Hair (11.1)

I cannot discern much from the deep heavy sands of last night’s dreamscape, and certainly cannot straighten those twisting, shifting fragments of my subconscious. Characters bled into one another, melted seamlessly; each figure was but an idea with many masks. But there a few shards, now well polished by my waking mind, that I can see. I am sitting in a hair salon next to my cousin/my friend/a benign female character waiting for a faceless stylist who finally approaches and shows me a frothing bowl of grey liquid, supposedly my hair dye. I try to protest but she, that blurred woman in white, tells me that it will turn out much redder on my hair. When I finally look in the mirror my hair is a soft, sad purple shot through with gray. I love it. The dream devolves into a shifting, featureless desert. Now I am flying low over the impenetrable snowy canopy of some Northern forest, muted purple hair waltzing in the wind. The vague knowledge that I am flying too low and that if I crash into the thick trees they will never find me leaks into the back of my mind but I am too free to care. I finally breach the tree line but manage to scramble onto a giant snow drift resting atop the canopy. I see a woman with her young son and an empty stroller walking down a sidewalk carved into the drift. I wave and know that I am saved.

Quote 11

"To live is to betray your god. Every act in life, every act that affirms us as living beings, requires that the commandments of your God be broken."
-Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz

Quote 10

"It's lonely here/ There's no one left to torture"
- Leonard Cohen, The Future

Quote 9

"... and since then had been in perpetual decline, one of those interminable Mexican declines, meaning a decline stitched together here and there with a muted laugh, a muted shot, a muted whimper."
- Roberto Bolaño, 2666

Joe Roberts (11.4)

The night after his brother Frankie hit someone with his truck Joe Roberts lay awake wondering if he should tell the police. The deep, primordial smell of earth mingles with the sickly sweet rot of dying vegetation. Somewhere deep in the recesses of the jungle the police are searching for him. Joe scrambles through the forest, the sound of dogs trailing him. The beat of his heart crashes  against the inside of his skull. He is running, running, chasing, looking for Frankie. If he can only talk to Frankie. Joe follows the hollow trickle of water to a river. His brother is sitting there on the bank, his body curled up around an object in his hands. Before he can say anything Frankie thrusts a rag into his pocket and whispers “Hide this for me.”  The glassy water clicks over the smooth stones in the bottom of the river. Joes runs. The rag starts bleeding and the thick blood seeps through his pocket and runs down his pant leg. The dogs can smell it. He wakes up in the police station, the rag still bleeding in his pocket. His veins feel like they’re pumping battery acid. Joe asks to use the bathroom and tries to clean his pants in the sink but the blood will not come out. An old policeman catches him scrubbing and pushes him against the cool, tiled wall. Joe confesses his brother’s sin and the oldman grumbles, “But your brother has been dead since Wednesday”.

The Squirrel (11.3)

His eyes, vast black ovals of liquid glass, tremble violently in his head.  The squirrel stands erect, taut, unmoving, a taxidermic statue on the campus green, perfectly still, waiting, listening, until a bolt of nervous energy shatters his composure like a gummy bear dipped in liquid nitrogen. Twitches shiver up and down his wiry muscles as he scrambles forward half a foot and freezes again. His tiny hands flutter rapidly around the hard surface of a found acorn. He nibbles anxiously. Stop. Listen. Run. Eat. Stop. Listen. Run. Eat. He is constantly in motion. Like aggressive multi-taskers, cocaine addicts and children with ADHD the squirrel does so much without every getting anything done. A cycle of furious spasms propels him towards the base of an oak where he stops, straightens, tightens, quivering, obviously wired, strung out, on the verge of some great mental edge. This schizoid dance of his prevents from ever having to stop and think. It’s as if his mental filter, that great biological spam filter, has broken, burned out and all the vast minutiae of life come crashing into his overloaded cerebellum. He is constantly assaulted by raw stimuli. The scrape of a shoe on stone. The sickly sweet smell of grass. A distant voice. The lingering breeze.  They pour directly into his cracked-open mind. Like a shark he must keep swimming, moving, going, or he’ll drown.

The Farmer and the Snake (11.2)

On a frozen November morning the Farmer was tromping down the dirt path to his house when he came upon a frozen snake coiled in the snow. The Farmer stooped down and lifted the limp, pale body into his arms and carried it back to his cottage. He laid it gently before the fireplace on a bed of old dish towels and waited. Soon the crackling warmth from the hearth warmed the Snake and he awoke. The Snake had never been in a cottage before. He had been born in the woods and had always thought he would die there, twisted in the dirt. The Farmer brought the Snake one of the mice he had found caught in the traps in his attic that morning. The Snake quickly swallowed it but was still hungry. He had not eaten in three weeks. It seemed he was always hungry. “Do you have more?” he asked. The gentle Farmer smiled and nodded slowly before laying two more mice down in front of him.  The Snake swallowed them both and curled up in his pallet of towels. The Farmer left him before the fire and went to bed. The Snake felt like he was brimming with something he did not understand and fell asleep. The next morning the Farmer bent down to pet his new friend. The Snake, still half-asleep, was plunged into panic and bit the Farmer on his hand, killing him. The Snake had never felt so empty. He slithered out the door and stole away down the twisting path, going nowhere.