Obit Edit (12 Months Later)

Stand still…
If you stand still the wind won’t cut through you. It’s strange, isn’t it. It goes against what we’ve learned.
Stand still.
Feel it? Do you feel it? You don’t. That’s the point. It’s strange. Short sleeves, too. The stiller you stand the more unlikely you are to feel the December wind.
(For calcium eat cabbage)
Wear a wide-brimmed hat in the rain. Water proof coat. Light an old cigar, have a few puffs. Then extinguish it and slide it back in its plastic tube.
Garcia y Vega.
(It’s not pronounced Garsha)
Stand still for a while and smell the air: dead maple leaves, wet, mixed with railroad. You know that smell…railroad. Carbon, I think. Stand quiet for a while because nothing will stand quiet for you.
No one will stop. Lose the melancholy. There are bills to pay. People will take an hour’s respite, write some nice words on a balloon about how much they miss you, then spin with everything that spins.
Who’s gonna feed the dog? Who’s gonna take care of Sadie?
Stand still. Just one more second. Listen.
Now let her have it.
I’ll see you some other time. They’ll tie balloons to the seat you used to claim in the courtyard, as a memorial.
I’ll snap a photo.
And then delete it to make room for others.
Of other living things.

4th Week Redux

…and we’re quiet for maybe twenty minutes. I am comfortable with that. So is Mark.
He opens up his small Bible and thumbs through to the middle. I wait for him to start. They’re all salesmen in here.
God is an indispensable product.
But he doesn’t say anything. He just reads to himself. And smokes.
The ceiling fan breaks up the blue vapor above us.
Where is this place? The land looks scarred from the weather. Beaten up. Defeated.
Where is this place?
I’m sorry? He looks up.
Where are we?
You don’t know?
I’m not sure.
Harborcreek, he says. Just east of Erie.
I think: Lake Erie.
Pennsylvania. Erie, Pennsylvania. How long have you been here?
He closes the small book.
A month maybe.
Who’s your counselor?
Cody.
There’s been no work the entire time I’ve been locked in. Blank sheets of paper. Stacks.
We sleep three to a room. The men snore. And fart.
I stuff toilet paper into my ear canals but the grinding gets through anyway. I’m not sure how long I’ll be in. Not sure if I’m well or if I’ll ever be well. Not sure who can get me out. Or if I sign myself free. They won’t tell us anything. Just to get better. We’re all getting better. War is Peace. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
He’s good. Cody. (Mark again). He’s a good man. He cares.
He has a mustache.
Mark laughs. I’m not sure why I say that. I’m not sure he’s sure either. There’s a long pause.
I think: here it comes. The Sales Pitch. ABC. Always Be Closing. Always Be Closing when they’re wounded.
Up for some backgammon?
Sure, I say. You can’t let me win, though.
Mark laughs.
I’m serious.
He makes me tell him about my grandfather. Again. I don’t know why. But I tell him. It makes him happy. We roll. We move. We bump. We come back in on points. We smoke. A nurse comes in and pulls the thin, white drapes to shield the room from the winter sun. She picks up a tray with discarded, dirty dishes.
We roll. And we move. And I tell Mark how my grandfather slaughtered the pig at Christmas time in the old country and how he made sausages and boiled the kidneys and served them with salt and pepper and horseradish.

Second Time’s The Charm

You’ll have to go through me.

It was stupid, me standing in front of the door, arms outstretched horizontally, grabbing the frame like some glib, white Jesus, as if it was going to make any difference. She had been at the window most of the year. Smoking. Or…dreaming of something else. Anything.
It was stupid. I wasn’t going to be able to stop her.
When a woman leaves you, all the bravado macho energy you’ve piled up over the years and shoveled from corner to corner of the house, looking to impart some perfect balance to a fundamentally unstable structure becomes a pyre of horseshit infecting all the arteries like a cancer.
And all you can muster is a weak, fleshy barrier, resembling a modern first class dunce attempting to stop the momentum of a freight train carrying much baggage.
And afterward you cry like an emotionally undeveloped fool.
And then you drink.
And all the while you feel sorry for yourself because no one else will. And even if they would, you’d still do it.
We are not altruistic animals; to be that we have to work hard against nature. We are selfish and self-centered, socially inept and mostly ill educated about one another.

You’ll have to go through me.

After she left, I raised the Underwood above my head and smashed it on the pine floor. The carriage and the cylinder and the ribbon and the regulator and all of the parts went sliding across and into the radiator valve, scurrying away like little Lego pieces.
Or roaches.
The windows had been left open.
The air smelled like railroad.
There was no wine left in the house.