The Night She Pondered the Death-Thought

That afternoon I sat and considered most things as they are and how they appear to be: the couch and cushions, raspy and woolen and grey; the bespeckled carpet; the fish twisting in the lazy murk of water and algae. Then upon an adulterated state my mind began to wander and consider, wonder and contemplate: the idea that November means brandy. So I wanted to make an adventure into the dry valley air and taste the wind and watch the anonymous faces whiz by holding and hiding unknown desires the likes of mine. By chance some may be afflicted with the same prescription. Be it by habit or vice these people have come to pilot steel with sunken brain or lifted lung, or some ill-calculated combination. Such is the way of a small-town boy, finding fun in things deemed malicious and regrettable, gagging out the window in an attempt to dispel wisps of creosote, or sprawling hands through sands to find beach spiders, finding them in absolute dread and horror and consequently seeking comfort in fist-sized chocolate bars, cringing at the stars too bright for barbiturated eyes, the patterns too lurid. All this leads to something. The ubiquitousness of the death-thought, the one that veins through your stomach at the sight of a hot, bloated bird on the grease-slicked rails of the CNR. Or the synesthesia brought on by a tight-rope routine using a lake-bloated log that squishes and squirms strangely beneath the feet. The thought that makes one cry into blueberry yogurt. These thoughts, while surreal and forgettable in youth, tend to manifest insidiously in the company of the aged. It seems one cannot simply recover from a death-trip at a coffee diner. One must overhear the latest obituary-gossip and deathbed readiness scenarios and one must also, at a human level, try to empathize with every soul and therefore must absorb every sentiment. It’s at this moment I realized the fruit fly had landed fatally in the pool of ketchup and could not be saved. So I forked the potatoes and swished them around the drowning fool. But even when I looked up and through the window I couldn’t avert my eyes from the absolute poverty of the streets where cats are leashed to shopping carts, are leashed to worked hands of humans looking for one more night. And then I wondered when the fly would finally die and where. I wondered if the fly would choke in the ketchup now or later, sitting in the black bags outside the restaurant in the grey cold.