Markers. Ants. Tectonics. X. & Pain. & Illness.

In Death

I forget how to hold my own penis,
and horrify everyone with my pleas.

The libraries hold only instructions
for devices that killed children.

The tables sag with food and the cups
brim with the grinnings of rats.

My shoes fit, but my pants drag
my arms dangling from my sleeves.

A plenty of wires, bricks, nails, wood
plenty plenty plenty.

We spread on the frosted
grass of the park, and we trade.

I find I like your life better.
Your achievements comfort me.

I laugh as I could not laugh
because my laughter is dead laughter.

And, in death, I pause, gather myself, and I
pause, gathering, to pause.

Uncle Stephen read the poem without stopping or asking questions.

I had been worried about his questions after the reactions I had gotten in class.

For a while, it had looked like I was going to be one of those troubled kids sent to the principal’s office.

Here’s the poem:

I awoke and the thing
called to me from under
the house
where it swam in dirt.

I awoke and the thing
sang to me from under
the floorboards
scratching with its eyes.

I awoke and the thing
whispered from within
the echoing bedsprings
shaking my dreams.

I awoke and the thing
was curled in my head
curving sound into its
one black wing.

“It’s good,” Uncle Stephen said, and rebalanced on his chair.

“That’s it?” I said.

“Why?”

“Well, my creative writing teacher said it was too abstract and besides it rhymed and the rhyming wasn’t even very good.”

“What’s wrong with rhyming?” Uncle Stephen said.

“He said nothing was wrong with rhyming, except that it’s how I write all of my poems and maybe I should try something else.”

“Your creative writing teacher is an ass.” Uncle Stephen said.

I took my poem back from Uncle Stephen.

I had not considered that possibility.

Mr. Schellenberg seemed like he knew what he was talking about.

“He’s nice,” I said.

“Great, he’s a nice idiot,” Uncle Stephen said.

Uncle Stephen seemed like he knew what he was talking about too.

About everything.

It was something in the tone of his voice.

I was trying to imitate Uncle Stephen’s manner and tone of speaking.

So far, I had succeeded in being called an arrogant jerk.

“The poem is good,” Uncle Stephen said, “go and write some more.”

“How do you know it’s good?” I said.

“Because when I finished your poem I knew I was breathing.”

“What?” I said.

“How many times are you aware of  your own breathing?” Uncle Stephen said.

“I dunno.”

“Any poem that makes me aware that I’m breathing, that’s a good poem,” Uncle Stephen said.

I took a breath. It had rained the day before. There was a deep hint of the smell of turned earth. When the air moved a certain way, I could smell the pop-up lilies and wild onions.

Now that I was aware of my own breathing, I couldn’t stop being aware of it.

Uncle Stephen put down his half drunk can of coke and opened another one.

The sound of the can crackled in the air and then there was its smell, the soda.

“The first sip is the best,” Uncle Stephen said. He sipped and then took a huge breath.

He held up the can.

“It clears the sinuses, you know?” Uncle Stephen said.

We were on the porch.

Uncle Stephen had decided that the best way to get over his health problems was to ignore them.

We were on the porch, in the cane bottom chairs that both needed to be re-caned, tilted back, the wooden chairs creaking as we shifted our weight and watched the yard, newly green, and the road, where a car might, it being Spring, drive by.

“Anything’s possible in Spring,” Uncle Stephen said.

He had been saying it all morning, while I installed him on the porch, with the cooler, a handful of Pay-Day candy bars he had decided would save his life by giving him the calories he needed, and an old quilt he pulled to him with a hand that was punched through the sewn together end of a sweater, with holes left for his fingers and thumb.

The sweater was a left-over from one of his inventions: footed pajamas for grown-ups. The feet had each had individual toes, which he was proud to point out that he wasn’t taking credit for, but the fingerless tops and tops with gloves were all his.

I had a pair of the tops. The bottoms made my toes miss each other.

It was close to seventy degrees. The oak in the yard had sprouted its red curlings that would become green leaves. And then red again in the Fall. It was Uncle Stephen who had pointed them out to me, unfurling and curlicued as the shell of a hermit crab.

“They’re kind of like a hermit crab,” I said.

He knew what I was talking about because I had thanked him for pointing out the buds. Every year I had sworn to see their first appearance and every year there was an explosion of tiny green leaves of every shade I could imagine and I had somehow missed it again.

Not this year. It turns out I always missed the start of Spring because I was looking for green and some of them were red, or white, or brown.

“A hermit crab?” Uncle Stephen said.

“Sure,” I said, “like, the way the shell curls up on itself.”

“Because leaves, they spend their time in the ocean, being used as shelter by multi-legged creatures who are very shy and smell bad if left too long in a jar forgotten by one particular boy.”

“OK. Not a hermit crab,” I said, “and the car never smelled the same again.”

“No,” Uncle Stephen drank from his coke, “it didn’t. That’s how you can tell ma’s aged, if that’d been me, she would have had me get out and hitch the rest of the way back from the coast.”

I was about to call bull-shit on that story, as he had crushed my metaphor, but then I remembered a time when my cousin Tim had been carrying-on in the car and grandmother had warned him, once, she said, you get one warning, and next word out of your mouth and I’m putting you out beside the road.

He got back to the house eight hours later, at night, one foot so blistered he still has the scars.

“You still happy?” Uncle Stephen said.

“Yup.” And I smiled. I couldn’t help myself. She was suffering. The girl I was so broken up over, my insides so shattered and sharp and scraped and muffled and…

“Why, again?” Uncle Stephen said.

“Because she and her new guy are still having problems,” I said.

A hawk sailed through the yard and shifted into the pine forest. As it passed I heard the feathers in its wings push against each other. And then there was a breeze following, as if the hawk was the future of air.

“I thought you loved this girl,” Uncle Stephen said.

My chair fell to the cement of the porch. The trick was to balance on its back two legs. I had seen Uncle Stephen sit motionless for minutes, balanced on those two legs. I needed the wall.

My chair went forward. And back. And forward, and then, for a moment, I had it, balance, and then it was gone again.

“I’ve been seeing a new girl,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” Uncle Stephen said.

Uh-huh. As if this weren’t news. I wanted to shock him. And I opened my mouth but ended up taking a sip. I had seen the circles under his eyes. The way his chest rose with each breath taking too long. He had insisted I buy him a scale at Target and so we learned that he weighed a hundred and thirty-three pounds. Six feet two inches.
“You want another candy bar?” I said.

“You made her a mix CD, right?” Uncle Stephen said, “Drove up special to see her in the middle of the night. Knocked on her window.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Didn’t you do the same thing with what’s her name?” Uncle Stephen said.

“Whatever works,” I said, but I knew I was fucked as soon as I’d said it.

Uncle Stephen looked at me, and then there was that breeze again. But this time it was as if his eyes had pulled it. His eyes echoed the gray sky, the iris deep black. He looked at me and pinned me to my chair, leaned against the wall, a bug in a museum, a curiosity for him to see, then put away.

Close the case.

“Don’t be stupid,” Uncle Stephen said, “I hate it when you’re stupid, and I haven’t been trying to unstupid you all these years to have you start all over again over girls.”

The worst part about dealing with Uncle Stephen was that he was always right. Even when he was wrong, it was as if he was wrong on purpose. His wrongness made the few times I was right that much clearer and sharper, so that win or lose, I felt chided.

But the clarity was worth it. And long ago I had learned to recognize my own pride. Not enough to be free of it, but at least to recognize it, and know it for what it was.

To try and set aside its yammering.

“I know,” I said, “every woman is different.”

“No,” Uncle Stephen said, “you don’t.”

He didn’t say, Or I wouldn’t have done what I did, but it was there.

“Every human is a human first, right?” Uncle Stephen said.

“And a gender second,” I said.

“And every human uniquely expresses his or her gender,” Uncle Stephen said.

“Yeah,” I said. I looked at the yard.

There were leaves from last Fall scattered there, while in the trees the new leaves were forming.

Uncle Stephen had been too sick to rake.

And I had school.

Uncle Stephen had said something and I had missed it.

And he had seen me miss it.

“Whatever,” Uncle Stephen said.

My eyes teared up. I looked away, towards the scraggling line of trees opposite the pines.

I had never heard that tone in his voice. There was nothing defiant there, nothing trying to convince me I was wrong. There was only exhaustion, hours of days of weeks of months of years of fighting freighted into one word and shoved out.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not even sure what I was apologizing for. The girls didn’t care. Or didn’t seem to.

I wasn’t sure I cared, the way Uncle Stephen defined caring.

Or that I didn’t care.

Shit. I wasn’t sure of anything.

“I had a girlfriend,” Uncle Stephen said, “who used to tell me, when I had done something that she didn’t like, that she hoped one day I would learn what a woman likes. Needs.”

I didn’t say anything. I had decided today was one of those days that I would be better off not saying anything.

“It never occurred to her that maybe I was paying attention to her needs, as best I could, but that every woman was different, every single one. And so she was unique.”

He looked at me again. He smiled.

“Buck-up,” Uncle Stephen said. And when he turned away, I tried to stop it but one damned tear escaped and made it halfway down my cheek.

I left it to dry in the wind.

“It’s what sucked,” Uncle Stephen said, “she kept claiming that she wanted to be special to me, that she wanted to be unique, when there was no other way for her to be. No other way for anyone to be. But she didn’t believe me when I told her there was only one her, because she didn’t even know it herself.”

“And I knew, would watch,” Uncle Stephen said, “when she’d try attitudes or games on me she’d used on other guys. I don’t think she meant any harm. Sometimes I’d play along, sometimes I’d call her out.”

“It’s hard,” Uncle Stephen said, “to learn the person you love, to not try and short-hand it and expect him or her to be like all the rest. Because there are, of course, similarities. But don’t ever mistake the being similar for the being the same.”

“Don’t ever treat any woman as if she were interchangeable,” Uncle Stephen said, “and try to shrug off the roles you’re going to be given by your women.”

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

“Love,” Uncle Stephen said, and his sharp shoulders shifted under the quilt.

“You’re the one who said you loved her,” Uncle Stephen said, “that’s easy. I’m just the guy with an inkling what that means.”

***

For the first time in months, that night, I tore open one of his envelopes, I Miss You, was typed on the outside, and this was on the inside:

We thought we understood each other.
Did we?

***

I put the envelope and its letter under the bed, under the Mississippi State Bulldog blanket.

He had been writing to a her. But she never got any of the letters.

She never knew of his questions.

And he, for how long, pondered the answers?

For how long being both sides of a conversation?

Uncle Stephen had given the questions to time and the silence of the page, and I had stolen them.

When he had wanted them burned.

Do we understand each other?

The obvious answer was that no, they hadn’t understood each other, because then they would have been together, unless they understood each other so well that they knew they weren’t supposed to be together. Or one of them knew that while the other one didn’t.

Christ. And I wasn’t cursing. I was praying. Help me, I thought up and into the world, help me.

It was dark enough in my room that I could look at the ceiling and see nothing.

I was sure I didn’t understand myself.

Could anyone else?

Damn Uncle Stephen.

The ceiling remained dark.

Another bad time.

We’ve all lost track. The bad times that used to scare us all so, the pain a warning of blood loosed and flooding.

Now, the pain echoes the past and nothing more.

Ephemeral scars that serve no purpose.

Uncle Stephen had tried standing up, sitting on the porch.

We were going to do our usual routine. The cold cokes. Watch the traffic. But I could see the sweat on his brow despite the cold weather, and the way his hand shook as he tried to pop the top on his can.

He handed it to me.

“Open that bitch, will you?” And the crack and hiss of the can made him wince.

He took a couple of sips, set the can down, and then apologized to me.

We went back inside, with him leaning on my arm.

“It’s like, I’m skin stretched over china, and during the night, something has smashed me, and all that broken crockery scrapes, shredding me as I move.”

After I put Uncle Stephen to bed, and he pulls the covers over his head, I wonder how long one person can cope with the breaking. He doesn’t talk about it much. Unless it’s gotten very bad.

And I pray that there is a way to feed Uncle Stephen a spider, a needle and thread clutched in its claws, to stitch him together again, to make what is now shattered, whole.

from one of the Vickers’s old cabins, a colic compound for horses and mules, 90% alcohol, and Gordon’s gin.

Today I managed to get up the guts again to get on stage. This time I was helped by four other guys, who kindly offered to let me be in their group, even though the groups were at first limited to four.

Today’s exercise was, I’m given to understand, a classic improv exercise. Yes, it’s true, I’ve been living under a rock that didn’t allow comedy to penetrate. Then again, I guess nothing gets through a rock. Dang.

To wit:

We stood on the bare stage. Black stage. Black walls. A few odds and ends of flats, today painted black with silver streaks that were perhaps clouds or something.

The class, or audience, if you will, yelled out a word. Each person of the group was in charge of one word, for example, my word was ‘cannibalism,’ yelled out by my teacher.

I then launched into an explanation of cannibalism, how it didn’t exist, as we understood it, but rather, like many notions of other cultures, was a creation of some white 19th century English aristocrats, who, on one of their many trips into the jungle, got hungry, and were forced to eat one of their own. Rather than admit what they had done, they blamed it on the indigenous people’s of wherever they happened to be.

“It all happened so fast, it was uncanny! And poor Al, if only we had a convenient -ism we could hang this on. Wait, Canny, AL, ism? Cannibalism. It’s perfect! And the name is sort of a tribute to our dear departed tasty friend Al.”

I wasn’t nearly so articulate when talking.

After I rambled about cannibalism for a while, I stood back, at which point, someone yelled, SCENE! and we had to do a scene with cannibalism as its source. Or some part of what I had said during my rambling as its source.

Due to the genius of my cohorts, I survived, and I think there was even some laughter out there, but the experience is so frightening on one level, and then in addition to do well it seems it’s best to have a blank mind, that I remember little of what happened while on stage.

I do remember pretending to use a dart gun to blow darts at my other stage partners.

Which turned out to be filled with sugar. Which meant that one person was even better to eat, except that person had diabetes.

During our time on stage we also dealt with the origins of gargling. Walruses, and had to deal with the word shenanigans. Which is a pain of a word for improv. Believe you me.

***

Which all brings me to the word of the day, also props out to David for talking to me while I mumbled this word into existence: sufferment.

(Of course, it’s already a word, but at the time, I didn’t know that.)

As in, the act of suffering, only more immediate.

And for some reason, a bit Southern in its reach.

“Oh Lord, that child is such a sufferment to me in my old age, whatever shall I do?”

Then we talked about peppermints, and David mentioned how he had always wondered about saltymints, and then I decided that the word of the day could also be a category of mints, suffer-mints. Suffermints?

“You look like a happy chap, care for a suffermint?”
“Why yes, I was feeling pretty good there for a minute.”
“Well, we can’t have that, can we?”
All laugh.

And there was a suggestion of sacra-mints.

The line of mints is endless.

By the time I arrived at Uncle Stephen’s it was clear that grandmother’s concerns about him burning down the back-forty were not going to come true.

He sat by his fire and burning at its center was the last of a hollow tree he had cut down.

I had seen the tree as a row of cut pieces behind his house for my entire life.

Now, the last piece burned.

“Pull up a seat,” Uncle Stephen said, and pointed at one of his cracking lawn chairs.

The remaining section of tree contained the fire and its center was bright red, the heat burning my face.

When I scooted the chair away from the fire, its legs grooved the soft ground. Grandmother’s concern about Uncle Stephen setting the property alight was needless, as it had been drizzling all day.

The misty rain fell down and met the rising smoke.

I sat down.

Uncle Stephen flipped opened the cooler, and inside, beside the usual cokes, was a bag of ice and a bottle of Jack Daniels. I took a coke.

We watched the fire.

Twilight crept on, the fire cooking our fronts, the night cooling our backs, and depending on the direction of the wind, the rain dampening our clothes, which then dried in the heat from the blaze.

Uncle Stephen had been told by his radiologist that he was dying. His neurosurgeon said the opposite.
The second opinion had had no helpful opinion.
The third opinion had had no helpful opinion.
Uncle Stephen was back to the first two, and was spending his days wondering.

I had never seen Uncle Stephen drink before, but he was using the same jelly jar he used for his cokes.
The rain fell on us, and we drank.

The fire popped, and in turn, that sound was broken by the drag of ice cubes against Uncle Stephen’s glass.

“Did you bring them?” Uncle Stephen said.

From my backpack, I pulled out the box of envelopes. One corner of the box had been repaired with masking tape.

The tape cracked off the box, but it left its stickiness behind. I thought, if I were Uncle Stephen, I would know what to do with that information, how the tape, the repairing agent, is gone, useless, but the failed attempt of the repair, the nasty stickiness, remains.

“You ready?” Uncle Stephen said.

“No,” I said.

He shook his glass, and made himself another drink. The moon had risen. Grandmother would be worried. She would be wondering whether or not to call the fire department.

“What you said about unconditional love,” I said.

Uncle Stephen leaned back into his chair and stuck his legs out in front of himself.

His legs steamed in the heat.

He gestured up into the smoke.

“You can see the moon reflected in the smoke, as the smoke passes through the tree branches,” Uncle Stephen said.

I followed the smoke as it wound through the branches, and saw the moon, as if the smoke were a screen.

I watched the moon on thickened air.

“In that unconditional love, you’re doing all the sacrificing,” I said. I held the sides of box. I had been thinking about this all night.

At school my her and her boy were no longer sitting together at lunch. But that was all I knew. Maybe all I wanted to know.

Uncle Stephen picked up a stick and dragged it across the ground, manipulating one leaf into the fire.

“You’re not thinking it through,” Uncle Stephen said.

Of all the common ways he chided me, that one bugged me the most.

“Let’s say, one day while I’m away from home, she reads through my journals. These journals she knows are private. The past, whatever, it doesn’t matter, but she’s looking for something.” Uncle Stephen said.

I thought of computers. E-mail. No e-mail when Uncle Stephen was dating. Of what it would mean to read someone’s journal. The opening of a book. Handwriting. It seemed like everyone I knew had poked around in their person’s e-mails. Their Facebook sites, the mySpaces, the blogs. Searching for what? Is it OK to break trust to find broken trust? Is there a way to glue it all back together?

“Do I not love her because she broke my trust?” Uncle Stephen said.

“That would be fair,” I said.

“Honesty. Fairness,” Uncle Stephen said, “Great ideas.”

“If you forgave her,” I said, “then you’re doing the sacrificing and she still dumps you for whatever reason?”

“Slow down,” Uncle Stephen said.

“If I love her unconditionally, then that means I have to forgive her, true, but if she were loving me the same way, then she would forgive me. Whether for the same faults or different ones, it wouldn’t matter.”

“Everybody sacrifices?” I said.

Uncle Stephen nodded towards the box.

“Yeah,” Uncle Stephen said, “throw them in.”

I looked down at the box of envelopes, and then at the fire that was the heat of an entire tree. While I had been studying the constitution, Uncle Stephen had been out in the rain, rolling the logs into the fire.

Burning.

Uncle Stephen had told me to bring them, and I had known what he was going to do. Or ask me to do. Maybe he couldn’t do it alone.
One unknown on an M.R.I. One bright spot in the smoky heaven of his brain.

I thought I might screw it up, one of the few direct things that Uncle Stephen had ever asked of me, but no, I tossed the box and it landed in the center of the flames, and then it was burning.

We both followed a few of the ashes as they sailed into the tree, their edges searing red against the night sky. But they all faded before they had gone far. And the pieces were dime sized. We weren’t going to set the world on fire.

“She didn’t love you,” I said.

“Shit,” Uncle Stephen said, “of course she did.”

“How do you know?” I said, “if she wouldn’t look past, whatever.”

Uncle Stephen drained his jelly jar.

“There were a lot of whatevers,” Uncle Stephen said, “and besides, she told me she loved me.”

“She told you?” I said.

“Yes.”

“And you believed her because you loved her unconditionally, so you had to trust her,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Damn.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Uncle Stephen said.

Then he changed the subject, and I let him.

On the way home, I thought of what it means to lie. How I had never lied to him before, as far as I knew.

Maybe he had been done with the letters, but I wasn’t. I had kept the rest of the I Miss You letters, filling the original box with a set of grandmother’s old tax returns stuffed into her envelopes.

I hoped that whatever had prompted him to give them to me in the first place, justified me, somehow.

I hoped that he was able to watch the ashes rise and feel some weight lift from him.

A weight wrapped in one of my old T-shirts and now hidden under my bed.

Each one of his letters to her a secret, now, of mine.

Between Uncle Stephen and myself. And whoever she was. Or had been.
Pages after pages of omissions. And secrets.

I couldn’t bare to destroy anything of his, even something that wasn’t for me, and by her rights, perhaps I should not have seen.

Who owns the words, once the letter is sealed?

The dot had gotten to me too, its shining where there should be no mark, where light was never meant to be.

OK.

This file is sort of large, even as an .mp3, it’s around 3mb, so only click if you’re prepared for that sort of commitment.

Whether or not this one is really done, I’m moving on. Well, the whole class is moving on, and I figure I better follow. I think my next project will be amplified spaces. The empty spaces, their digital hiss, amplified and then filtered/altered/layered.

Something.

Click for the February 2008 Mix of Bounces and Feeds.

Oh, and warning, it starts out quietly, so don’t turn it up. Use Kwoya’s first “bounces and feeds” as a volume reference.

I was going to sleep.

Had closed my eyes, thinking of nothing but school-work, some math problem, some something that was so not her when I heard her voice calling my name and I was awake and she wasn’t there and my heart was pounding.

I felt under the bed for the box and pulled it out.

In the darkness, I opened the box, feeling the way the cardboard had softened over the years.

I was putting the letters back as I opened them, so I felt along the opened edges, the torn ones, for the first one unopened.

Then I pulled it from the box and lay on my back, the envelope pressed to my chest.

It was no use. I turned on the light.

Envelope number 4.

I ripped. I even tore the paper inside.

Today I found a doodle. A short sweetness we shared.
Or that you left for me to discover in love
found instead in loss.

I sat up. Pulled on my pants and shoes and coat. It was past ten.

On the way out of the house I grabbed my fuzzy hat.

Then I was out, walking head down, pushing my feet so that each breath hit me as I moved.

“Bull-shit,” I said. Then I said it again. Each foot step.

Bull. Step. Shit. Step.

I jammed my hands into my pockets. I wished I had put on a shirt.

By the time I got to Uncle Stephen’s I was out of breath.

I was raising my hand to knock when he spoke, and I thought I was going to die, he frightened me so much my breath stopped and the ocean sounded in my ears.

“Bull shit?” Uncle Stephen said.

He was on his porch in the shadow cast by the moon.

“Jesus Christ.” I said.

He was sitting with his legs curled up. Wearing his own fuzzy hat. An almost twin to mine. But no coat. His arms were pale in the moonlight, and his feet were bare.

When I had caught my breath, I said, “Aren’t you cold?”

“Sure,” Uncle Stephen said.

He pointed up at the stars.

And as always at his house on clear nights, the stars were stinging in their brightness. Pin pricks by the acupuncture of God, Uncle Stephen had once said.

“Bull shit?” Uncle Stephen said.

I sat down.

“Did you love her?” I said.

“Unconditionally,” Uncle Stephen said.

“What does that mean?” I said.

“I loved her as I found her. No more. No less. Everything,” Uncle Stephen said.

“And she loved you?” I said.

“Sure,” Uncle Stephen said.

“Unconditionally?” I said.

“No,” Uncle Stephen said, “She needed me to be things I wasn’t.”

“Like what?”

“Pick a thing. Any thing. Something more than this sick man on his porch at night.”

“You loved her, even though she didn’t love all of you?”

“Yes.”

“She left because you couldn’t change those things?”

“Yes.”

“You wouldn’t have changed her, so that she accepted you as you are?”

“Then, she wouldn’t have been the person I loved,” Uncle Stephen said.

“You loved even the parts of her that forced her to leave you.”

“That’s the unconditional part.” Uncle Stephen said.

“But she didn’t love you unconditionally,” I said.

“That wasn’t her way of loving,” Uncle Stephen said, “You can’t help who you love, it seems, no matter how right or wrong, and you don’t have to accept every love.”

“But you would’ve accepted her?” I said.

“Now we’re in circles, but yes, that’s what unconditional means,” Uncle Stephen said.

“It’s all bull-shit,” I said.

“Sit down,” Uncle Stephen said. Despite the fact that his ribs were showing through his thin T-shirt, and his pale arms prickled with the cold, his voice still had the edge. I sat down.

He waived at the sky bristling above us.

“Stars,” Uncle Stephen said, “she was like them. A brilliant thing. Of life. Our small joke was that she was a kite too, a star on a string.”

“Look at them all,” Uncle Stephen said. And the same edge was there but even without the command I was searching the stars, imagining him with that string of what? Fire? Electricity? What knot do you use on a star?

“Are they bull-shit?” Uncle Stephen said.

I shook my head. Was I up there? Or down here? Was my her up there?  Did I love her?

“We all love the way we love,” Uncle Stephen said, “that’s the way it goes.”

“What happens to the string?” I said.

From my her to me.

From Uncle Stephen’s her to him.

The line an atom thick but so strong as to break time and curve space all the while burning and surviving the burning to mark us. All.
Cross our hearts and hope to die.

“That,” Uncle Stephen said, “is the question, isn’t it?”

Rich parents are using the same technology Hollywood uses to map star’s faces to computer generated personalities, or avatars, to create characters in the latest killer application of 3-d technology: computerized parenting that sounds (and now looks) just like the actual parent.

Many times, a babysitter will be faced with a spoiled brat who uses the argument of, “My mother never makes me go to bed at nine” at which point the exasperated babysitter is forced to allow the child to say up late and eat far too many chips in a can.

No longer. !

Now, with the flick of a mouse, the babysitter can call up the image of the mother saying, “No!” or any of several thousand other negative expressions, such as, “It’s no wonder you don’t have any friends!” and my favorite, “Drop Dead!”

Of course, the father is still the stricter of the two parents, rarely seen on screen and instead hinted at by the mother, “Wait until your father gets back from Sudan where he’s making very important oil deals!”

The father is scanned mainly as entertainment for the babysitter, who is attracted to older men, and will, of course, eventually replace the mother in real and artificial life.

That’s why soon, we’ll all be scanned at key moments in our lives, so that our personal avatars can be given as gifts or curses or hostages to each other.

Been dumped by some lousy guy?

Use the latest hack!

“Hey Jenny, wanna see my ex beat the crap out of himself?”

We All Can’t Wait.

There’s three people on earth who would get the joke in the title with the words: plain, simple, unardorned.

Jonathan and Eric and myself. Maybe some audience members who saw the project.

I ramble.

I’m spotting some negatives from 1993 scanned with the Nikon Cooscan 5000ED.

One of them is below. The scanner has a high resolution, but seems to lose focus at the edges of the image. Any idea why? I don’t think it’s negative curl, but might be. If you’ve used that model of  scanner and seen that softness at the edges, drop me an e-mail: vickersps @ vcu.edu, as I’m curious if there’s something I can do to fix it. Meanwhile, I’ll keep searching for the answer online at the usual places. The edge softening is very noticeable, with the film grain disappearing into a smear of fog. It’s also depressing, as I was hoping this scanner was the best solution for me, and there’s no budget for another one. Maybe that’s why Freestyle sells that aftermarket kit for the next model up that uses the liquid film holder? Sigh. Technology is a pain.

But this cow cheers me up. It’s not going to show in this one, reduced for the web, but zoomed into the picture for spotting purposes I can see reflected in her eye the field, the tree line, the clouds and sky, and even myself, standing off to one side.  All as it was in 1993. The field is now a forest. And the cow? I don’t know.

Time travel through photography.

Uncle Stephen started playing Boggle after his second brain surgery.

He lost his first game.

But only a handful since.

I don’t have a chance, but like to play.

We all make up words.

When challenged, grandmother suggests hers are types of rare grasses.

Uncle Stephen’s, geographical or geological.

Mine, landmasses, small or large.

*

The dot.

The dot remains a dot.

The radiologist says it’s death waiting.

The neurosurgeon says the dot is scar tissue. Death’s mark in passing.

*

We play Boggle, and are given, perhaps, an impossible set of letters.

Here they are, if someone else sees a word in this set, please let me know.

Y Qu C A
G S Z K
L J L G
S O V N

By Boggle rules, of course.

*

In relation to the Dot, and portents, we discussed what an impossible Boggle might mean.

The we shook them up again.

Uncle Stephen won.
Grandmother was second.
I was third.

Grandmother got us both with the word ‘tare.’

Grandmother and grandfather’s house was built in 1974.

Uncle Stephen was four.

He walked amid the studs that were not yet walls, and moved like a ghost. He told me he wrote his name, in crayon, on one of the raw pine boards and the date.

A time capsule of a name.

Grandfather built his house with what, at the time, was considered extravagant things: storm windows, brick, fiberglass insulation and central heat. But he had had a good year of the soybean crop, and at that time one good year equaled one house.

The money allowed N.A.S.A engineer in him to build the house the way he wanted.

One contractor quite over a disagreement in how much insulation grandfather wanted.

All of that engineering means that in the winter the house is easy to heat, but very quiet.

During the Mississippi winter nights, sleeping in what was Uncle Stephen’s room, I would lie in bed, and if I had the shades drawn, or it was a moonless night, I couldn’t see my hand waving in front of my face.

And the silence was a weighted thing that pressed on my chest.

Blackness and silence.

Except for the snoring of my grandparents in the their bedroom. Not every night. But many.

When I was young, their snorts and grunts were monstrous.

When I was old enough to realize what the sound was, I was appalled.

How could they sleep next to each with that caterwauling?

I imagined myself married, my wife sounding as if water was pouring into her open mouth and then being spurted out through her nose. I didn’t know what I would do. Uncle Stephen wore earplugs.

But earplugs made the darkness and silence too absolute.

This is the inside of a coffin, I would think. And not sleep.

*

The central heating ducts had a side effect: they carried sound as well as heat.

Noises rattled throughout the house.

Each sound was there, sometimes small, sometimes large.

The bathrooms. The bedrooms. The kitchen, farthest from the bedrooms.

In the mornings, I awoke to the sounds from the kitchen, echoing through the ducts, and when the heat was on, the forced heat carried with it the smell of bacon frying. And its crackling in the pan.

The brick construction on a solid slab of poured concrete meant the house didn’t settle or creak like a wooden house.

*

When the house was full, it was very full, all of us hearing each other. There was no privacy of sound.

When the house was empty, it filled with emptiness.

Each room’s silence traveled through the ductwork and melted into the silence from the other rooms and then gathered and rushed from room to room and so as I sat and waited for grandmother and Uncle Stephen to return from Starkville, the silence folded over me.

It was an invisible blanket, quilted from the absence of sound in each room.

*

I had sworn I would dole out the envelopes Uncle Stephen had given me. Make them last. Save them for when I was sure I was going to collapse under the weight of her absence into a nothing that would join the silence of the house.

But with Uncle Stephen still gone, my thoughts turned to her. I held my breath until I could hear my heart beating.

See the edges of my world grow dark.

She had moved on. Why couldn’t I?

She had her new boy.

Or man. My great aunt had told me the last time I saw her that I had turned into a man when she wasn’t looking. And then she had winked at me. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe she still needed a boy. Or maybe he was more of a man than I was.

My thoughts circled each other, flew down the heating system and came back to me, amplified.

*

I tried the television.
Without Uncle Stephen to point out the ridiculousness of each television show and commercial, how each demeaned humanity in one way or another, the images were surfaces devoid of meaning.

Point. Less.

He had taught me that there was something underneath each sight and sound, and now I couldn’t watch without hearing his voice. I needed to hear his voice.

Besides, the TV masked the noises from outside; the sounds of wheels on gravel that would be them returning.

And I was back in my room. The box again on my lap. The next envelope.

“I miss you,” I said. And though I wanted to cry. I couldn’t.

“Didn’t writing these make it worse?” I had asked Uncle Stephen.

“I don’t know,” Uncle Stephen had said, “and I had always intended to give them to her.”

“Why?”

“She never believed that I loved her. And only her.”

I Miss You.

Uncle Stephen’s advice on love came and went with the seasons, and his health.

“And you never mailed a single one?”

He had shrugged, “I pictured her new man coming home, finding the envelope, opening it.”

“People open other people’s mail?”

“Love makes you do strange things,” Uncle Stephen said.

“But that’s wrong.”

Even as I was saying it I was remembering her computer, the one time I had been left alone in her room, while she went to the bathroom, and how I could see the Instant Messaging boxes popping open and a chime, meaning that she had new e-mail.

To not look at her computer I had made a fist, and the marks of my nails on my palm were there for days. One pain for another. She had found the marks on my palm, and asked, and I had lied, telling her I had fallen on the hay rake.

I Miss You.

The house was silent.

Outside, winter held its breath.

There was no car pulling into our driveway.

No snap of the river-stone gravel under the car’s wheels.

There was only myself and the past, one letter at a time, boxed.

This time I used my knife and slit the envelope open, though grandfather had warned me that paper dulled knives.

Again, the single sheet of paper.

I held it up to the light. Watermarked. I knew from Uncle Stephen’s writing days that he only used 100 percent cotton rag paper.

I Miss You:

I had forgotten what it was to be pure.
I had forgotten what it was to be seen.
I had forgotten what it was to believe.
I had forgotten what it was to be known.
You brought me these.

I had the house to myself.

Uncle Stephen and grandmother were in Starkville to see the neurologist.

I pulled the box from under the bed.

Grandmother’s house had its own smell, as if all the years of drying her clothes on the line had brought the fierce sun into the house, burning away the Mississippi mustiness and leaving a hint of hot clean cloth.

But Uncle Stephen’s box had his house’s smell.

When I missed him, I had the box.

And its envelopes.

The second was addressed the same as the first: I Miss You.

And the return address: Uncle Stephen’s initials, S. R. V.

Stephen Rye Vickers.

His last M.R.I. had a small white dot.

The neurologist was going to explain the dot.

I held envelope number two and thought about going to medical school to learn how to explain one small mark.

One mystery.

He had typed the addresses, and the periods of the manual typewriter left dents in the envelope I could feel.

Dots.

“I miss you,” I said.

I tore the envelope open.

Your voice comforted me when nothing else would.