Woodland Sketches I

When the moon is full and the energy in the air is only potential, the fox swathes the stars with her tail.  Like a hand moving against the current of a softly flowing stream, it pulls and drags the atmosphere into smooth vortices.  Each twitch of the tail is fluid, rolling satisfaction as vertebrae slide across cartilage.  There are no hunters.  No prey and no world to hunt them in. There is a hill, there is the moon, and there is the fox contemplating the peace.

Fairies

She walks in the door and the fairies in her smile are hidden behind a tongue tasting bitterness.  There is a cat smell, thick and stale like a cloud of wet spores.  She’s in good spirits until walking into the house.  The front door: threshold of negativity.
     She plops her backpack on the kitchen table.  Lights dim and flicker above her head when she walks near.  Faulty electricity.  In the bathroom a pipe breaks through the soft wall and sprays her in the face.  Shrieking, cursing, she shoves toilet paper rolls into the hole and curses the prior tenants and the plumbers.  Negligence and winter freezes are a frustrating duo.
     She hears yelling.
     The stairs jut into the second floor and creak when her feet lick their carpet coated sweetness.  Light squeezes through the crack in the slightly opened door and she pushes it open with a gentle word and soft knock.  Its squeak covers the track and derails a train of frustration, collapsing and sliding into a joyous greeting.  The fairies in their mouths beat on porcelain bars and she hears ivory happiness chain down painful insinuations.  She says hello, how are you, that’s great, nice to see you again.  Each word a gag in her throat.  Spit in her eye.
     Well-practiced, they all keep their jaws closed tight, because fairies always say the things that are most difficult for us to hear.

Bubbles

I was nine years old when I first noticed the bubble.  I pushed my hand against it and it yielded but didn’t move.  Like the inside of a balloon.  It was nice then.  Things I didn’t need coming in didn’t.  The bubble held me close.  It was the inside of that womb most call the “Bigger Picture”.  A way of allowing my feeble kid mind to process a vast and endless reality.

                What we see is so small.  Minute the like light refracting through suds of soap.  We see it, and then it changes.  Watch it swirl about the surface like an oil stain.  These paradoxical things keep recurring inside each other.  There’s some natural logic to why soap and oil don’t mix well: they think they’re the same thing.

I played in my patch of grass, or my sandbox.  My bubble let in the people I would call ‘friend’ and they probably had bubbles too but I couldn’t see them.  It’s important to feel special, but not too special.  The bubble knew this.  It wouldn’t have wanted me to think I was unique in that sense.

                I played soccer, and my bubble made my mother my coach.  I was unphased.  I knew my bubble didn’t want anything from me.  It knew that it didn’t mean anything to me.  It was just there, like when you take off your pants and there’s your genitals.  That was my bubble.  A part of the bland congruity of things I believed to be my own.

                Bubbles laugh.  Did you know that?  The trick is reminding yourself that the bubble is laughing with you.  Whatever that means.  You can only run with somebody if they’re running too.  Nothing can laugh with you unless you’re laughing.  Explanations are just things said so your feelings won't get hurt.  “How expensive is your shame?” they ask.

                As I grew older, so did the bubble.  I grew and it grew.  In cunning and in size.  And smarts.  Can’t forget those.  My bubble did something special.  It started to take control.  It convinced me, once I believed something was real, that it wasn’t. That’s when I started to think my bubble wasn’t really mine.

                But there it was.  Constantly reminding me that it had to be.  Fingerprints cast through a prism; a holographic projection of myself into a world I couldn’t believe in because I believed so much.  It tried to mask itself by shrinking until it was a thin film over my skin.  I tried not to feel filtered, but  of course I did.  Sometimes I wonder what the bubble’s beef with beliefs and convictions is.

                When I was 16, I saw my bubble emerge as noticeable limitation for the first time.  I woke up one day feeling good about myself.  I went outside and took a whiff of the morning, nocturnal chill giving way to the warmth of a budding day.  There was the inspiring egg of the world, waiting for me hatch it.  I stepped through the front door and that familiar, swirling, rainbow globe saran-wrapped me away from the beauty like a chunk of meatloaf.

                You know who kisses another man’s ring and then rips off his hand with his teeth?  I do.  Now all I’m looking for is the right pin.

Woodland Sketches IV

     Once there was a pig who wore a teddy bear suit so the world would not respond to his shame. Where the bear's snout would have protruded was his pink face, and his little hooves eked out where there should have been paws like a porcine Indian chief. The pig was never dishonest about his nature, but his repulsiveness was overlooked by the comedy his life had become. Devouring food and never bathing, the pig was disgusting even for others of his kind, yet he was loved by all.

     When the pig came home and disrobed he would drink himself into a stupor, cut the feces from where his asshole scraped against the polyester lining of the suit, and retire to his room where he dwelt in the shit that was his real self, crying himself to sleep, consumed by cowardice.