Trace

by JW Burns

Sleep fumes steaming the walls..

Fridge is bare racks and a heretical smell, on the kitchen counter salt and pepper and this morning's slapdash of sun. Stampede down the stairs, fling open the door in a tailspin, merging with other people on the submerged sidewalk. Adjust to the flow. Tic left to the Deli where chance is less likely to prevail on the income than on the outcome and vice versa. Fitting a fork between your fingers to resurrect the seductive hot turkey sandwich on cracked wheat, side of smashed potatoes warmly integrated with butter, prurient chilled pickle, ice cold sweet tea.

Our last night together, we were running water in the pipes. Sinks, shower, bath, wet gospel sceptics gurgling, splashing, soaking while insisting on a ruthless progression of minutes. The rat in the wall kept on the move, shuffling, scratching behind an area of pre-speech where dignity was incomprehensible. It's true that to be serviceable water must first get trapped in the pipes, but when I see you now I witness a person who had—at first of necessity and then of choice—largely raised herself while unraveling the existence of the world and those in it in her spare time, which she didn't have much of. Murmuring, swirling, gushing, dribbling through your veins, seeping into my connective tissue, a camera projecting it all on some blank screen teasing the mind, minding the tease.

In the deli, I sat at the far end of the counter. Willie took my order and quickly delievered the spoils. Eating is serious or should be. Then, Jan edged around the counter carrying a plate fully formed with meat loaf, string beans, mashed potatoes, minced carrots and a slab of cornbread.

“Hey.”

“Hey, yourself.” She was gone.

I chewed the last of my turkey, waiting. She returned.

“Hey.”

“You said that.” Snigger, but she paused.

“How you been.”

“Around.” Mock yawn.

“Seen Clare lately?

“No. Have you?” Mechanical response mixed with a dollop of fatigue.

“No...” she was moving, “but I miss her.”

Stops. “No shit?”

“No shit.” Clues had been everywhere for days, but I'd discarded them, held their sweaty litlle hands walking through my three rooms as if it were Versaillas. Suddenly, her face was in every mirror in every panel in the palace. “ I miss her.”

“Virginia. With her sis--”

“Goddamnit, Jan I don't pay you to talk pay you to walk so walk these goddamn plates on out there.” Jerry's chalky face and bladelike voice through the rectangle seperating kitchen and diningroom counter space.

“--ter.” Splitting snarl. “Yes, boss.” Lips reverberating off her tympanic membrane.

Back outside, clouds are beginning to fill the sky. More traffic just for a few seconds in true, correct and complete motion. Then, a scaly blue van cuts off a yellow Prius, horns blaze, all moving parts twitch, twitter, slide, slump, bunch, bind, skid, stop...human voices, tires, those horns. An Uber pulls to the curb, discharges three people with cellphones fixed to their ears. Looping neurons, wreakage sung delusionally clear, crisp, controlled. Manner restored, walk block after block until smelling the river, tight charcoal clouds tighten above. Just before the rain finding a roomy recessed entrance to a blank building. Rain sheets do everything they can to wish heaven would go away, convince me that Eden should exist somewhere between digestion and the jejunum.

Remember when we spent unrehearsed mornings sitting on a rock above the pine forest sipping coffee? The house had our backs, a distillation of the past, and a place to obtain a second cup of coffee. There, we encountered the future: you debating various options, which seemed as real to you as your toes; me checked and balanced in those moments, unable or unwilling to find anything beyond. But you pushed me forward along the decorative squares, gently rung my neck with immigrant suppositions concerning support structures, where they would come from. How would they maintain their stability when the wind raged and the water rose? A refugee from tension, what could I do but tuck my paws in my sleeves and reply with puppet skits, which to your credit you took a part.

Now, a light, steady rain, most of the water a film on the sidewalk, street, gushing in the gutter making a thrusting arch over a half-plugged drain. Cars, delievery trucks, bikes, wheels more reluctant now; walkers touched by lethargy, waiting for their bodies to acknowledge the end of the downpour. Umbrellas are the norm, but one young man—no umbrella, hatless, water wearing his shaggy hair and unshaven face—passes by, halts, turns, and approaches me. Standing straight, ever so slight quivering right arm.

“Hey, man...this is my corner. My place...”

“I don't see your name anywhere.” Looking to my left outside his dripping person.

“Well...” Uneasy in murky, sodden shoes, he does a kind of an awkard newsreel twostep capped with a stumbling whirling circle. “My place my name everywhere anywhere you...” he sneezes “don't see.”      

“That is pretty fucking profound.” Lick my lips.

“...yes...” he half turns away, head and hands receding into the soaked denim shirt, quickly reappearing. Once more facing me. “Bye..” Ambling through the now gray rainless air.

“Bye.”

Our feet had skipped over microscopic enslavements, default conventions, creepily free to smooth transfiguring shadows; later, we inhabited the vast garden behind a palace, a place where people if they weren't caretakers or special guests didn't belong. But we did. Sat cross-legged, watched our our bodies fly beyond the palace over the city, twice around one building, through one open window out another, causing a man sitting at a desk to spill coffee down his front; a woman to drop papers, grasping like a seal;  soaring up until the smoking cannon of our energy burst into flame, our internal organs quasars packed together, exploding, burning, falling ash. So, what remained absorbed no more light, even though this electromagnetic charge survived. And we were twin chimneys, sometimes smokey and warm, other times clear and cold. She left the bathroom, came over to the bed. I sat up. The kiss a stone bumping across the surface further and further away.

It's way too early to eat again. Not sleepy, not tired. Walking through the thin afternoon, I can sense the clay inside people's skin hardening. Counting footfalls for five blocks, starting over at the beginning of each block. Finally, the steps blending, at least somewhat, the motion a bit more fluid, less robotic. Past a restaurant with empty booths,tables, one person sitting at the counter, probably dead. Past a steeple swearing to be free, high snickering windows; eyeball the empty parking lot as it holds the air like a newborn. Step over a large lichen-covered branch fallen from a spreading red oak. Blink against an impenatrable apartment jungle knowing you are forever on the inside looking out.

We had been naked. Swung our bodies back and forth against each other, the room a homemade sweater one arm too long the other too short, neck tighter, tighter until we were lying side by side thinking we'd never move again until the words we had always used to form thoughts mixed perfectly together, making a river that would have drowned us both had not our sticky inner thighs sprouted wings and flapped into crumbs of blue beyond the window.

All of a sudden waiting to cross the street in a crowd. Then moving almost as one.

BIO: JW Burns lives in Florida.