Airikr Eusephem sat on the porch and imagined red. Cadmium soiled sun set, burnt sienna soil, fallen autumn oak leaves searing, and a vertical slat picket fence. The structure circumnavigating the lawn was indeed red, though badly weather worn and rasping away, revealing the dull grey wood beneath. Each flank was pierced at vital points by an un-galvanized screw, bleeding rust, pooling into great crimson knot holes and falling in thin sangria pen stripes, like a fresh coat of paint drip drying down natural ribs in the grain. Euseph sat on the rotting wooden, peeling and warped porch to avoid thick heavy rain drops that splotched from the highest elephant leaves and dowsed when they had gathered speed and volume at the bottom limbs. The back yard was a spattering of forest and fern, sprouting kelly and harlequin while the sun deftly rose to slither a trail of color, like an oil spill, into the menacing foliage.
The dumb hollow thumping of garbage bins echoed down streets away. Voices bellowed an octave above the creaming diesel engine that chugged forward along one direction, paused, and then chugged off again, perhaps in the same direction or off onto another street. The echo distanced the illusion as time marked the only proof of its existence. Though dumpsters were fraught and deposited on the sidewalks, they would be tenderly removed by tenants and repositioned again at a later time. The suburb population liked to move things around, it was even more exciting when they were paid for their trendy tasks. The illusion of time marked their existence.
Airikr Eusephem was an echo. The sounds that mimicked the person reverberated inside a mind, synonymous with hard work and debt. Airikr Eusephem reached into the front button pocket of his checker board flannel shirt and pulled out a pack of Kamel K reds, because they tasted good. Flipping the crumpled head from the box and the lid from his zippo, he tugged with his teeth the butt of a grit and lit the tip, near simultaneously.
Airiker Eusephem wasn’t a bad ass, he was efficient. Airikr Eusephem, mostly known as Euseph by his friends, was known as Euseph by his friends because introducing himself as Airikr Eusephem to a stranger begged narrative stories, Euseph mostly hated telling.
The neighbors annoying chiming clock struck a pattern of notes six times. A slow scraping stretched through the kitchen window like a violin bow descending the length of several measures in an overture. Staccato tapping of rain drops syncopated the incongruent rhythms over a mechanical whir. Ferelle Eusephmia was a water color blur in the fern, sprouting Kelly and harlequin.
Ferelle Eusephmia held out her hands beneath a spout shaped leaf and collected tributaries within her cupped palms. Instinct begged her to place the abutted heels of her pink palms to her lips and wet them. Attention won over the will of her body, moving her hands. Desire was conquering her soul to reveal herself. The mask which slipped from the corners of her ears, toppled down her tresses and slid over her shoulders. The needle tips of the grass exhaled a sigh as their spear like shape refused to penetrate the feint plastic.
“No” Airikr cooed out with a gust exhalation of smoke. “He said ‘death was an industrious…’ and then he cut off. He didn’t finish the thought with ‘death is industrious,’ before the girl retracted her left arm and pulled his hand up to her right breast.”
They were spooning and Airikr Eusephem was, as usual, narrating a story in his head.
“What was that story?” Asked Ramona.
There was a dissonant pause as he remembered seeing an old house, like the house he had lived in previously, the living room actually with its giant mural wall but there was no mural or wall really, just the white or darkness fading around the big picture. The big picture was a man pulling together a giant piece of plastic tarp, like the kind painters use or maybe a crime scene investigator. He thought of the last line, about death being industrious and wondered what exactly it meant.
“Nothing really.”
“Nothingness,” she pondered. “I like that.”
It was whenever his bravado reached peak, than what she would least expect, that the time turned over in her favor. She would not think of anything and only feel the palm of his hand cradling her right breast until it was time to think of something. When this occurred her thoughts were louder than detonating explosives which demanded attention and were mostly in pictures, like a children’s book. Words were hardly used except to summarize what she had thought was happening in one or two words, to be filed away into a memory folder, appropriately labeled with the same words she used in her thoughts.
For example he knew one day he would be asked to whisper “sweet nothings” into her ear and be expected to recall this story verbatim.
“Whisper ‘sweet nothing’s’ into my ear.” She would breathlessly request.
And he would ask “What dear?”
She would be in reverie for a few moments before the words fell out her mouth. Occasionally she would imagine her fantastical organization system extending beyond her head and prestidigitated into the real world by some equally fantastic label gun. The prideful success that she had just put something in its place with a permanent brand or scar remained as fog in the atmoshpere. She would have to remind him of its title, aptly given the name from her memory folder labeled “Nothing really”.
0 comments:
Post a Comment