The 98 Cent Body

Drastic transformations of the landscape almost always occur outside the city limits. But when they do occur within, we have a way of covering them up immediately. Wrapping fences around them, building gazeboes, so that if you fall in at that point, no one really considers it an accident. You have, in your perversity, willed the thing to happen and you get what you deserve. Which is almost always a lingering death by hypothermia, though you might be so lucky as to find your way out again (by following the light in a crevice, say), but when you emerge nothing is ever again the same. Your wife makes the toast and looks you in the eyes when you eat it, and when asked to explain this strange behavior, she shrugs her shoulders as if to say any explanation that might be forthcoming is so necessarily alien and incomplete, there is no point in even initiating a response. It is best to just let the silence that sits between us do whatever work is necessary. At least then we’ll know where we would have wound up eventually. Despite the path the swans take to safety when startled. Despite the pain in the palm of your hand that radiates outward just as soon as you try to swallow any resentment you might feel at this disclosure. It’s like a spider web, that pain, except it’s not visible on the surface. And you’re pretty sure it doesn’t really exist beneath the surface either. It has been invented, the way you might invent the sights and miseries of someone else’s childhood. The way you might, if you had the means and the power, plunge an entire coastline into darkness on little more than a whim.

How to Miniaturize the Soul

Commend the idea of flags, of snow. Of sand grains in the layers that might otherwise seem identical if you were to look at them through a microscope. One specially designed to fit your eye socket -- a necessity ever since there was that dust-up in the tavern where no one pays in cash. They don’t have the patience. The true culprits lie in wait behind the benches, in the yard-tall grass. They say prayers that sound suspiciously like laundry lists. Or those chronicles of what occurred on some island nation where nothing has ever really occurred at all. They know how to miniaturize the soul, if need be. They know how to turn it into a package of seeds like that you’d find on the shelf at a hardware store. But without the pretty photographs on the outside, of course. And the addresses. The suggestions for how to turn your cabin into the kind of fabled destination people drive for hours on the weekend just to visit. Just to tell their friends about when they return because their friends make such stupid, snap decisions. They stick to the edges of every photograph where overlooking them is to be expected. They blend in well with the bald cypress trees. And the sea gulls just arrived from some body of water that, evidently, lies beyond our line of sight. That waits there by implication. And drowns neither actual beasts nor figurative saints. But buoys all things equally. Perhaps it isn’t really made of water after all, but something else entirely. Hydrogen gas. A diminished nihilism. The sort of thing one looks for in the newspaper when the car won’t start. And breakfast sits half-eaten on the table.

Copyright © Charles Freeland, 2008

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