Later than I had hoped

The dog is barking in the dead of night. Inside, we close the windows and slip into sleep beneath the low hum of the fan, not concerned about what the dog is barking over, or what we've missed while we weren't watching television. We close our eyes, and drift into dreamless sleep, our faces cradled in palms, our jaws slack, alone at last.

I'm drinking a glass of water with two bugs floating in it. The bugs flying in too low for that ocean of purified water. They move away from my my mouth as I take a drink, and consider their lives lost. I do not toast them. But I give them this passing thought in the evening before I go to bed, and that should be enough. Tomorrow, tomorrow I'll clean this cup, I tell myself, tomorrow they'll go down the drain. But tonight they will be the silent company in these late hours, and I will bid them a fond farewell, a death at sea.

Have you ever imagined you were a fly? Like how big a glass of water would be? Like if it would have so much appeal to you that you would fly (joke) right in and dunk yourself in it. If the water was like some sort of baptism. Do flies baptize? Lord only knows, I suppose?

Fiction (Cont.)

I bent at the silver railing, slick and salty, and hurled my lunch overboard. A school of fish appeared and began snapping it up, little bubbles appearing where their mouths closed. I remember the hair on her arm, bleached white, resting inches from mine. I remember all the tenebrous connections I’d sought to get here close to me, and how I deemed it ironic, chronically misused I know, that the vomiting had done it. We stood in that unfiltered morning light, the sky getting clearer, watching fish eat vomit. “I’d love to stay like this all day Gilligan.”

Anyhow, I loved her. I loved her as you love a first: all head over heels and stupidly, such that when you finally emerge from that plunge you have no earthly clue why you’re wearing designer clothes and listening to jazz in your spare time.

We were hiking on the day of the event. I wore sensible shoes, contoured soles designed to give increased grip on slippery terrain. They were some sort of trail scramblers that I’d picked up at an outlet store in Gaviota. The shoes were fairly new. I’d had them for two months. It’s highly unlikely given my infrequent usage that the grip had worn away at all. The trail took us around an empty polo field pock-marked by gopher holes. It meandered, I suppose.

The polo field was surrounded by a track, red, comprised primarily of clay. The track was ringed by a series of yellowing bamboo shoots, which appeared to me, ghoulish, like the bones of some long dead race of giants. I’m projecting backward now though, I’ve no earthly clue if they were anything but bamboo shoots lining the path. The sky was, as I recall, beige in color. The clouds were light and variable.