“Wistaria” BONUS

As compensation for missing last week and missing the deadline for today, here is a special extra bonus Wistaria entry. I know ALL of you are excited.

Cigarette Water

The taste of the whiskey burned my eyes. I saw everything in terms of onions. Isaiah was shirtless, lying on the counter with a cigarette in his mouth, unlit. The cartilage in my ears felt bruised. My skull was soft. He mumbled something and dropped his cigarette into the crevasses of his neck. The lighting started to be blue when the moon set. I had never seen a moon rise but I had seen hundreds fall below the horizon. I had been told there was a place where the moon rose and it was only there you could see it, because it came from the icy waters, led by pale white sea lions into the heavens, or whatever.

The house filled with water like an aquarium and we began to drown. Giant orange fish with gaping mouths sprung from the hallways. Sharks lurked in deep shadows. An oscar with holes in his head mimicked a flounder in his movements, all as painful to watch as they were to make. He flinched and sighed as blood and puss poured from the wounds around his eyes. I reached beneath the sink and grabbed a jug of bleach to chuck at him. The bleach swallowed his body in a Napalm cloud of silver.   

“Oblique, Oblique, are you okay?” Isaiah asked. He knelt to my level and grabbed my face. He was so tan and his skin looked charred and burnt. I turned away, trying to get away from his shiny, blistered flesh. 

“Who are you, who are you?” I asked. My mouth seemed to move long before the words were exposed. When he came to me again, his hand extended to show he meant no harm, everything was repressed into something like normalcy, or some vein of which I could handle without becoming sick or fearful. 

“It’s me, Isaiah. Are you okay? Maybe you should sit down, I’ll get you some water.” 

“Are you real?” I asked nervously. 

“Am I real?” He asked. He was confused. He went to the cupboard and found a glass and the faucet filled it with clean-looking water. 

“Yeah. I get visitors, a lot, but most of them aren’t real. They come back, now and then, but I can’t tell if they’re real,” I tried to explain.

“Oh, yeah?” 

“Yeah. The boy from the concert, Steve. He lies on the counter. And the fish come at night. And sometimes, outside my window, there’s a tiny girl taking pictures of me. When I drink coffee I have this horrible– this horrible dream that she–”

“In school you seem like you got it together.” 

“Are you real? I’ve talked to so many people and seen so many things– what makes me see all this? I try–” 

“Oblique, I’m real. Drink this. Maybe you should see a doctor, or something?” He offered. I shook my head vigorously. 

“I’m fine,” I assured. He sat down next to me.

“You’re not fine.” 

“No one can help me. I’d go to them and they’d turn out to be– or I’ve gone to them already– or– Don’t make me go!” 

“I won’t. Where are your parents?” He asked. 

“I’m not sure. I don’t miss them,” I said. 

“I wouldn’t miss mine. God, I wish my dad would just disappear, too.” 

“Isaiah?”

“Oblique?” 

“Where you get all them bruises? Mr. Abel?” 

“Yeah.”

“Does it hurt, I mean, does it hurt for him to hit you?” I asked, I touched the bruise on his cheek.  

“When I’m getting beaten, I hear a piano playing.” 

“Who’s playing it?” I asked. He looked up, his eyes were vacant and his mind was distant. 

“I never thought about it before. They’re very angry, though, and they’re slamming on the keys. It sounds like they’re taking a sledgehammer to them. But it sounds kind of pretty.” 

“Why does he hit you?” I asked, gently. He turned to me, at first his look was severe, then it melted into a sideways smile. 

“He wishes I was a crocodile.” 

I wasn’t sure what he meant, but immediately after he said it, the house transformed into an aquarium, again. This time, I was an oyster and he was a crocodile and we were lodged into the sandy bottom, while swimmers circulated like birds above us. He blubbed, 

“What’s your real name?” 

And I blubbed, 

“I don’t have one.”

“Wistaria”

 

The Aquarium

 

Through the walls I heard the deep systematic pounding of a bass. 

A beat. 

A rhythm. 

One boy. That boy. 

He played his music very loud from his garage. He blared his stereo, the whole neighborhood would echo with it. The elderly neighbors would get angry, but I sat on my porch and watched the notes buzz around the homes. The houses collapsed and shook under the pressure of such fiery words, the scales would drop, the frequency would rise and space wouldn’t know where to place itself in our streets. There’d just be emptiness at the bottom of the cul de sac. The only thing tearing through the layer of highly concentrated artificial apathy was the megalithic rap charging like the sky was raining bricks of cement. 

At night, it was better because it all looked like a movie set. The lavender bushes gently rocked in a breeze scented with laundry detergent. 

I went crazy thinking: 

That’s all they want you to believe. 

Then the music would

rock 

everything 

like an energy drink. 

Oh, caffeine. Oh, brittle, brittle highs. How we feel so empty and up when we’re standing completely still. I felt myself oozing out of my skin and crawling skyward like 99 luft balloons. Into those clouds that looked like Mount Kilimanjaro. 

Killah Man. Killer man. Kill her, man. Kill her, man. Kill her. 

Kill. 

Her.

Wolf. 

Those highs only angered my substitute reality and without ever leaving the safety of a cold leather couch, I was lying on mud, interacting with people I never met before. I knew their names, I knew their ages, I knew their faces like the stalks of long-stemmed roses. I knew their fatigue. Compassion, compassion. In a musty fog I saw all these widowers, dressed in black for the funeral, dipping a limp body into the water. Then I’d awake, realize it was a dream, and lie there waiting for something tangible to hit me. Punch me. Take an oar to a my temple. That was that music. His music.   

I heard it. It rattled me. I ran the front of the house and stopped when my stomach was caught by the frame of the window. I hung out and crawled to the roof. Sitting and watching the only boy who would play his music so daringly loud in his brightly lit garage at 3am, I felt so alive and real. 

He had a big textbook in his hand and was reading through it, or so it appeared. I watched him with a smile because he couldn’t see me, but I heard everything over the stampede of energized music, empowered with clarity, an immaculate understanding. The stars bounced overhead in the waves of heat emitted from the cooling surface of Earth, the rhymes electrified the air with anarchy. 

I saw his dad enter the garage, my chemistry teacher, with his belt knotted around his thick waist. He jutted his hips forward and looked down at this son. I hardly saw anything, just heard the music stop and the father crack the boy with the textbook. The boy’s head took the brunt, his neck bent sideways and he fell to the ground. His hands lifted, he pleaded.

No, Dad, no.

You are a disgrace. 

Please, Dad, please. 

You are not my son. 

Dad, Dad, stop! 

I am disgusted with you. You are not Isaiah, you are not Abel, you are not progeny. I will throw you outside. Let’s see how you do outside. 

Dad, they’ll kill me if I’m outside this late. Dad, please.

I will kill you if they don’t. 

As I paced around the empty house which hummed with unnecessary appliances, I felt like a fish trapped in an aquarium. Everything was blue and looked splintered by refracted light in the curvy, trippy swirls of water. I spun around the crystalized pebbles and passed the skeleton fisherman holding the sign “Beware!” I started to think about a boy I met at a concert who wore sunglasses even though it was night and we were indoors. The club was poorly lit and the carpeting was maroon. On the stage a charismatic woman wearing all black riffed with a throaty voice that sounded like cool gravel. A manic cellist played along side her, he had a long beard but was young and wore a navy sweatshirt from Harvard. 

The boy beside me turned out to be a man. He asked, “How old are you?” 

I said, “I am seventeen. How old are you?” 

I expected him to say the same. “I am twenty-six.” 

At that moment, in memory and in reality, his face (which before had seemed so perfect) began to degrade. The layers of skin decomposed, melted away like the powder on moth wings. Teeth, yellow as mucus, fell from his black gums. Before I could utter another sound or breathe another breath, he was a corpse lying on my kitchen table. Then he was nothing but a cup of coffee. Then he was nothing. 

I heard whimpers outside. I went to the door, then onto the porch. I saw a circle of long, reaper like shadows hunched over a dog. The shadowy gang. I entered the taboo outdoors. The grass had the sharpness and the softness of pine needles. Closer, I walked, towards the group of boys like bundles of blackberries, assaulting a little dog. It barked and yelped with pain as they kicked it and punched it and spit on it. I stood before them and raised my bare white arms. Instantly, on cue, they scattered, revealing not a dog, but Isaiah. 

  He shook and quivered and cried. When I knelt beside him, he struggled away, but his head was soar and he was curled into the defenseless roll of a caterpillar. 

“Shh. Shh. Oh, are you hurt?” I asked. He looked up and whimpered more, shocked and afraid, the words were scribbled haphazardly on his eyes. I saw the blood run down his nose and I took my sleeve to it. He jerked away. 

“Are you fine?” I demanded an answer this time and he hardly nodded in response. I became defensive and strong-feeling, as if a red tide was growing on my back and carrying me to shore unapologetic to any tyrant that happened to fall in my path. I dared Leviathan to return; I wanted to remove their masks, hiss at them. Some knew better than to deal with me when my fists were clenched and my jaw was locked tight with anger. I earned that respect, like a spider does amongst the flies. 

“You’re going to be OK, alright? I’m going to take care of you,” I insisted and I thought he heard. He eased and grabbed my hand and rolled into me, resting his almond-shaped head into the pit of my hip and my arm. He started to cry, a deep uninhibited cry.

Everything as if it was covered with 

oil paints 

nothing was real

only sequences placedtogether 

more or less for 

my amusement. 

My lips found 

  a 

  bright 

        lit 

        path 

           to 

           his 

           forehead, 

           and there I 

          pressed them, 

          until he stopped 

          shivering on that 

                            cold 

                 night. 

        night. 

night.