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9 episodes
1
I gathered inchworms hanging from the huge oak tree; dripping from branches too high up to reach, to climb on. I put them on top of my red plastic lunch box and proceeded to kindergarten, watching their squirmy yellowish green bodies inch their way along the top towards the handle slowly and mindlessly. I placed them gently back so that my hand would not accidentally move and crush their tiny bodies, leaving delicious guts on my fingers.
I left my red plastic lunch box in the coatroom, did my activities of the day of making castles to live in when I married the prince and clay frogs to eat lima beans off my diner plate.
The stupid inchworms were shriveled, dehydrated when I returned, died in the coatroom smelling of dirty ugly children. Pissy, barfy, rubbery smells of small people suffocated little inchworms.
2
I luxuriously ate honeysuckle, letting the taste fill my mouth, rolling my tongue around until I got every tooth, every part of my gums and my cheeks covered. I pulled apart the little yellow flowers, allowing each to float towards the group once I was finished with it, spotting the grond with yellow until the sweetness made me nauseous.
3
Little sun-dressed with splashy patterns, short enough to show off dirty scabby knees with skinny straps tied in silly bows on my shoulders; the skirt hugging my thighs in a way that I loved as I spun and danced. I am always tugging the dresses down away from my chest as if they were strangling me, crushing my heart; allowing the sun to freckle my exposed chest.
4
Big heavy boots stomping through deep snow, avoiding pissy yellow patched left by cold dogs. My mittens are full with snow to melt on my lips, cold water to drink. Suddenly I step in snow too deep. The left leg is unable to pull out of the drift with my foot still booted. I feel too lazy to dig it back out and plan to wait until thawing, until spring, to retrieve it, to spend the winter months with only one boot on.
5
I am following butterflies around high grass, watching them kiss flowers and then float further; not caring where they went as I stomped on decayed zucchini still on the vine in the vegetable garden. I go with them until they reach pavement where I allow them to leave me, watching them flitter away until they are too small to see. My bare feet with wet mud and grass stuck between my toes stay where the butterflies have left me for the mosquitoes to suck my dirty blood.
6
Sunshine blaring on car windows as I drive faster, blurring exit ramps, signs, "scenery". Cigarettes ashes blown back into the car by the wind of speeding to music that isn't even good blaring to block out thought sso my existences is ash, asphalt and squinty eyes.
Then seeing a dead dog. Things that aren't supposed to die on the side of the road, dirty like exhaust and stringy hair from rain. A fast look at the dead dog gives me something to think of between cigarettes. Chain-smoking is disgusting, so I wait a few minutes, pretending that I am not.
Dead dogs, who were once loved, dead dogs that pissed yellow spots into lawns and were still loved, dead dogs with fleas and love and late evening walks and belly rubs and a warm bed to sleep near owners' feet that loved them and then they die. They don't exist and they are still loved and they decay on the side of the road; stupid drivers who can't follow white lines hitting their now dead paws that used to run after slimy tennis balls. Dead dog's guts on hot asphalt, assaulted by flies until someone removes the smushed remains and there are no dead dogs for a few days before someone kills another that people love and give silly names to and treat better than they treat themselves.
7
A gravedigger making earth-space for homes where we put dead people. Shovel, throw, shovel, throw. Deeper and wider and deeper and wider, piles of dirt around the hole. He brings his mother the flowers people leave behind.
8
Twisted straw and four dimes. Empty crusty glasses after milk shakes at roachy diners with waitresses with halitosis, rotten teeth and stained aprons who probably spit in your water and put hairs in your greasy fries with cheese, bloodied with thick ketchup. Change like the gloves left behind in the booth, leather cracked and insulation slowly falling out on fingers.
9
Change like a twisting tumbling thing, like a rupture of flow, the rhythm of a good jazz album and old tin cans with rust holes and sharp edges. Whatever they thoughts of then, now that there is change, never existed in the first place. Change occurring the seconds between the time the phone rings and someone picks it up; can't go back.
Change like cut string
And burnt leaves, broken light bulbs with millions of silvery shards of glass. Like avalanches and thin ice cracking in never ending veins through bodies, brining warm oxygen to fingers and toes. The end and then beginning and the middle all rearranged and they ways we know get lost in black garbage bags to decay far away in landfills, far from where people live.
Sunday, October 7, 2001
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