but she finds a drop of browning paint and with that
browning paint she troubles the wall with one more name (she writes his name is
Paper boy) and she puts into that description the things she knows about him:
that his number, written in her walls with shards of rock and mountain, points
to a constant ringing on her distant doorbell and the flicker of shutters on
her walls that says someone has come far from the recess of her staircase at
the very bottom of the tower and has brought a gift of nothing new (she never
gets the mail and all of her subscriptions never come but he comes every time
instead to bring her even just that piece of news)
It is a
little strange to her this morning that neither her finger nor her scalp are
pounding and she flickers.in.and.out like fire of her own making she has
entrapped herself or maybe it is the tower’s fault after all/because it/not/her
is the perpetrator of all entrapment. The tenant looks up at her nest of hair,
golden wine-stoppers and coat hooks and blankets and upholstery she has woven
with three and a half crochet hooks into things in and around her walls, trails
of golden hair stuck in corners and flowering over couches, hair for curtains
and hair for carpets, hair for the chandelier that never had
fire.because.fire.hurts.her.scalp if it gets too close she tried only once and
now a patch of head on her crown aches only a tenth of a little
The tenant
looks up at all this nest and blinks, she blinks again blonde blinking golden
blinks and reminds that stretch of hair that holds her clothing on rusty hangers
to stay still she picks out the next dress she’ll have to put it on slowly
through the bottom, porcelain leaves watch her undress through the window, low
winds blow golden-hair curtains aside she has gotten good at weaving herself
into ornaments.
One day ten
hundred thousand eye-blinks later the tenant is looking through the shutters,
her index finger sore in the spot that holds down one piece of crinkling
plastic and the breeze comes through with a shard of porcelain leaf/so small
she.doesn’t.notice until much later that it has found a home inside her wrist
and will one day kill her or perhaps if she never bends it that way she will
die of natural causes with the shard and scientist a million years from now
will find her skeleton with a piece of porcelain leaf embedded and they’ll
think she must have loved somebody so much she died clutching a gift from them,
a piece of china maybe – and they’ll write seven books and nineteen critical
essays on the phenomenon (ancient and dug up just recently watch out it may
just be contagious) of unconditional all-encompassing love.
But that is
not what the tenant feels as she does not feel the porcelain shard in her wrist
(right beside a main artery pulsing closer slowly trickles of droplet blood
that mix with the red of sun-flushing she is as always amazed at how quickly time
flows through her shutters even though she turns away it always finds her
older). No, as the tenant holds down the unnoticeable shard and the rattling
shutter she feels nothing but the feeling she gets when she waits
It is
something like the feeling she gets when the ceiling fan spurts little coughs
of black gas or when the window bursts open onto itself and she is there
without anyone to tell it to so she just picks away at floorboards and at walls
avoiding the unlocked door/ it must be easy to get out only because there are
things to get you in the stairwell
It feels
something like the feeling she gets at the end of a very long television
program that ends with the hero clutching the wrong girl in his arms and the
villain has the right girl captive in his bed they have fornicated and now the
right girl finds her heart too deeply entrenched in the way this welcome
stranger takes her from bed to kitchen and fixes her an alcoholic drink/the
hero meanwhile is dissatisfied he doesn’t know why the wrong girl isn’t right
but she has eyes that push out all his faults like blackheads he is popped
through and through/ the program ends with everyone only somewhat happy you’d
think they could either die today or live forever and some third party some
catalyst comes along twenty-three seconds before the credits and pulls out a gun,
now you don’t know who is the one that is going to survive
That kind of
feeling.
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