Nothing To Remember: Epilogue

She locked the door behind him and looked at the raw circles set about the extremities of her slender feet, hugging her bare arms against the wrinkled and delicate fabric of the sweater she wore with nothing underneath. Setting a kettle to boil, she gathered sheets and duvet and pillows up, arranging them back about her mattress. Shaking out the quilt, which she’d found at the bottom of a pile of aged linens in a box at the flea market in the west coast city where she’d loved a boy for the first time, the floral print underwear she’d set aside all week tumbled onto the hardwood in a wad. Her mind wandered back so many hours as she sat cross-legged on the floor before them.

In those heels for the third night, she’d been thankful for the acrid apple flavored vodka swirling in the bottom of the sweating glass. So long as she didn’t get carried away in the tingling carbonation of feminine laughter, she’d stood lean and craning. For a moment, she had allowed herself to close her eyes and tilted her head to the side to enjoy the draft from the single pane windows on her neck and the thin flesh stretched across the bone behind her ear. This young man before her kept resting his fingers against the descending slope at the bottom corner of her abdomen and she kept pretending not to notice. Instead, she looked at his boots and nodded as though listening to whatever it was he was just saying about writing. But mostly, she thought about how her pillow would smell of cigarettes in the sunny afternoon after he had left and she lay wondering when next he would call.

Nothing To Remember Pt. III

The flat was palatial in that “old world” sense. The ceilings seemed to be lifting away from the floor all the time, the way the espresso from the café down the rue made the top of your head feel as you reached its bottom. Everything ornate and rosette’d and engraved, so much so that surfaces seemed more pockmarked than decorated. Alyson could hardly imagine this place on a winter evening, the single pane windows like cellophane stretched between shriveled fingers of wood. Those summer months, they just stayed swung open at every hour. Moths made pilgrimages to the few, flickering lamps every night. They had nearly no furniture. Mattresses on floors. Treacherous, wreaking chairs parked beside milk crates and wood boxes pilfered from behind the tavern. The problem with “summer in Paris” was that you were trapped in every other summer in Paris. Even huddled, teeth-chattering, in that damp, frigid alley in March, Alyson didn’t really miss it.

The light, above her in the kitchen window, dumped a yellow wash across the alley. A tittering laughter clattered against the cement around her. His voice, muted and indecipherable, murmured beneath it all. Alyson peaked, though she didn’t need to.

That summer, they would smoke cigarettes and talk too loudly out on the balcony of the sprawling flat. All those American girls, it’s a wonder more of France’s young men didn’t gather beneath that balcony like dogs outside a butcher’s dumpster. They were all but hollering about the tragedy of this or that when they failed to notice the intermingling of a foreign trail of smoke amongst their own. Andrew, in his outrageous boots, had leaned against the column beneath their sheltering parapet, to smoke and listen.

Inside the kitchen, where Alyson didn’t need to see, his hands were on the redhead’s waist and her chin was tucked against her shoulder. Alyson knew that they were leaning against the sink. In Paris, it had been one of those awful cast iron basins with no counter beside it to set your coffee press to dry or to lay out ingredients. Here it was some dull aluminum thing, no doubt, with miles of counter space. Every spurned American housewife, baking away her loneliness, had demanded it. He’d place his thumb along that nigh-translucent waif’s perfect little jaw-line and turn her head up to his. Then he’d press his lips and musky breath with hers.

Andrew threw his hat to them and made them promise to return it that evening. They laughed and made no promises. Inside, Alyson wrote her initials on it’s fraying tag.

When she woke up the following morning, she was still mostly dressed.

His attention had been very much like Paris after the rain. At night, everything sparkles and you feel yourself as the first-born of creation and culture. And yet, in the mornings, the sun casts mottled shadows on every embellishment. Every quaint little flaw of the antiqued is just the marring of too many trespassers.

When the elite of a moment are many, Alyson began to think in a way she’d never say aloud, you realize it may be better to be forgotten.

Nothing To Remember Pt. II

He used to say it sometimes at parties. He’d stare at his scuffy boots and scratch at the greasy hair behind his ear and say it. Or, he’d tug at that stupid thrift store t-shirt and look over your shoulder as he said it. Alyson had watched him do this once a week, every week, for 8 months and now she watched him do it again in that fucking basement. He snapped the folded-down beer can tab with the nail of his forefinger and looked up at the ceiling and said it.


“I don’t know… you know? It’s like, when you make art – when I write – and you do it in public like that, you’re just free. And anonymous. In front of everyone. “

The skinny red-headed girl, that girl that everyone thought was overdressed in her asymmetrical dress and asymmetrical haircut and teetering, perilous heels, nodded solemnly with her eyes closed and her head down, like an acolyte at prayer. He went on. Alyson, on the mildewed basement sofa, stopped smiling.

“It’s like, because everyone is there and sees you, it's like you matter. But you don’t have to explain to anyone why and no one could say for sure why, but everyone knows that this guy, with his typewriter…”

He touched the little, freckled thing on the hip with the tips of his fingers of his non-beer hand.

“or this girl with her sketch pad, or whatever. They know that you matter.”

He shrugged and pressed the sweaty beer can against his forehead and the little red-headed girl bit her lip, blushing behind all her adorable goddamn freckles.

Allyson stood and smoothed her sweater, swaying a little. Leaving that half-full beer can on the coffee table she’d carved their names into in the Spring, she climbed the stairs out of the heat and the sweat and the noise of the basement. The rest of the house was cool and all you could hear was traffic outside and the muted thump of the music downstairs. She tried a few cupboards and finally found the glasses and selected the biggest, cleanest one. At the sink she let the water run and and stared at her reflection in the window out on the alley between disheveled bungalows.

She knew she was pretty. Delicate featured, with fair skin and a great mass of healthy dark hair. It wasn't just her looks he didn't talk to anymore. It was her, in all the invisible ways.

Alyson dipped a finger into the water coming from the faucet and it was that shocking mid-winter cold. She filled her glass and lit a cigarette at the stove. Ducking outside, she sat in the late-march cold with her water and chain-smoked, shivering. And not crying.


She'd left her coat down there on the couch and couldn't decide if it was worth retrieving.

Nothing To Remember Pt. I

“Everyone knows that girl,” this other girl exclaimed, “is a liar.”

That girl sat at the end of a basement sofa balancing a can of beer on her knees pulled to her chest, heels of her flats on the ratty cushions. Her fingers tapped rhythms on her cantilevered soles. Her jacket was folded beside her and in it were three loose cigarettes. She smiled while the room performed for her benign spectatorship and, eavesdropping, she sometimes laughed. Before the end of the night, her cigarettes would be ash and filter in the street.


There, across the grey institutional carpet was the only thing that undid the smile in her eyes, if not her mouth. His boots were just too big and never tied, as though he’d been in some kind of hurry to get to this chair in this room and not talk to her.

Alive. Alone. Alight.

The boy sat all bold angles and subtle curves in the belly of the cast iron tub. Soap bubbles had collected at the edge of the water ringed in filthy grey and the ripples of that way little boys are never still. His head was lathered in a great frothy white wig of shampoo so that he looked cast in a pageant. The man’s hands moved deftly and quickly through the froth, so that when the time came, he cupped an inverted hand over the boy’s brow and ladled bathwater with the other. When he was finished, the man swept the boy’s bangs out of his eyes and kissed his slippery forehead. The boy wiped at his eyes with fingers that seemed longer every day to the man.

“Do moms sometimes give sons baths?” the little boy asked while the man ruffled him briskly about the shoulders with a towel.

“They do, mostly when they’re little boys.” Said the man. The boy stepped into the underpants the man held sprawled between his hands.

“And then do they brush their teeth together and floss and shave together?”

“Well, Mom’s don’t shave their faces the way dads do, but yeah, then they brush their teeth.”

“And read together before bed?”

“The best moms do, yes.”

“My mom was one of the best, right?”

The man put his hand on the little boy’s chest, flat and broad like he was giving compressions to keep the child alive until help arrived. He looked at the wallpaper and all its little swoops and textures. He felt his heartbeat 7 times round and then spun the boy to face the sink. They brushed their teeth. They flossed their teeth. They spread shaving cream about their faces and wiped it away from their chins and cheeks and upper lips, the boy with a plastic razor, the man with the real deal.

“You want batman or superman tonight?”

“I want to be spiderman.”

“Spiderman’s dirty, pal. Tomorrow night.”

“Okay. Okay, batman.”


The man started to help the boy into his pajamas, but he didn’t need it. The man leaned against the doorframe to the room she had painted with care. It was only barely just dark out on account of the summer and he could see the boundaries of their world together, him and the boy. That afternoon, he’d sat with his thoughts and his iced tea on the steps to the kitchen door and watched a pale warrior make-believe a victory at the edge of the lawn. The sun had made the man tired and the boy wanted him to come and fight at his side. He could have and maybe should have. With the cinematic memory that rested in sepia tones through his thoughts now, he was glad he didn’t.


The boy was dressed for bed and they read a story of turtle’s stacked to the sky that one might reach the moon, like some inversion of the Hindu foundations of the world.

The man awoke on the floor of his bedroom, all those photos spread around him and the glass on its side having been earlier drained. The boy was crying, frantic. When the man stepped to the door of the child’s room, still bright from the moon and being painted white save for the clouds stenciled about the ceiling, he heard the boy but didn’t see him. And then there he was, folded into a pile just inside the door by the wall, his eyes wide with terror and drenched in grief.

“What is it, pal?”

“It was a bad dream… a bad dream.”

“Oh, no… You know you’re okay now, okay?”

“I just – yeah, I know, I just – it was so scary and-- so scary.”

“Do you want to tell me about it, pal?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”



The boy trembled with sobs and his breath rippled the room like frothy bath water.

“It was all of us on the bridge, but it wasn’t the bridge,” the boy let tumble out.

“All of us?”

“You and me and mr. mittens and mommy and we were on the bridge but it wasn’t the bridge.”

“How did you know it wasn’t the bridge?”

“Because it was real high. It was so real high up and mommy was out front while we crossed it and and then…” The boy’s voice broke. “ but and then she fell and you couldn’t catch her.”

“You knew it was your mom?”

“Yeah and she fell and you reached and couldn’t catch her and you were holding mr. mittens and we all began to slip. We slipped and we fell too.”

“And then you woke up?”

“I woke up and I was crying and then I tried to find you but I was scared. I was scared.”

“It’s okay to be scared and I’m always going to come find you.”

“But I don’t like it.”

“And that’s okay too. Just look for me, okay?”

“I wish you played with me today. I wanted you to.”

“Sometimes dads have to let their little boys play by themselves. It’s good for us. For both of us.”

“Okay.”

The man held his boy in that empty house and well within the boundaries of their world. The boy was asleep soon and the man soon after. In the morning, they made pancakes and they laughed in the sunlight that found its way onto their faces through trees and windows.

Noble Lies & The Things Implied

Cigarettes were, for him, always the triumph of context over reason. He never smoked them in America, but on the Continent, the air smelled wrong without the hint of acrid tobacco smoke about his clothes. Except now, he’d been in Europe so long he was always cold. He spent most of his mornings rubbing his hands together and trying to get the fluid slowly gripping his lungs to settle for the day's work. European editors were used to phlegmatic writers. American editors couldn’t be bothered to get up early enough to call in the morning. If his daughter called, she would have worried.

Still, she never called.


He wrote the same six pages every day. In those pages, she walked from the kitchen and collected a basket with blankets and pads of paper and brushes and paints. He would describe, everyday, that same dress, that same gold ribbon in her hair. And she would walk through the back woods to the clearing and his words would describe what her brushes would portray. Then, in his description and even in the room a bit, the air would take a chill and the light would go gray. Day after day, twilight would be creeping around her enclave, her clearing.

Then he would stop, light a cigarette and get to work.


Today, when he pulled his kerchief away from his mouth, it was streaked with red. Today, the phone would not ring, nor the day after. Today, in the six pages, she was grown and in a white dress and he didn’t follow her to the clearing. Today, he narrated as though wrapped in gauze and only half awake. And, in the distance, she sat on the swing he’d always meant to build in the woods and smiled.

Mildew & Rust. Moths & Blowing Dust

She preferred her dresses barely there and this one was no exception. It wasn’t so much that a dress should show vast expanses of pearly skin, though this one certainly did. After dashing across her front, just beneath her collarbones, the neck line traversed a scapular curve at a dire, hurtling angle, and swept back up over the other shoulder blade just as abruptly. This dress was barely there in that perfect way; it hung across her frame delicately and yet moved with her like an aura. Like a razor thin cloud of silvery ephemera. In candle-light, she glowed. In passing headlights, she shimmered.


And the best thing about this cad on her arm was that he never noticed. She could set her emerald irises in a field of smoky grays such that they suggested men would fight wars in her honor, and he would spend the whole evening behind a scotch and a cigar, content to kiss her cheek on every entrance and exit. She was, for him, much like his cuff links; dashing accoutrement that, if left at home, would be unfortunate but, after all, the night would go on. Tonight, she’d feign a yawn and tuck her fingers beneath the lapel of his coat.

“I’m tired,” she exhaled, brushing his ear with just the hint of her bottom lip. He produced some bills and she received them along with a last kiss for her cheek in all those masculine aromas.


And wherever the taxi took her, she had hours before the illusion required she was home. There were, of course, men who loved her. Probably one each in every surrounding postal code. Men who would have stolen her away to any number of warm, Catholic places for the rest of history. And she told them how she loved the sound of escape. And, in the mean time, she let them buy her things she had no place to wear. Every single one wondered why she never spent the night.

And every morning she woke up before him in that sprawling bed and thought with fear that she would always love the man who never called her by her name.

Aptly Alternating Alttitudes

There wasn’t a square corner in the place. Every angle pinched acutely or yawned obtusely. Every line bowed this way or that. If you rested your temple against the wall and looked towards a corner, it was as if you perceived the curvature of space itself. The building was skewed with the drunkenness of its architects those generations ago. It lay at the edge of the clearing in a murky wood. At this elevation, nearby peaks caught hulking afternoon thunderheads as they trundled past, but the golden hour was often left clear and placid. God Himself tied finishing touches on the day in rainbow’d ribbon. The soil beside the deck was spongy and cold beneath her feet as she waved goodbye to the guests who’d ventured here only to speak in generalities and leave behind the odd article of clothing.

The parties were nearly as unbearable as the stretches of aloneness. Anyone she invited out here never came alone. It was always handfuls of people and usually one or two more than there were seats for. They staggered and sprawled across worn out rugs and worn-smooth floorboards alike. They would parade through, like a band of mendicant friars, in a clinking of glass, a shuffle of feet and a dull, spiraling murmur of vacant illocutions.

“This place must be a hundred years old.”

“Don’t you get lonely out here?”

“The view is just beautiful.”

Usually, on the second or third day, everyone would come to a hush, the better to hear the muffled sublimity of the afternoon tempests beyond the meandering walls. That was always the day they’d leave and the only one she wished they wouldn’t.

The Way Winter Wears

Papers are finished and graded. I’m home in California, where it’s warmer by twenty degrees and considerably less snowy. The air here is damp all the time, though. Even when it’s sunny, the coastal damp hangs invisible in your sweaters. I’m colder here, by far. I wish I were more relaxed, but well, I’m not. I corralled the long-ignored tasks from the weeks of paper writing and finals stress, dumped them in a folder and now they lurk here as well. PHD applications. Student loan business. Letters I’ve been meaning to write for ages and ages. I forgot to pick up some dry cleaning last night and I woke up in a panic this morning. Old habits die hard, they say.

So, in faith, I write:

“Winter’s here,” She sighed and pulled the expanse and weight of down-filled white around her middle, “and I’ll never be warm again.”

A month before she’d filled the trunk of my car with fallen leaves so that they spilled around my ankles when it opened. She was thoughtful like that. There I stood, at a gas pump in Lancaster, Pennsylvania with the New England fall condensed about my feet, laughing to myself. The pay phone line had crackled when she told me, “You can take it with you…see!”

I still haven’t vacuumed the bits and grit from the carpeting.

Now the clouds seemed, having once been fleecy, to take a cold distance of slate-like canopy. The crisp breezy had become a harrowing howl. The leaves of autumn had long been bagged and shipped away. And all her rambunction with it. I’d returned, but she’d retreated into a cocoon of bedridden boredom. Of tea and television. Soup and solitude. She lay like seeds underground, waiting to blossom through the snow.

This morning she’d awoke in last night’s clothes. The party I’d dragged her to had murmered collectively with the fervent solemnity of deep January. Everyone smoked a little more and the drunkards’ conversation was of challenges more than triumphs. So rarely was agreement found and two young bucks had locked horns in the yard, spilling across the frost and ice. I’d got her home, but she burrowed into the bed made for guests on our sofa and would not be moved. I slept alone in her bed, most of the heavy sheets and covers pushed down to the floor. I’ve never needed to be so warm.

She’d long stopped turning her back to change and the t-shirt fell across her breasts a veil that bespeaks the covered. I sat the edge of the bed and she stood before me, a bare-skinned pilgrim, and I pressed my lips to the skin at the hollow of her hipbone, just below the hem of that shirt. She laced her fingers through my hair and clutched weakly.

“Will it be like this every winter?” she asked in that far-off way.

“Here? Maybe so.” I pressed my temple to her waist and looked across the field of empty clothes that led to the door.

“It’s harder when you leave.”

“It makes a difference if I stay?”

“I think it does.”

“I couldn’t anyways. You know that.”

“I know. ‘the cost of a future somewhere warm’” She parroted what I’d written across the collage of used-up plane tickets.

She plodded in her bare-feet to the window and pulled the shades. When she returned I spun her round and down across the bed, and for a while her hands about her hair and her thighs about my ears. Later I’d lift the shades and sit with a book over a steaming cup of coffee by the window. In a few moments, she’d emerge at the steps of the building and light a cigarette.

At the bottom of the next page, I’d look up to see her seated on the snow and crying.

When I finished that chapter, I’d looked up and she was by my side.

So, All Saints Suffer?

And now, a little Halloween story...

We were the first folks in the county to get a Ford, and I’ll tell you, we were off to California. For a people emerged from the bleakness of a coal-mine into the bleakness of a Midwestern winter, to roll up shirt-sleeves on Christmas is quite the heralding image. We found our home and a parish. The new jobs were simple, but easy enough. Yes, a job each, since we thought ourselves modern. I’d not been in the Great War. She’d not had to see me go. Things were quiet enough and our world was small. We didn’t own a radio. We only got a newspaper on Sundays. A whole city began to grow around us, as others came to roll their sleeves on Christmas too. But we paid that little mind.

That day had been dark, like clouds rolling through a diamond sky. But with the dark came a hiss. Almost a hum, and with it a living roil of swarming life. The black cloud of what would prove a pestilence lifted over our city, and then dropped from the air like a balloon had burst, and lay like dust on every surface. This fine, alien dust that choked your throat and ringed your nostrils. The streets sat quiet for days as people swept and mopped with rags across their nose and mouth. And then the bleeding began.

The yellowed sheets were threadbare and loosely knit. This gauzy lens through which we saw the cathedral ceilings was lifted above our heads as soon as we arrived. No waiting for death to pull the shroud across our faces. That time weeks ago. The glossy, red stains would wick through them rapidly, like a nation fleeing toward the coasts. They all but dripped at the corners as though taps had been installed and opened wide. If the shift nurses forgot to roll you every few hours, or if things advanced considerably, you’d be wrapped in a gestalt of your own lifeblood in just a few seconds. Weighted and suffocated in a glistening, crimson death shroud. In 1918, you could drown from the inside on your own fluids, if the fever didn’t cook your mind first. But now...well, not so much the opposite as a new the-same.

The Repetitive Price of Purgation

Okay, okay, I feel guilty about yesterday's vacuous (if not unpleasant) photo-entry. Here's a little content for balance' sake.

I wrote this sitting outside the cafe one afternoon, using my phone and publishing immediately to Twitter. Micro-micro-fiction, I suppose. I was reading Cormac McCarthy's "The Crossing" at the time and borrowed a bit of the premise for the story from a passage in that.

a note: each sentence had to be 140 characters or less, as is Twitter's custom.

-The Cost of Things: a story (inspired by McCarthys "The Crossing")

-A man dreamt each night, less and less, of the casual beauty and her smile since losing sight at twenty-eight.

-He would feel sometimes, wandering here and there, at stranger's faces, but never pictured any but hers.

-Now old and beset only with his cane, the clothes about him and sturdy boots that cradled ancient feet, he ceased to dream at all.

-Wrecked between world and reveries, sleep having lost its lure, he called upon a man of tonics and oils.

-A tonic prescribed, promising to restore dreams and their contents, cost the same as sturdy boots, not more.

-Unshod and set in thoroughfares' dust, his mind's eyes saw what carried further than feet.
And carried thus, more and more, till no more sleeping could be had. (The End)

Remembering The Revenant's Role

The dreams are always the same. The dreams are never the same. Or rather, the elements never coalesce in quite the same way twice, though there is repetition to the themes. Oh, I do wish there was some way to be clearer about all of this, but you know dreams. They are so set in their peculiar ways, and they make their own kind of sense. They have that dream-logic. You see people and they don’t look like themselves, though their identity is certain. You flash from place to place, though they might be in wholly different parts of the country. The world.

I’m beginning to suspect she doesn’t have dreams. I know, I know, everyone has dreams. And yes, its common to, having no practice in recollecting them, awake with no memory of those dreams everyone has. It isn’t her not remembering that I take as evidence, but the sort of sleeping she does. The sleep of the dead, you might say. Or the innocent, though that seems increasingly unlikely. Like a horizontal yogi, she selects some lithe position and holds it till morning. Then she’ll stretch like a cat; claws out and back arched, purring a little.

Then, 5 days out of seven, we fuck.

But that’s not the point.

In the dreams (my dreams, that is) the world is itself, only darker. And every entity presses, first, from the velvety panel of a night-time universe, then bursts into color. Into the color one can almost hear with the remarkably common synesthesia of dreams. Its nature, mostly, but sometimes buildings. Everything oddly proportioned. Not that I can see myself, but I’m present as my 13 year old self. Pre-adolescent and awkward and so aware that nothing about me is unchanging or ready yet for the world. And all the women I’ve loved begin to lurk into a clearing, only they are fawns. I mean, it’s them. We both know I know it’s them. But they are delicate, feminine deer. White tails and brown noses and dark eyes, with Bambi lashes.

It’s often now that I’ll notice there are birds singing with that spring-time urgency. Sirens, in both senses.

They stroll with varying steadiness and poise into the clearing and fold their spindly legs beneath their musky torsos. They first kneel, then lay about me in a circle, nibbling grass but mostly staring with those eyes, like ink-dipped marbles.

Then the silence is appearant, and the dead bodies of sparrows and robins rain down out of the card-paper-cut-out trees. Or, sometimes, from the pop-up-book power lines.

And that’s when I wake up. Wake up and see her sleeping still, in both senses.