UNTIMELY #24 – A cat, for once in your life...

I’m not saying it was a nightmare, but I was definitely asleep. There was a cat, and it was sitting next to me, and I was sitting down, too. We were looking at each other, the cat and I, me and the cat. I mean, I was looking at the cat the way maybe you look at a mailbox. It’s there, you see that it’s there, but at the same time you don’t see it; you don’t really care; it wouldn’t change your life one way or another if it were suddenly to disappear, cease to exist. But the cat was looking hard. I mean hard. And it was giving off a strange energy; it suddenly seemed to awaken from this stupor of indifference and all at once it really, really minded that I was sitting right next to it. Like it found my presence actively offensive. I wasn’t doing anything. Just sitting there. Next to it. But the cat was getting madder and madder. It wasn’t moving yet either, but I could see it in its eyes, could see the anger building and building. And I could see that there was going to be some shit. The cat was kicking off. And so I sat there, watching it.

I was wearing a t-shirt and a black armband about halfway up my forearm. Maybe someone had died, maybe I’d been playing tennis. Maybe I was in a rock band. I have no idea why I was wearing such a thing in such a place.

The cat looked at me and it looked at my arm, bare save for the mysterious armband. Then it straightarmed me, with claws slightly extended, which I think is the cat equivalent of slapping someone around a little bit, just trying to get the feel of the situation and everything. Letting them know you’re upset, but sort of buying some time while you figure out what you’re gonna do. It sort of patted my arm and its claws stuck in the terrycloth of the armband and I thought this was funny but this made the cat really mad. Like even madder. It started swatting me harder and harder but it kept hitting the armband and its claws kept sticking and I just sat there, not moving, keeping my arm frozen immobile stiff. The cat got madder and madder and then it started scratching my arm above the band, and still I didn’t move. Then it started clawing my hands and biting my fingers. I could feel that something was happening to me, but I wouldn’t quite say that it hurt. It was more like a strange sensation, and I just sat there while it went crazy.

When the cat finished and ran off, I stood up, and it was only then that I realized that the warm, wet stickiness between my fingers was my blood. I was dripping bright red hot everywhere and the cuts and scratches and wounds on my hands were really pumping out all over the place. A woman walked past and when she saw my hands and the red all over the ground she started screaming, but I didn’t know what to do. It still didn’t hurt much, but the blood was pooling in my cupped hands and I was making such an awful mess.

I don’t know how it ended, but next thing I remember I was in a basement with low ceilings jousting on a papier-mâché horse.

Untimely #23 – Skeezer

They hear a noise but no one looks up. Not because they didn’t hear it—because like I said they heard it—but because they don’t. They are unflappable. The unflappables. The Unflappables capital u. Sometimes people call them that. OK, no one calls them that, but you could imagine people calling them that. “The Unflappables capital u.” You know? Kind of thing. They’re just used to it, the noise. All noise. Any noise. Any noise, I am not joking. Imagine a bee in your ear singing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” at the top of its lungs. Kind of thing. Do you know once I got a fly in my eye and it got so far up there it only came out the next day? Truth. OK, maybe it was a gnat. But it was very painful. I slept with it in there, because I had to, because I was very tired, and so I tried not to touch it and in the morning I had actually forgotten about it. And I showered and everything and got on the bus and read my magazine and went in to work and then about two hours later I scratched my eye, because I had an itch, and holy hell did it hurt! I must have dislodged the gnat or the fly or whatever it was but it felt like a helicopter in there. And I started crying, uncontrollably, minus the sobbing and all of that. Just the tears. But floods and floods. Like my shirt was getting wet kind of floods. And Gary—he sits across me—he looked up and he’s like Bill, what the hell is wrong with you? Because of course what he meant was like omfg are you OK? But with Gary it always comes out like he’s gonna kick your ass. And I guess a lot of the time he is. Maybe half the time. But then for whatever reason he doesn’t, maybe ’cause he doesn’t want to go back to jail. Anyway, so he doesn’t kick my ass but I can tell he’s totally skeezing out because my nose has started running now, because they’re connected, all the pipes in your head, and so my shirt is wet and I’ve got snot dripping onto my lip but I am really and truly paralyzed it hurts so much. OK I’m not actually paralyzed but I just completely and totally forget where I am such is the intensity of the pain in my eyeball. Because it is a pain in my eyeball, seriously in it, not like near it or next to it or by it or on the side of it. It is my actual physical eyeball and I am in so many kinds of pain and I’m blinking like crazy almost like a reflex, like I can’t control it, and I’m freaking out like maybe I’m going to have to go to the hospital or something and then all of a sudden the pain passes like God plucks me from the sea where I’m drowning because I can’t swim and the instant His hand touches me the water clears from my lungs and I can breathe again. Like that, but I mean like less of a fairy and stuff ’cause I don’t even really believe in God or whatever. So then I feel something in the corner of my eye which is your canthus in case you didn’t know, the places where your boogers collect in the night if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t really wash your face before bed because you’re not a fairy or like if you’re a child and just dirty. I’ve never quite figured out if it’s something your eyes make like snot out of your eyelids or if it kind of drips out your nose and up and around but either way it’s pretty gross. But I guess it’s grosser if you snot out your eyes. No wait, maybe it’s grosser if your snot goes up and around the side of your nose and into your eyes. Either way it’s pretty gross and I haven’t had boogers in my eyes since I was like four I’m just saying. So I feel something in my canthus and instinctively I just reach up and touch it and it comes away on my finger and I look down and it’s this huge fucking gnat and it’s still alive and it starts flapping it’s wings all feebly and then I think, you poor silly thing, you were probably on your way to your family, maybe bringing back the food you had scavenged in a flower or a dead squirrel or something (fucking gross! That fucker was in my eye!) and all of a sudden you took a wrong turn and you wound up in my eye, but you didn’t die, you hung in there, you tried to survive as you slid back and forth across my eyeball and you nearly suffocated and you were too tired to fight it anymore and then miraculously just as you were about to go under for the last time the hand of God plucked you from the deeps and the instant His hand touches you (hey hang on a minute!) OK well whatever this fucking poor lost gnat spent the whole night in my eye and nearly died and I looked at it and all of these thoughts that took like twenty seconds to explain flashed before my eyes in like a quarter of a second and I contemplated the universe and my place in it and the gnat’s place in it and I felt a mystical connection to this tiny, powerless creature that had caused me so much pain and I thought of the mouse & the lion and Amos & Boris and David & Goliath and I looked down at this poor, half-squished bugger with wet wings and then I brought my thumb around to my forefinger like if I was making the A-OK! sign and I squashed the fuck out of it until it was just black streaks between my fingers. Piece of shit almost blinded me.

Untimely #22 – Won

Dinner was at eight, they came twelve-thirty for twelve the next month of the next century. “Appointments” are for pussy cats. Dressed head to toe in ermine with baby-seal-skin boots and more guns than the NRA.

Charlie brushes the menu aside, smashing a crystal punch bowl and feeling for his smokes. Tommy’s already been sober and drunk and sober again and then drunk again and now even drunker since breakfast. He growls hello and Charlie just nods, chewing on a cigarette and sizing up his tablemate as he licks flecks of tobacco from twixt his tiger fangs.

Hey horsefucker bring me a drink Charlie spits and the maître d’ scurries to the kitchen. From between its double doors come six liveried bellhops pushing an enormous oaken barrel on a trolley. Barrel so big you’d need a helicopter and a crane and a troop of volunteer boy scouts just to turn it upright. They leave it on the trolley and the maître d’ fills two flagons fashioned from the skulls of Viking chieftains with a liquid the color of molten steel. It smells like a jungle cat’s lair and tastes like a highway covered in lava and left for an ice age. Charlie pulls six skulls without a breath while Tommy inquires after the freshness of the prawns. Charlie’s lip curls so far into a sneer his left nostril flips right.

After dinner the waiters cover the table in three hundred pounds of tobacco leaf and set it alight while twelve serving wenches fan the flames with a giant bellows. The winners discuss their artistic principles:
“I’m not interested in what people believe, I’m interested in what I believe, and that’s the truth, that’s what rules me.”
“You put yourself in some kind of a trance in order to receive certain songs, you know it’s like setting a trap for a song, it’s like fishing or anything else, you have to be real quiet to catch the big ones.”
“I blinked and I cured my brain.”
“I think what I try and do is write adventure songs and Halloween music.”

While Charlie huffs, Tommy sings to him of the anger of Peleus’ son, a fourteen-hour epic chanted and growled and barked in dactylic hexameter. Six hours in he loses his place and starts again. Charlie’s eyes have glazed over and the only sign that he is still awake is the occasional grunt of harmony during choruses.

At dawn a gray sun creeps above the smoldering wreckage of the table, stippling, speckling, flecking the shards and assorted debris, cracked lights and crack pipes, tea rolls and obetrols. The sky darkens and lightens and flashes with the force of a galaxy breathing its last sigh, a long, slow hiss that builds to a deafening roar, a holy ghoster tornado, and then all is totally, completely and forevermore black. Gentlemen, goodnight.

Untimely #21 – Five Views of Greatness (Now with more dogs!)

So hey! Hey! Yeah, it’s going to be really great! Why don’t you come along? We are going to be fulfilling the plan of the great projects. Yeah. Yeah! I know! You are so going to love it. I think we are going to start with a parade. There’s going to be a band – several bands, but one at the front with really big fuck-off instruments that will take like eleven people to carry and about six to play, all blowing hard and working levers and huffing and puffing and cetera. And then we’ll have some dancing bears, yeah! And then we’ll have some fighting bears after that. And then the dog and cat show, which will be a sort of parade within the parade, led by children from the school for the blind, deaf, and dumb, so actually maybe some of the animals will lead some of the children. Which will be fine and really beautiful and heartwarming for everyone who’s watching anyway! And then will come the dancing children. In traditional dress! With different costumes for each of the regions they will represent! Which is all of them! And they will do traditional country dances and throw flowers and candy to the people on the sidewalks. And following them will be no less than ten thousand troops from our glorious army marching in close formation and the streets will tremble and ring with the clicking of twenty thousand boots and they shall know our might and see the greatness of our projects! And that’s just the beginning!

And as they gain on us may we summon the spirits of our holy fathers that we may wreak impossible vengeance upon the hollow bodies of their crepitant dead. And that we may have horses and wear capes as we ride them in the night, so flying like bats through the streets and banging on pots like gongs we scare the sissy children and women and scorbutic dogs. Bombast! Bombard! Bombard the dogs! We shall crush the dogs, the Imperialist dogs, the cretinous dogs, the dastardly dogs, the enteric dogs, the fallow and filthy and filarial dogs with their fustian, the godless dogs may howl and rasp and die. May they keel over dead before we get to them and make them choke on the dust of a thousand pusillanimous ancestors.

OK, so maybe we could start everything with a parade. I’m sure we could get the permits, get the streets closed down. At least one of the central avenues. Or if they can’t close it all the way maybe we can at least get a police escort. You know for traffic, and crowd control. Or just to keep the cars off the street while we’re on it, you know? Like police cars in back and in front driving real slow and keeping the cars away just while we pass. OK, how about we march in the bike lane? Yeah, we could do the sidewalks. Fine, we won’t call it a march. OK, so we’re just going to go for a little walk, and we’ll just keep it to the sidewalk. Great. No, no, it’ll be good, really good. Really, really good.

The greatest of the great plans is of course colonizing the moon. And this will be great because we will be able to found anew the socialist workers’ utopia that has so long eluded us on this cold, hard planet. Except that the moon is colder and harder! But we will not worry about that. The thing about the moon is that if it’s so great how come we’ve never been back? Don’t you think our technology is so much better now? Don’t you think we’d be able to get there in half the time with half the gas? Our fuel efficiency savings must be enormous! Because the last thing we want is to get to the moon and start littering and polluting and mining everywhere. Oh my god! If they discover oil on the moon we’re screwed! Can you imagine that? Suddenly there’ll be a whole other space race and wars to colonize bits and pieces of the moon and then wars in space and moon battles and the whole thing’s going to get really nasty. Urgh.

The shots rang out in a volley like firecrackers, fast as raindrops, loud as thunder. And then after it was silent and we none of us could see for all the dust. We lay still where we had fallen, some daring only to peek through slitted eyes, looking to see if they were still alive. The silence was otherworldly. Some wondered if they’d gone deaf, so close to the firing. And then we heard it, a low mournful whine, and we looked behind us and saw a dog trapped under the bodies of two men who had fallen from a balcony onto the crowd below. We could see where the wooden railing had cracked open wide under their weight and then we saw the red streaks down their cheeks and the hole in the forehead gaping into blackness. You forget just how heavy a body is until you try to move one. Bag of bones, sack of stones. They’d fallen one two right on top of the dog, broken its back. It must have been hemmed in by the crowd, trying to squirm through legs when the firing started. It had nearly made it, too, just a few meters from the alleyway, when poof! from above and any chance it had was over.

Untimely #20 – Three Thoughts

I don’t cook for one. Cooking for me, see, it’s social. Baking. No one bakes alone. You bake for someone. You want to eat cookies, you buy cookies. You open the jar and take a cookie and eat it. You don’t mix flour and beat eggs and melt chocolate and then eat a cookie three hours later when by now your stomach is like ten times emptier and you probably would die just as soon as eat a cookie because you already ate ten an hour ago when you couldn’t wait for the fucking things to bake. So really your stomach wasn’t very empty, but it would have been entirely empty minus the acids that swirl about like Grand Rapids, MI, in that empty belly of yours. But now they rush and flood a mountain of cookie debris and you feel ill as you get fatter. Aren’t cookies grand? At this point you probably wish you ate a vegetable, unless of course it was eggplant, because eggs aren’t very healthy, especially if you cook them in oil. Olive oil is good for your skin, but too much will give you indigestion.

In the mountains, though, you can eat anything. Because you are chopping wood and herding goats and anything you want to eat you’ve either got to kill and skin or farm and dig and wash and chop. That’s why everyone smokes in the mountains, because everything takes about fifty times longer to do and also the air is cleaner, so it doesn’t even matter. When the earth is overpopulated, we’re all going to go up the mountains and leave the stinking cities to the rats. When the ice caps melt will there be penguins in Miami?

On my way out of the subway this morning there was a girl in hot pink sandals sitting on the steps. She smelled like piss in the most foul way. Sharp and sour, like she’d washed her clothes in it.

Untimely #19 – Rigid

Oh Stanley, you phoned in the night, and yes I remember the waking from sleep, the sweeping across the table and knocking the phone down, knocking the water down, the full glass, the water everywhere overspilling and soaking the tissues the books the carpet. And picking it up and hello who’s this what’s it all about what what what no. No. Because just a day ago. Just two days ago. We were. You, on the phone, and me, you said yes and you I could see you smiling, I could picture it right in my head inside my head. And it was fine. It was all going to be fine. Then the call and you couldn’t talk, your voice strangled in the air. Hello! Stanley! Can’t you hear me? Hello! Then your voice like a wire being torn out of you. Every word tearing it out and the phone goes heavy in my hand. Every word like a wire and the phone heavy like a wire like a. Winstanley. Every word like a.

They always want to tell you how quick it all is. It happened so quickly. You wouldn’t believe how quickly it happened. It happened and it was over before she he knew it. Over before it knew it. Over it. Knew it. Over. It. And how do they know it doesn’t all slow down? All those films, where it all slows down, you see the whole thing, frame by frame, frame by tiny frame, and it’s an age and an agony. Maybe it happens so slowly it’s the speed of life, it’s just like living it all over again. Or maybe we’re watching it now, watching it when we think we’re living it. It’s already it and we’re here and we’re watching it but we don’t know when it ends because we just can’t remember because we can’t see because how can we know that’s the last scene when we’ve been watching it so long we’ve already forgotten the ending? It’s like that book I just couldn’t finish because I kept falling asleep on the couch and I couldn’t remember if I’d read it or not and so I kept rereading it and I kept falling asleep again. And I could never finish it. So?

Oh Stanley. I knew younger ones too. I knew younger ones, but what do I care? Everybody knows younger ones.

Like a rictus, your voice frozen midair, I could see it twisted, twisting all the way down, down down and back inside you. Down into the blackness, the sour bile, the wretched churning of acid nothing oh Stanley the gale, falling and falling and whirling down and down and down and.

Untimely #18 – Pursuit

I heard him come in. Listen. You can’t tell me I didn’t. I heard it. I was sitting there and looking at the ceiling and I heard a noise and it was the door opening and in he came. I heard it. He just sat there and for a long time I didn’t look at him. I just kept looking at the ceiling. It was a white ceiling, but boy could you see a lot. You can see a lot when you put your mind to it. Really look. All the cracks and everything. Shadows. I saw a lot, boy. I sure did. Like with clouds, but different. If I can’t sleep, I don’t count sheep, I just look at things. Look and look. Well so I was looking at the ceiling and I almost forgot he’d come in. Because I hadn’t looked at him yet, you see. But then, as I was looking up, all of a sudden I smelled him. He was just sitting there, been sitting there a while. But I smelled him. Like that! One minute I was just looking at the ceiling and I practically forgot he was there and the next there was this smell and I just knew it was him. I mean I thought it was him before when he came in but I didn’t look. But then I smelled him and I knew. He smelled like sweat and a pipe. It kind of made me sick but kind of it was a good smell. You know? Kind of sweet. But a little too sweet. Too sweet and it becomes sick. Sweet, sweet smell of pipe, like polished wood and dried fruits and it’s evening and it’s fall. But then, just when you’re starting to think like maybe this is a really good smell and you can enjoy it and keep looking at the ceiling, then there’s this sour note that runs right through it and makes it shrivel all up. Sours it all to hell. And I knew it was him. So now I didn’t look at him because I didn’t have to. I knew it was him. I’d smelled him before. Smelling just like that, sweet and sour like a fucking plum duck. Oh it was him all right. It was him. Boy that smell it started to drive me crazy. He just sat there, not moving. I could just barely hear him breathe, that’s if I really concentrated. I stared at the ceiling but I couldn’t see anything anymore, the smell was too much. It was taking over. And that’s when I knew what I had to do. I reached under my pillow. Just like that I aimed the revolver and he didn’t move, he didn’t speak, he didn’t do nothing. I didn’t even look at him when I pulled the trigger. The smell disappeared almost instantly. There was the powder like incense to clean the air and then it was gone. I looked over and the chair was empty and then I looked back at the ceiling and then I fell asleep.

Untimely #17 - Aisle of Dogs

Somewhere, somehow, a dog barked. A long, lone, yelping howl at the sliver of moon rising from behind the trees. Then silence. Then another bark. Shorter, crisper, sound dying prematurely in the air, frozen, arrested motion. A hollow where it had been, a vacuum, drawing attention now to its absence. Now the sound of tires on ice, smooth gliding then crunching, crackling, like wet glass slowly fracturing. The wind was very, very cold on her face, but she could not wrap up any more than she already was. Her nose and cheeks smarted but the damp of the air prevented her getting used to it. Each time the wind gusted against her it was awful and shocking and worse than before. She could not believe the misery she was in. And again the dog barked.

This time its bark rang out like a gong and was answered by other barks in the middle distance, staggered as in a round, all ringing out together like a giant gong falling down an immensely long staircase. Like a gong falling down the side of a Mayan pyramid. All of Chichen Itza trembling as the pitch rises higher and higher, faster and faster, until you can feel your teeth coming loose at the gums, the barking now a ragged shriek in a thousand bloody canine throats. In the cacophony a lizard closes its eyes and coughs. Somewhere a dog barks, then eats the lizard.

A dog’s bark shook her from her reverie. Yes, it was mighty cold. She wanted to touch her nose, to see if it was still there, but her hands pinned her arms to her sides. It was quiet again now. From time to time she heard tires on ice, crunching, crackling, gliding smoothly, then nothing. The wind in her ears was notable for its blistering coldness. A moon, a sliver of moon, rose behind the spindly naked branches of the trees. She watched it rise clear then fall behind a cloud. She could no longer feel her face, but still she waited. Somewhere a dog barked.

UNTIMELY #16 – I Can’t Stand the Rain

And.

***

It.

***

Was.

***

Wet.

***
***

Rain pelted blackly, diagonally up from the charnel house of the river’s gashed and roiled surface. “Blast thees eenfirnall rrrain!” Alfredo Gonzales ejaculated wildly. Water dripped from the ends of his lacquered moustaches, the gaping cavities of his pendulous ears filled with a maddening drip-drip, and his wet, tobacco-blackened lips jutted forth petulantly – not even his monumental unibrow could shield them from the storm. Suddenly all hell broke loose!! The sky was rent with an almighty crack like the sound of a million beetles snapping in half into a microphone inside a cathedral in space.

Untimely #15 – Wrong Song Boys

He, he could feel his nails too long as he rubbed his hands together, fingertips brushing. Not like a girl’s, not really long, but long enough. Long enough to cut something. Like sometimes when the skin on the hands is dry and splitting, chapped and windblown and cracking fit to bleed, sometimes then when his nails are too long he’ll accidentally jab himself and it will split the skin and boyo will that hurt. And once you get one cut there, the fingers just seem to find it of their own accord. Drawn to it like magnets. And maybe he’ll forget and go and squeeze a lemon and the juice will run all around and over it and sting like a thousand bees inside his eyeballs and boyo will they water. Then he will shake his wrist very quickly and vigorously to try to get all of the blood out of his hand so that it won’t hurt. Or maybe to flush the hand with blood so that it won’t hurt. Anway he’ll shake his hand very fast and it will almost start to hurt his wrist and his fingers just a blur and the pulsing citrus burn will ebb a bit and he’ll be OK unless he smacks his hand on something else as he waggles it. Holy hell that’s just the worst, isn’t it? Also once he let his whiskers grow too long and they started to curve around and poke back into his face. Like what the hell. Since when is your body a booby trap, you know? Also his toenails are cracking and white, but she can’t see that. She spies him through the glasses from the pawnshop. Long scraggly beard and dirty nails and just looking like a drowned rat of a wreck. But there is something she is drawn to and, when her evil but misunderstood father is not looking, she slips out the door and down the hill. She finds him lying in a heap at the foot of a tree. His eyes are closed and his legs tucked up under his chin and his arms wrapped around them. Probably she could fit him inside a crate of melons, that’s how small he looks, all bunched up under the tree. And her heart goes all to water: she wants to be his woman. She stares at him a long time and when he doesn’t move she gives him a little nudge with her foot. Still nothing. A little nudge right between the ribs, right where his arm is clasping his legs. He groans and with a twitch he opens one eye. Why did you do that? he asks. She is not expecting a Spanish accent. I don’t know, she says in Spanish. Why are you playing the clarinet? he asks, still with a Spanish accent but not in Spanish. She looks down at her hands. They are soft and smooth and smell of sandalwood. She is not playing a clarinet. She looks back at him but he has fallen asleep again. This is not how it was supposed to be. Slowly, slowly she turns and makes her way back up the hill to her father’s shop.

UNTIMELY #14 – A Sunday Walk

We awoke an hour before dawn and left the house when even Mother was still asleep. Our bodies ached and we stank of the nightsweat, could feel it in our shirts damp against our skin, but we didn’t dare wash for the noise. And so we left in silence, taking the parcels we’d hidden under our pillows, the dry bread and cheese, the fruit and nuts, and half an onion I’d managed to smuggle into my pocket during supper. We had a litre of father’s wine between us and I felt very grown up.

The moon was gone and the sky lightening as we walked in the misty gray along the edges of the fields. There was a low fog and our clothes wet now with condensation. The cold got inside our coats and our gloves and our scarves and we walked rigid and tense to ward it off.

At first light we came to an inn on the outskirts of the city. There was a fire and men talking and the sounds of dishes being washed. We stood close up against the long wooden bar and were grateful for the warmth. Slowly we drank the coffee, lapping the bitter water and feeling our spirits rise.


And so we stormed the barricade
And threw our rocks over the flaming sawhorses
Bureaus ancient and smoking
Lacquered wood peeling and cracking and hissing in the flames
Popping and creaking and collapsing with a sudden rush of air
Whoosh down and bang and the smoke billowing forth in acrid clouds
And we ran back for more
Tearing up the streets
And we took the pickaxes
And clattered the cobbles
And ran back to the flames, hurling our missiles onto their shelters


In the night the fires burned and the streetlights didn’t come on and we’d never seen the city so dark. Smoke and clouds blocked out the stars and we ran from blaze to blaze and felt along the walls with one hand when we couldn’t see, when it was pitch, but always we moved forwards. When we heard voices we ducked into doorways, hid under cars, and waited for the boots to pass, our faces close against the stones, the tyres, the rainbow puddles of oil that filled our noses with the scent of battle.

UNTIMELY #13 – Kerry & Kevin in Four Parts

Part 1.

The calling of the roll.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Present.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Here.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Yo.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Yes.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Hello.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Yep.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Hi.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Adsum.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Here, ma’am.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Right!

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Hep!

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Ho!

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Hi-ya!

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Hoopsie!

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Shtoops.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Yessum.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Being present, ma’am.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Psych.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Ha.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Yerp.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Yeah.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Yiyiyi!

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Geronimo!

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Gravy.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Wotcher.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Huh.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Hmhm.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Sì!

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Allo.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Hey.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Hey hey.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Hey hey hey!

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Hay. [sniggers]

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Righto.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: You bet.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Yes, ma’am.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Ya’ram.

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Woohoo!

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: What?

Kerry: Kevin?

Kevin: Who?

Kerry: Keith?

Kevin: [lets rip a loud fart]

Part 2.

Bacon, Brennan, Brown, Burke, Byrne, Campbell, Clarke, Collins, Connolly, Daly, Doyle, Dunne, Egan, Fitzgerald, Gallagher, Hughes, Johnson, Kelly, Kennedy, Lynch, McCarthy, McLoughlin, Moore, Murphy, Murray, O’Brien, O’Carroll, O’Connell, O’Connor, O’Doherty, O’Farrell, O’Neill, O’Reilly, O’Sullivan, Quinn, Ryan, Spacey, Smith, Walsh, Wilson [as one]:

Who the fuck is Keith?

Part 3.

Kerry, remembered.

You picked me up from school and peeled out of the lot and that fat bastard of an assistant principal chasing us threatening to call the cops. And we laughed and laughed and thought we’d nearly die. And driving into Ramsey you ran all the lights and past the police station we were very scared and you pegged it at 30 and the cars were honking and trying to pass us but we didn’t care a hoot. Drove all the way upstate and dead north on the thruway and slowly slowly the cars disappeared and it was just us and I pushed the seat all the way back and fell asleep with your hand clasped tight in mine. I woke up and didn’t know where I was. I was alone in the car in a parking lot and it was very cold. The motor was off and the keys were gone and I realized that I was locked in. There were some kind of crazy child locks on my door and I couldn’t open it from the inside and so I just sat there and tried to figure out where we were but I couldn’t see any signs. Just the highway behind me and the very occasional pair of headlights zipping along. I started to shiver and my teeth were chattering and then the car door opened and there you were with Roy Rogers and I was so glad to see you. Afterwards we ate the sandwiches, which were still sort of warm, and the cold french fries, which I always loved, ate them in great handfuls and the salt burned my fingers where the cold had split them.

Part 4.

A song!

Kevin’s knives slice nice snipe twice,

Me oh my but what a spice!

And filigreed so daintily

With lettuce leaves and potpourri,

Oh, Kevin, what a dish!

Nor fowl, beast nor fish!

Oh, Kevin, what a dish…

Untimely #12 - In the Gallery

Oh David don't I look divine? And yes, she did, because everyone wanted Karen's hair, so straight and so very very black. Black like jet some might say, and black as night others might say. And some say midnight blue, which is just about the same. Black and blue and white all over, with her lilyporcelainsnowwhite skin and gaping darkbrown eyes.

Black and blue and white all over

Like a lily midst the clover...

Lucia, darling, do you remember going for the Sunday strolls, the promenades in the gallery, weighted down with finery, white socks pulled up to the knee and stable boys in livery? When it rained the marble was so slippery and the girls looked so pale. Their hair so black and legs so long and thin!

When it rained the gallery was very full and the windows would steam up, slowly, from the bottom and the edges, until they were all covered like in a fog and the candles flickered overhead and everything was shinier and duller than you expected it. Her hair was so black and so low over her eyes and her mouth so red, so very very red. I think she put blue in her hair, to make it blacker. Just a bit, you understand, a bit of blue to make it black. It got very noisy in the gallery and the cold air rushing through the fever heat of bodies chilled us with its touch. In our stomachs we felt sick like hungry but not. We followed her through the gallery but it was no use, we couldn't see her face. Her hair was straight and short and blue in the sun but in the gallery it was black and blacker and she was prettier than anyone I'd ever met.

Untimely #11 – Melt Banana

Brushing his teeth in the mirror the world stops. Suddenly he feels very, very old. Where once reigned an unruly mane, a thin black wisp of tousled hair is disheveled, flattened, plastered to his mottled crown with sweat. Spots, age spots they call them, grow like a second skin, a thick, gnarled, scabby skin of brown blotches, from ear to ear across his craggy head. He has them on his back, too, and a few on his chest, though those are bumps, raised higher off the skin, and softer. Out of these grow a few straggling white hairs and, in between, something he could never understand: tiny red pinpricks of spots, bulbous, spherical, minute. Like droplets of blood hanging off of (or onto) his body. He was never quite sure how they formed, but there were more and more of them now, constellations in blood.

He was not fat so much as saggy; skin hung in loose folds, layering over his modest paunch, under his arms, his breast. Whatever tensile strength his skin had once exerted had long been given up. Now was the time to start running, he thought, and yet there had never been a worse time. How would his knees stand up to the crashing impact of the asphalt? His ankles? He could feel the shin splints as flesh separated from bone with each concussion. No, it was not the time to start running. Far from it. It was the time to stop, instead, to stop moving, stop driving, stop eating, because the more he ate the more he had to shit and the more he irritated his already irritated (and irritable) bowel. He was a bit of an irritable old bowel himself and worse he knew it. He smelled of sour banana skins, mostly because he would keep half-eaten bananas in his pockets, in all his pockets, in jacket pockets, trouser pockets, glove compartments. He loved bananas, but could no longer finish one, for either it made him constipated and irritated his bowel or made him need the toilet and irritated his bowel. There was no way to win, no middle ground, except of course not to eat the entire banana but to put the rest away for later. To wrap it in its own convenient packaging, a ready-made doggie bag, resealable and reusable yet entirely disposable and environmentally friendly. Sometimes, even now, he marveled at his own genius. As to the browning of the banana flesh inside the blackening skin, the mushing and mashing incurred upon the innocent fruit by the simple repetitive action of walking, or being sat upon, or the nose of a dog thrust importunately forth into his seat pocket – all of these happened at least once if not oftener and resulted in the sweet stench of rotting tropical fruit by which Mr. Jackson came to be known. Professor Donald Jackson, once preeminent biologist now left to rot and wither and brown like so many bananas in so many absentminded pockets. Yes, life had not been easy on him.

Untimely #10 – City of Rocks

They left him for dead in the city of rocks, for the sun to kill him, or the heat, or the cold, or the wind, or the wound. The sun came up in a rusty red dawn, all mist and sand and wind. Then it was overhead and all around him sallow grey light too bright to look at. He pressed his head into the ground and shifting saw the blood thick and black and muddy where it pooled by his side and his shirt plastered down to his hip. His tongue felt like a block of wood between two stones. He lay on his side and closed his eyes and prayed that he would never open them. He held them shut a long time and thought of stories they used to tell of men buried up to their necks and covered in molasses and how the ants would clean the flesh off their bones, the vultures pluck out their eyes. OK, he thought, so it could be worse. It could always be worse. But still he kept his eyes shut and felt the tightening in his side and then there was a very great tightening and he thought that this might be it. When he awoke it was dark and there was a high moon and he was shivering. He couldn’t feel his legs and he tried to move them but he couldn’t see to tell whether they had moved. He was frozen all over and shuddering now and then he felt a surge of warm and then it was over.

Untimely #9 - Seabiscuit

As has been noted, Jack loved his job. He had always liked bread, had liked to eat, and the town of Barber’s Landing had long lacked a bakery with the wherewithal to fashion a tasty loaf. And yet the bread on which he’d grown to his six feet and one hundred ninety five pounds, stacked on his upper half in the form of a barreled chest and arms to match, was bread any boy would have been more than happy with during a war. There was no war while Jack was growing up, but not knowing better nor knowing worse bread was bread and Jack was a happy man. Then one day Jack awoke from a dream in which he had been rowing a small boat across a calm afternoon sea to an island just distant at the edge of a great fog. When he arrived at the short pebble beach he paused to turn and look at the sky ominously blackening behind him over the bay. Rather than risk his vessel and his life in the choppy, churning waves, he dragged his boat clear of the water and, leaving it, began to climb the rocks, hoping for a bit of shelter, perhaps a rocky overhang or even a shallow cave, a dry spot out of the rain, even, dare he hope, a stone mansion with a great open fire and unwieldy steins of semisweet mead to quaff whilst reclining on the furs of wild bears and other savage beasts. Perhaps someone would offer him a pipe of opium, and as she prepared it for him she would do a little dance, dressed, as she was, in seven veils, and removing them one by one she would finish and fall into his lap, naked and adoring, as he drifted off into a haze of narcotically charged dreams. Of course, to dream in his dream might overwhelm his semiconscious powers, and so instead he simply continued to clamber over the jagged rocks in the diminishing light. Eventually he made it to the top, hands cut and knees and elbows scraped from slips and slides across the imperfect surface, and there he found himself in a clearing little more than ten paces by ten paces. In the center, on a wooden pedestal, was a shiny brass lamp with a small sign reading, in seven languages, “Rub Me.”

No, of course there was not. Instead, in the center of the clearing was ... absolutely nothing. Not a tree, not a cave, not a rock under which to find shelter from the rain that was beginning to fall with alarming force, slapping and popping on his bared skin like fingers on taut sheepskin. He ran to the center and arms widespread looked pleadingly up at the sky but the drops only fell in his eyes, blurring his sight. He dropped to his knees with a squelch in the liquid mud and felt the cold stream of drops running under his shirt and down his chest. For a very brief moment it felt cool and refreshing, invigorating, and then it began to get cold, and then very cold, and then very much colder, and he fell forward with his head on his knees, hands outstretched palms up in the mud and the rain splattered his back and his trousers and the soles of his shoes. He could feel it most on the back of his bare neck and when he went to cover himself he awoke stark naked and kneeling in the middle of his bed. He leaned over the wooden baseboard and retrieved his blankets from the cold floor, and then, rearranging himself, snugly fell into a long and dreamless sleep in which the sensation of being next to a fireplace featured strongly. The next day when he woke up he went straight to the general store and bought himself some flour and salt and corn flour and his first bread was sold out by the time he was ready to taste any.

Untimely #8 – An Early Memory

They were all sitting at the table when I came down. In the kitchen with the lights on in the middle of the night – I knew it was strange because the light was so orange, so rich and thick like syrup, not like daylight, nor like the evening light of after dinner. It was heavy and dark, the light, and they were sitting around the table crying. I took the stairs slowly, sleep-eyed, trailing my bear along the steps. I came down the last stair and turned down the hallway and I could see them all at the table around the telephone. My mother had her back to me and her shoulders were shaking and my aunt was holding her, but her face was hidden, too. Silently I walked toward the kitchen, the hall carpet threadbare and familiar under my naked feet. They were crying, all of them, the women of the house, and yet it was so quiet. I stood in the door in my pajamas, holding the jamb with one hand, the other holding my bear.

Untimely #7 – Ambergris My Gander

...nose to steamed porthole, the smell of pennies, a mouth of copper. Blood, for he bites the lip senseless out of habit. Boredom. Its salty tang frightens and refreshes him. Backing slightly from the blackened glass he touches two fingers to his lip. It’s only small – snakebite, a puncture either side of the fleshy center. He wipes the condensation from the glass. Black night. He cannot tell the water from the sky. Inside a greenish haze from dimlit lamps and a smell of socks. Old socks like wet bread and mushrooms and the underside of rocks. He runs his fingers across his lips and tries to see in the window but it is only a ghost that looks back at him. No sign of the blood that trickles to the corner of his mouth like when the old and infirm – dried like paper, like elephants, like biltong, like cement – forget to drink, forget to lick their lips or dab the corners of their mouths with handkerchiefs and work the saliva into a paste. He has seen amber rivers of tobacco juice flowing down the creases of weathered faces on the ship; salted and cured by the spray and wind, they’ll outlast the pharaohs, he’ll warrant. Men who look like strands of rope, with yellow nails and teeth and eyes and hairy ears the better to balance with. Men who cannot now return to shore without the blinding drunk to give that list they’ve come to know so well. He can feel the blood drying like paint and wonders whether he can pick it off or if he should just leave it, wash it in the morning. Remembers waking as a child with the hot blood coursing down his neck and throat, his pillow soaked, and how it caked below his eyes and in his fingernails. Mother screaming what’s he done, what’s he done! Holding his head back until it stopped, the salty snotty drip drip down his throat that made him gag, then dabbing at his cheeks with a moistened cloth. Now he could feel it dry and the taste fading and he pressed his head once more against the coolness of the glass, feeling his breath fog the window and wondering if she missed him like he missed her.

Untimely #6 – Black Sheep

And the keening, the keening. He heard them in the tunnel, the sheep, and ran toward the sound, slowing to a walk around the corner where the tracks led into the blackness. Looking both ways, for trains, for guards, for crackheads and cops and nosy schoolchildren, and seeing none, he jumped, careful to avoid what he had oft heard spoken of as the third rail. Not knowing quite what the third rail was, he aimed for the middle of the tracks, the wooden crosshatches that ran eighteen inches apart, figuring that wood was about as bad a conductor as they came and surely the third rail would not run smack down the center? He landed squarely in the middle and bent his knees deep, hands held out fingers spread wide for balance, trying not to touch either of the metal rails, nor the rat shit and trash that festooned the tracks. Before him was a black puddle filled with batteries, behind a newspaper and six coffee cups, relics of a meeting? An impromptu platform chat, as around a watercooler, men in suits gathering to speak crudely of women’s nether regions and slap each other on their padded shoulders? His mind ran off but now, standing in the middle of the subway tracks, was not the time, and he called it back and began to walk in the direction of the bleating. The tunnel blackened quickly, the orange lights along the walls and pillars dividing the tracks into uptown and downtown, local and express, providing a dull glow in which to plod, trippingly, amongst the trash and machinery, the skeleton of the city, bare and tough and rusted. The sheep were louder now the sound was channeled by the lowered ceilings and his footsteps clanged from pillar to pillar sounding like an army advancing before and after. He hurried from hatch to hatch, terrified of tripping, terrified of the apocryphal third rail and the deathly ooze of battery acid and urine that was a distillation of the plague itself.

When he had got accustomed to the regular gaps between the hatches and could walk at a steady rate without first checking each step, he began to think of his great fortune. He had long heard tales of the underground flocks that grazed between stations along the old tunnels, the first ones, the very deepest, in which long ago a freight car had derailed, dumping dozens of fresh Vermont country sheep into the bowels of New York City. The sheep whose virgin wool was soon turned black by the dirt and soot and lack of sun, the fabled Manhattan Blackbacks, a kilo of whose wool would fetch far dearer than its equal weight in truffles. The flocks who had been known to block trains for hours as they grazed on the discarded trash of commuters or in moments of true daring stormed the garbage trains and eviscerated the carefully tied black bags teeming with chicken bones and hot dog buns and paper napkins. For paper was the sheeps greatest source of energy, their staple, like potatoes to the Irish and rice to the Indians and cassava to the Africans. What riders unthinkingly discarded by the ton was what fed this flock and let it grow so that unbeknownst to all but the conductors and maintenance workers and the enthusiasts there were no fewer than ten thousand adult Manhattan Blackbacks roaming the city’s abandoned tunnels. But of course this was just an estimate, for no one had ever actually seen a flock, let alone the full herd of migrating beasts. There had been the occasional spotting, a woolly bottom or the glint of a yellow eye staring from beneath a grating on seventy-second street one early morning just before dawn, when an elderly woman by the name of Mabel Gardener nearly slipped and broke her knee after stooping low to the grating to see just what it was her Fifi was barking at so frantically.

No, these were mythical beasts, except they were not—they were real. Except no one had ever been able to study one, no one had found their lair. Which is why, as he rounded the bend and the bleating began to reverberate deafeningly off the solid metal tunnel, Henry Forsythe held his breath and clenched his fists for eagerness. There was a pounding in his chest and he fought the desire to break into a mad sprint towards the sheep he knew were just around the bend. He must not scare them. He must approach them like a cat stalking its prey: patience was the essence. It was almost more than he could bear.

Untimely #5 - Joy's Grape

Well son, you see joy is like - it's like you have this grape, yeah? You take a grape, maybe like a nice fat grape so purple it's almost black. You take it and you put it on your tongue and you push it up against the back of your front teeth right up by the roof of your mouth feeling the chalky skin bitter against the tip of your tongue even though they say it's the bitter you taste way back down almost down your throat that's how far back it is. And you press and maybe at first it gives a little bit, the grape, because it's juicy and liquid inside and moveable, but then you press some more and it gets taut and really it's quite difficult now to press anymore. And so you keep on pushing with your tongue and but now it's awkward because it's hard to get a good angle with enough leverage to like really push on it and so you open your lips a little bit and are breathing sort of haggard through your teeth but you don't want to part your teeth because then maybe the grape will come flying out like a cannonball what with all the pressure your tongue's exerting on it and all. And so you strain a little bit and kind of squint your eyes and clench your fists and you feel it in your stomach even and it's a little bit sickening but then so you give it a final push and you are just starting to worry like maybe you're going to do a big fart or worse and but then it gives way and the flesh ruptures the skin and your mouth fills with sweet sticky juices and translucent chewy flesh and it runs all down your tongue and down your throat. And so you see, son, that's joy's grape.