between the nights

Life is running on a 10 second delay. It gives me just enough time to hang over the edge and watch myself go. I wake up, feed everything in my path; chickens, cats, dogs, rabbits, fish, kids.
Then I drive.

I go to work. Sometimes if I am lucky all of me shows up. Only I don't know how to hold onto to it. Tiny moments like soap bubbles floating off into soft summer air. Too fragile to hold, too fleeting to own.

When I'm done at work I get really excited to go home But when I get home I can't quite figure out why I wanted to be there.
In the afternoons the house is quiet. The swamp-cooler in the upstairs bathroom window blocks most of the light. The colors are all muted and the air smells wet. The land is the opposite. The summer light runs naked through the field. Its heat toasts the tops of the grasses. From the ground it raises the dead.

I keep wandering around looking for something I feel I might have lost- but I don't know what it is. I go back and forth; I got this, no I don't, oh-wait I do, oh-no, I don't....

So I went for a run to try to sort out how I was feeling. The answer: miserable.

Which is sort of funny because of course I am. I didn't need a gimpy 4 mile, 90 degree run to tell myself that.

 I can see August like a orange haze hanging before me. It's been that way for months. But out running on the trail I remember something unsettling that had not occurred to me before- first I have to get through July. 

I panic. Stop running and look to the river. The sweet rot of its poison rising the banks. And that was when I noticed despite all the rain the river is at low tide [sic].  Cut off from its head-water by a stranglehold of man-made mazes and diversions, it is drowning in the emptiness of itself. 

I see July. And I see August. I see a long, lonely, dry road ahead.

 And I'm not sure how well I'm going to travel down it.

        

(Friday, July 28, 2006)

People die.  Wendi died on “A” day.  I guess that isn’t really true, she died in the dim blank space before that.  Her bloated naked body slumped across the bathroom floor.  Her swollen feet tangled around the base of the toilet.  Her badly bludgeoned forehead smashed against the door jam.

In her apparent fall her arm laid trapped beneath her, the weight of her decomposing body splitting and shedding the skin. A bath tub of stagnating water to her left, on her right a pool of dark rancid fluid created by brown chunks of her hair, thick layers of rotting flesh, old blood, and vomit.

In the first few hours her once olive toned skin had taken on a stark jaundice, as time past a shade of ashy purple.  It is death purple and you will not find it in a box of crayons.  You must know death to know this color.  And once you know it you can’t ‘un know’ it.

In the 6 by 9 foot front room a fan jammed in an open window did little to cool the stale summer heat; nothing to dissipate the smell. 

And then there was something said about the flies. 

It was the smell that exposed her. Of course initially my information was all second even third hand. I was told a tenant in her building called the land lord complaining of a noxious odder.  The landlord found her body.  He called the police and they called my parents.  I suppose that is our parents after all she was my sister.   ~Taming Venus, mlb