Light
Palm-wide bars of impersonal morning light painted acoustically hollow white walls which housed unfurnitured space. The world swung with my steps, the carpet thick and unyielding beneath my little feet. The world to me now was 2 rooms: the room where I had done it, which was the living room, which carried my beloved Thomas the Tank Engine train set and its wooden rails all laid out in partial disarray, and the room where She was. I walked towards Her unclad from the waist down; my diaper lay abandoned in the first room. I tugged on Her skirt, a dark-green sacred fabric bell which never rang but rustled, and enclosed darkness.
“Where did you put your diaper,” came down the voice, the color of orange sun through a filled beer stein, rung through with a mandatory note.
“Ucki,” I said, and pointed her to the next room, which we walked to.
There it was, in not exactly the middle of the room. I had been learning to go potty. I thought, if thought is the right word, that She might be pleased. I held my head high, and smiled broadly. I lived in that natural state of knowledge in absentia which held space for future knowledge the way the vacant mind of the budding seed is held within the penciled sketch of the full-grown plant.
I could feel, sense, her body tense, though she didn’t hold me. Her face contorted, voice tones turned rigid, like the prongs on a rake, sharp but also thick and metallic.
A single elongated undulation sounded, like the effect of a ground tremor eddying through that sunlit beer, blast from some revenant foghorn, then, “Bad boy! Bad boy!”
Blunt electricity twice coursed through me, or rather through that original tangle of electric cords that wires all bodies. I saw only the uncomprehending white walls. They seemed blank and mute, helpless or unwilling to help.
From the ground one moment, altitude increased the next, and there was a smacking once on my bottom, what must have been my filthy, unwashed bottom. It was more sound than sensation, this clap, and then, as in the third of three separated images, I found myself carpeted again.
When She left I did not cry but staggered. The vague intimations of happy shared joy in my gift had turned a fugitive fantasy, a chalk mark on an already erased slate board. A state of disgrace caged me now in streaks of malevolent light. Between these two images was a space like that between the graphs of two asymptotes in time.
I might then, or perhaps it was later, have felt the first stirrings of a white, puke-warm discomfort and repulsion, a segmented worm rippling thickly through my solar plexus.
“Bad boy, bad boy, bad boy,” I whispered as I wandered through the house, and clapped weakly again and again the bottom of my pants.
Fissures
You'll be talking to someone, and suddenly, micro-fissures erupt in the conversational landscape: a slight inflection is taken wrong; "there are good people who like to skate" is taken to mean that "all good people" like it; your hesitating breath pausing to take stock is taken to indicate disagreement; your hasty and confused attempts to clarify things only confuse them further. Some magical bird normally so swift it is invisible, employed to sail meaning across gusts of words, has been interrupted in flight and revealed to be a crude chewing-gum-and-aluminum affair.
Palm-wide bars of impersonal morning light painted acoustically hollow white walls which housed unfurnitured space. The world swung with my steps, the carpet thick and unyielding beneath my little feet. The world to me now was 2 rooms: the room where I had done it, which was the living room, which carried my beloved Thomas the Tank Engine train set and its wooden rails all laid out in partial disarray, and the room where She was. I walked towards Her unclad from the waist down; my diaper lay abandoned in the first room. I tugged on Her skirt, a dark-green sacred fabric bell which never rang but rustled, and enclosed darkness.
“Where did you put your diaper,” came down the voice, the color of orange sun through a filled beer stein, rung through with a mandatory note.
“Ucki,” I said, and pointed her to the next room, which we walked to.
There it was, in not exactly the middle of the room. I had been learning to go potty. I thought, if thought is the right word, that She might be pleased. I held my head high, and smiled broadly. I lived in that natural state of knowledge in absentia which held space for future knowledge the way the vacant mind of the budding seed is held within the penciled sketch of the full-grown plant.
I could feel, sense, her body tense, though she didn’t hold me. Her face contorted, voice tones turned rigid, like the prongs on a rake, sharp but also thick and metallic.
A single elongated undulation sounded, like the effect of a ground tremor eddying through that sunlit beer, blast from some revenant foghorn, then, “Bad boy! Bad boy!”
Blunt electricity twice coursed through me, or rather through that original tangle of electric cords that wires all bodies. I saw only the uncomprehending white walls. They seemed blank and mute, helpless or unwilling to help.
From the ground one moment, altitude increased the next, and there was a smacking once on my bottom, what must have been my filthy, unwashed bottom. It was more sound than sensation, this clap, and then, as in the third of three separated images, I found myself carpeted again.
When She left I did not cry but staggered. The vague intimations of happy shared joy in my gift had turned a fugitive fantasy, a chalk mark on an already erased slate board. A state of disgrace caged me now in streaks of malevolent light. Between these two images was a space like that between the graphs of two asymptotes in time.
I might then, or perhaps it was later, have felt the first stirrings of a white, puke-warm discomfort and repulsion, a segmented worm rippling thickly through my solar plexus.
“Bad boy, bad boy, bad boy,” I whispered as I wandered through the house, and clapped weakly again and again the bottom of my pants.
Fissures
You'll be talking to someone, and suddenly, micro-fissures erupt in the conversational landscape: a slight inflection is taken wrong; "there are good people who like to skate" is taken to mean that "all good people" like it; your hesitating breath pausing to take stock is taken to indicate disagreement; your hasty and confused attempts to clarify things only confuse them further. Some magical bird normally so swift it is invisible, employed to sail meaning across gusts of words, has been interrupted in flight and revealed to be a crude chewing-gum-and-aluminum affair.
