You can't kill what's already dead

You know, I had a profound thought but I can only express it by slashing tires and ringing doorbells. I feel like I’m running toward a second chance to meet that girl who I first crushed on. You know the one. High on my parents’ conflicting advice, I handed her a photograph of ME. The ones that call for the weird people from outside of school to come up with some elaborate procedure. Line you up undisputedly alphabetical, comb your hair, and then last but not least describe its original disarray in a way that only eccentric, coffee-possessed middle-aged ladies can. I gave her a medium sized one, not the wallet one because girls don’t carry wallets, and not a large one because that was for my mother. But medium was still really good. I only got four of them. I try to smile then I pass it around.

I feel foolish because I know he could have been my first love. No one in school really thought much of him, other than that he smelled of boiled carrots and had the occasionally strange remark. He wasn’t that funny, only a few of the others laughed, and usually only the ones that kept to themselves. The whole class saw him pick his nose one day right before he tripped, fell, and gave me a picture of himself. A bright red little Irish boy with a mushroom cut the span of something I didn’t know yet. I thought back then that I was the only one who picked my nose, for it was so forbidden that that was probably only the second time I saw someone else do it. On the way home my friends found it so i threw it in a puddle. The reflection rippled, I skipped away giggling at the fact i’d been tagged.

I found my face from 2nd grade in the hands of a beggar

Bleached from acid rain

“My son!” he said. “Don’t you have a heart??”

Busily ignoring him, staring at cars

For some reason this time I thought I’d say something back

To snap him out of this sob story I knew he was quackin

“Nope, no heart. I was about to beg you.”

So he said, “Okay fine, let me tell you the truth.”

Its been 30 years now, I wonder what became of this boy. I wonder for how long  he has been out in the rain? Maybe he’s somewhere now where it doesn’t rain and it only snows so: everything is preserved in its intensity forever.

The boy was a man and he was at a coffee shop somewhere safe discussing idolatry.  For some reason he didn’t like most of the world around him, not any company and definitely no photographs. Shielding his face reflexively like he was swatting something away. Every now and then his hand would send the droplets in his feathery hair ricocheting and they’d land bullseye on the lens. Whoever took the picture would procrastinate to get it developed and forget where and when the shot was taken. They’d post it online and say it was a ghost they’d captured in the office of an abandoned hospital. But this was only on sweaty days. 

“I don’t go to sleep and have delusions of grandeur. I dream of wolves that lead me under the drooped evergreen to palaces of domestic abuse. Where the indoor heating exists specifically to keep water wet enough to drown the master bedroom and all of its taxidermy. I watch powerlessly, as in a memory an intruder could only complicate. So I camp, where I can eat meat. The flies are all dead and the eunuchs begin to notice me. They know I’m here to help the queen this winter.”

She wonders if we’d believe that romantic love lasts forever if they never came up with the freezer. The stale, the loss, the investment.

He forwards his look across the table to his mate, napkins his upper lip area and says “General Electric is an interesting name for a company.”