Kettle Whistle.

                Lightning flashed outside, turning the dark windows into momentary green eyes staring in at her, where she lay, tethered to the bed, dreaming.

                “You’re not a prisoner,” she had said, and the words skittered around the dark corners of the room like the mice and cockroach. Perhaps she’d said it days ago, or weeks. For her part, Katherine couldn’t remember the last time she’d conversed with anybody.

                “If I’m not a prisoner,” she’d said, “why do you rope me to this bed?”

                The orderly had laughed, her enormous bust like a second thorax bouncing in her joviality, but her face soured with scorn. Her eyes lifted beyond the bed, and Katherine followed the sightline to where another orderly, dressed in identical whites, though a man, stood in the doorway, where she had been unaware of his presence. He brought his heavy, dark arms up to twist around themselves high across his chest. He, too, gave a low chortling sound, but Katherine saw in his eyes where he didn’t quite know the answer to her question, how he hoped he wasn’t expected to respond. He must be new.

                The orderly at her bedside went on. “You are not ‘roped to your bed,’ as you say,” and she plugged a length of clear tube into the port pierced through the back of her hand like fishhook. She pivoted and pushed a button, turned a knob on a towering console, and a thick green liquid filled the tube, coloring all of its serpentine twists, until it finally reached her hand and disappeared inside. While Katherine felt no immediate physical effects, she could already sense her interest in the conversation waning. She no longer felt any strong want to defend herself, but only to be left alone. Her tongue waggled dumb and lost behind the cage of her teeth like a tranquilized animal.

                Yet the orderly continued, “You are here of your own free will. You are here for treatment, and bed rest is an invaluable facet of the course the doctor has charted for you.”

                Katherine’s skull lulled, and the starch of her pillow puffed around her in tiny, pleasant mushroom clouds.

                Sensing victory, the orderly smiled a puckered grin, tapping Katherine’s unmolested hand, saying, “These are your first steps back to wellness.”

                Katherine staggered over pale cold sand. The sun was nothing more than a bad memory, bobbing grey on the horizon over the standstill ocean. There was no sound until she picked a rock from an odd footprint and tossed it into the water with a hollow thunk.

                She swallowed a mouthful of empty air. A repetition of noise finally reached her, and it was the chirp of a temporary bird before evolving into something digital: the chime of an unseen machine. And Katherine knew she was dreaming. But she hugged her arms around a grey tree trunk and touched it with her tongue, and she no longer cared whether she was dreaming or awake. She had learned to string her dreams together into something consistent, weave the images into something reliable, something that she could return to – which was more than what waited for her in the woken world. And so her mind had become inverted, flipped inside-out, so that her dreams were her reality, and her consciousness mere gibberish.

                She spun around on the beach, letting herself collapse to her knees. She bathed her hair in the grit of sand. She twisted herself along the shore, and tried to dream up her dead lover, but her lover wouldn’t come. And in her writhings, her fingers snared a tiny stone as if a fish in a net.

                And Katherine sat herself with legs entwined before her like a child, and inspected the acorn-sized stone until she understood the small burrows to be sockets, and the delicate tiny fissures to be teeth; for it was the skull of something too small to be anything but innocent – a beachfaring rodentia, perhaps, or the pet of a very small child.

                And it was at her foot that Katherine found another skull, slightly larger and more pronounced in feature, as if a squirrel. And a couple of strides from this, the head of a rabbit. And so on. Cats and dogs. A strewn collection of horse heads. Katherine walked a mile or more until she came upon skulls the size of small boulders: the preposterous rhinoceros, the hilarious hippopotamus. A brilliant elephant, regal and gorgeous even with all of its skin melted to dust. Katherine found all of God’s creatures there at her feet. And they led her to a mountain of human skulls, collected in a neat pyramid, lines and angles all dimensionally perfect, and all as grey and silent as the sun, which had, Katherine noticed, begun a slow meaningless spin out on the water, sending small wisps of concentric circles to lick politely at the shore.

                And Katherine gasped suddenly at what appeared to be a living human face, cheery cheeked and beaming, bright with wisdom, lain at the foot of the pyramid. The face positioned on its side, but happily, and Katherine reached for it, shaking with hope.

                In her hands it turned to truth: too cold, too firm, and then clearly inanimate, and then not human at all. She spun it in her hands with the speed of frustration, blinking the thing into clarity. And it was a kettle, garish in vibrancy, a plucked apple with a painted brown handle made to represent a stem, and a little green leaf top. Katherine snapped at the lid, and the kettle made a resonating ping that hypnotized her into attention as her mind followed the circular sound waves outward into the now-meaningless sky.

                Katherine clutched that kettle to her chest and collapsed to the beach again, this time without the aid of her will. And she cried and cried syrupy tears into the open kettle until there was enough to slosh around in the bottom. And she built a silver fire into the sand and set the kettle upon its lukewarm flames. And she blinded herself with fistfuls of sand until an impenetrable darkness replaced the pain, and a flickering coolness to the air tells her that she is back in her hospital bed. And her breath returns to her, and her heartbeat relaxes to something human. For it is in the dark, where the color and form of everything bleeds its outlines so that all melds together into a single congealed mass, numb to the touch, that Katherine finds her peace. And from an unseen corner of the darkness comes the soft and tuneless kettle whistle, and Katherine’s boiled dreams collect like condensation upon the ceiling, and fall down upon her like a cool, soft rain.

For the Scriptic.org prompt exchange this week, Bewildered Bug at http://www.bewilderedbug.com gave me this prompt: All she had ever wanted was a ruby red kettle.

I gave Kirsten at http://www.thekircorner.com this prompt: "... frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push." - William S. Burroughs, "Interzone"

1. The hangman in the wings.

                He rises out of the subway on still feet. A cigarette butt has been captured at the top of the escalator, where the metal stairs cycled back beneath the ground. He tries to visualize how the stairs rotated from the top of the well back to the bottom, but can’t. “Strange,” he thinks, a slight twist of jaw. And the cigarette butt churns and churns like boil. He wonders what will ever make it go away.

                Because of the metal grooves of elevator step locking into menacing yellow grooves in escalator sill in replication of voracious teeth, the man, as a boy, had called escalators “alligators.” He smiles at the recollection, but there is no warmth in it.

                The subway station is in the – what is the word? The subway station is built into the ground, beneath a towering Pittsburgh high-rise. What is the word that means the hollow space beneath a skyscraper? Basement doesn’t sound right. What is a gallows? The hangman’s gallows. The man imagines the trapdoor in the hangman’s gallows. He conjures the strangely satisfying click-swoosh-reverberating twang of the trapdoor falling – how do we all know that sound? He imagines the hangman in the wings as the body snaps and flails like a flag going flaccid in the wind. The hangman’s gait makes the slow knock-knock-knock sound of a man with serious shoes walking upon a serious wooden floor without concern nor care nor commitment. He stands at the edge of the trapdoor cavity, an arm’s length from the plasticine body as it turns on its tether with the rotation of the earth. He shoves the body with the blunt side of his two-headed axe, satisfied. And it is with a dramatic flair, in regards to the wide eyes of the crushed and silent audience that he possesses too much professional dignity to acknowledge, that he takes up his axe and swings it through the white sky on an unbroken arch, like a dark bird of prey, biting one crisp snick into the taut rope. And the still of death is broken. As though the man were only dead while still connected to his execution rope- As though the man was only cunningly playing dead to escape his doomed sentence- The man suddenly jerks into life, arms and legs snapping into sharp right angles, and those held too at right angles from the body, in the pose of escape. In the pose of freedom. The hangman cuts the rope to bring the man back to sudden life, reanimation. And the man flails the dance of the reborn, snapping and clawing at the empty air about him, snapping hungrily with bared teeth at the sunset as it passes by at sudden terminal velocity, and falls to final abrupt rest in the tattered birds nest of collected bleached bones and skulls and teeth that are woven beneath the hangman’s gallows.

                The man thinks these things until he realizes why he’s thinking them, and then he stops. He doesn’t think of anything at all.

                The building lobby spills a fountain of waterfalls cascading down a series of steps as though apocalypse. The stench of chlorine careens off the marble floors and maze walls and towering ceilings like echo, emphasizing the catacomb construction of the space in a way that is not entirely unpleasant. People flow like current, dressed identically. Simultaneously, a woman pours and a man drinks.

                Through corkscrew door, the man is spilled out onto the grey city street, vacuous of atmosphere, temperature-less, the swirl of so much baseless noise synthesizing silence. There is no air except for the toxic bus fumes being hooked and dragged screaming down the streets by following cars. The man holds his breath and feels the sidewalk seashells through his thin-soled leather shoes. Rounding a corner, he has to pirouette one-footed in air to avoid the legs of a vagrant as they kick at the air in dream or dementia.

                The man’s office is across four lanes of city traffic, through another engine turbine door, the glass propeller of a sinking boat. Here, there are no fountains and the walls are a panel and the ceilings crush down upon your head, but at least the man can breathe. He smiles and nods and waves to the black bulldog behind the desk that serves as both security and reception, steps seamless into brass elevator. He’s been out three days, now – his stomach is a flurry of strange wings. He could vomit, and is ashamed of his meekness. The doors slide shut before him, amputating him into a momentary solitude. The tarnish in his reflection turns his face into a dark-socketed skull, smeared sideways as something crushed.

Flowers.

I’m moving: driven and ragged and dusted – my eyes sawdust-dry, my breath is rasping husks like blown dead cornstalk. The fluorescent hallway lighting crackles, and I crackle with it. Hospital air is so clean, it’s bleached of color and scent, and I am bleached with it: bled white.

A father, I am. I am a father. My mind rolls the notion around my skull like tongue, and still can’t get accustomed. I smile, though – skull grin. It’s a good feeling, I suppose.

I stop meaninglessly, clumsily at a water fountain I pass. The water is teeth-aching cold, and splashes down my paper gown – seafoam green and laughable, “Take that thing off,” and I say, “No, no, no,” and smile. I don’t know why. The water’s cold is pulling me back into a realm of reality that I don’t enjoy, and I’m wishing wasn’t there. I continue down the hallway where people nod and smile at me, and I wonder if anybody thinks I’m a doctor.

Her room, her hallway – in the two days, I’ve traversed this path so many times that it’s already tattooed into my sense memory, and I go – left, right, right, right, left with such speedy ease that I near-knock over a clean-faced, middle-aged woman in scrubs with dark hair pulled tightly back as we pirouette around each, my hands to her elbows, us laughing social laughter, and me saying, “Sorry, sorry,” and her saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” and even this exchange is engrained into the directions back to her room.

The flowers are a stench and hit me first – musky and perfumed, heavy. My entire life, flowers are funerals – saccharine lilies, magazine roses: means my grandparent is waxy and dead and obvious, stretched in a dark box at the head of a room filled with my awkward and conversing family, something fetid and thick just beneath everybody’s surface.

Today, flowers and sunlight, and my wife and my daughter – everything glows, more lifelike than life. “Perhaps I’ve died,” I think.

“Take that thing off,” somebody.

“No, no, no,” me.

I touch my daughter’s cheek. I touch flower petals. I wash my hands and touch her cheek again, immaculate.

I touch flower petals. I touch the little white pitchforked cards, speared into the guts of the flowers – the little sharp corners of the cards.

In doctor’s office waiting room, the green glowed, turning everybody into reptiles with yellow eyes. Fish bubbled sickening around an obscene aquarium.

“Everything okay?” she asks.

I nod, mutely, forgetting to smile, at first, then turning to her with warm teeth. The look saying, “Everything is okay, family.”

I was seventeen years old. That would be… eight – no – seven years ago. I wish that number would get bigger, faster. I wish a dozen years, and then twenty. Enough to say, “Oh, but that was so many years ago.” Enough to say, “That was hardly even me that happened to – who did that.”

I thought cartoon thoughts. “This,” I thought, “was like when they used to not let men into delivery rooms. Only in reverse.”

In reverse, she would be in the waiting room, and I’d be in there, having the warmth of my guts hollowed.

I thought, “Should I be passing out cigars?” I sickened myself. A thought came quickly, “Run.” From somewhere, the sickening smell of flowers. The formaldehyde stench of roses.

She sent flowers. I couldn’t make sense of the gesture. I pressed the card into my fingertip, but it wouldn’t break skin.

Our child that wasn’t would be eight – no – seven years old, now.

I move into the sunlight and stroke the peach fuzz perfection of my daughter’s golden head.

The hook and gadget clockwork of my blood ticks and ticks away into bottomless time.

For the Scriptic.org prompt exchange this week, Corinne at http://www.seedsofcoriander.com gave me this prompt: Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is most known for: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." Write about a situation in which the main character has to make a tough decision.

I gave femmefauxpas at http://rettorical.blogspot.com this prompt: Bus Stop Boxer.

Milk.

I carry my morning’s offering to the semen tree.

The sun rises from between the overgrowth like a dead thing, grey and cold – fetal inside a pregnant marble sculpture.

The fruit dangling from the semen tree is like withered black figs, and services conclude with me plucking one from a nearby branch. The fruit has a skin like leather, pulp like dust – but I eat it religiously. “For this is my body, which will be given up-”

What looks like black insects miring in tree sap, is. I crouch into a squat and watch them struggle, knee-deep children in black fallout snow. I balance myself with hand to trunk, noting the tree has taken on a platicine sheen, smooth to the touch. A wind comes through the grass, heavy with rot.

* * *

The wind comes through the walls. I touch ear to a seam in my living room, and the Sunday morning wind comes through in a quiet, angry whistle. I run my finger along the black tar compound I’d used to make the wall air-tight, and the tip comes away moist – the start of the summer wet.

Pride is sinful, as they say, but I take pride in my house – modest to a point of miniscule, perhaps, but hand-hewn, and puzzled together, by myself alone. I can touch the ceiling without unbending my elbow, but the roof held two feet of heavy winter snow without give. The house has stood autumnal wind and spring growth. But nothing havocs like the perpetual wet warmth of summer.

The wind comes through the walls and stirs about the house, rousing the thick scent of Lucy.

* * *

I stand over Sammy, watching him writhe in his tank. I’d hoped that his malaise was partially attributable to a lingering winter’s hibernation. But today, the glass of Sammy’s tank sweats in hot rivulets. And still, Sammy won’t move beyond his slow, grinding twist upon himself. His back is marred and nicked with mouse chews.

I shake my head at him, slowly. Though it’s no longer necessary, or a challenge, or even fun, I still hold my breath, if only out of respect, and when I reach for Sammy, do so with a quick bolting snag, catching him just at the base of his head.

The glass jar is streaked with lid rust like Lucy crying makeup down her pale face. I hold it open to Sammy’s mouth, and he bites onto it limply, no longer any snap to his jaw. I’ve milked him so many times he’s become domesticated to it, and his venom is weakening for it. Not his fault at all, but I still reach for my buck knife to decapitate him beside his tank – but stop. I look down into the graphite eyes, and toss Sammy coarsely back into his tank before taking further action. No point in killing Sammy before a replacement is found. I’ll keep my eyes open. If I can catch one this week, maybe I can offer Sammy next Sunday, banqueting on him and pinning his skin to the tree with the rest of them.

Reposing at the kitchen table, I dip needle into venom, pulling the juice into chamber like vinegar piss. I cross myself and give thanks to the Lord for another sacred Sunday, and inject the poison into a thick roping hank of vein. My mind erupts into Technicolor pinwheels of electric fire, blinding me immediately in both eyes, before dying down into a huffing smolder. Deflated and muscleless, I slither off my chair into a heap on the floor, spasming suddenly at an awkward moment, lurching and cracking my skull off hardwood in a way which I more register than feel. Light and color return to me in forms without outlines, and I momentarily smile into the face of God, saliva, warm as blood, bubbling joyfully at the corners of my mouth.

* * *

I caught Lucy coming through the brambles as soft and playful as a wild hare, her eyes spinning around in her skull as I wrapped my arms around her. We laughed together as she kicked her bare feet in the blue American sky, her saying, “No, no, no, no,” as I nuzzled my face into her throat and said, “Oh, yes,” and wrestled her into the house.

I kissed her and kissed her the way girls like for you to do, and her eyes begged for me all big and silent, but I said, “Oh, no, no, darling – I’m old fashioned. We don’t go any further until you marry me, first – and we can’t get married until Sunday, and today is… oh, my – Monday!” We laughed and laughed. “Ain’t that the luck? But it’ll fly by, darling. I won’t leave your side, not for a moment.”

And I read to her from the Good Book. I read her the stories of the honorable wives, like Sarah and Ruth. And admittedly, when I weakened in the moonlight and her twitching and yearnings got to me, the sultry tales of Jezebel and Salome.

And on Sunday we were married beneath the tree, rattling around in the dead leaves like rattlesnakes. And we were happy.

The following Sunday, I took to baptizing Lucy, stringing her wrist straight and biting her soft arm with my needlepoint. She writhed terribly and foamed, like a lady version of Paul’s Ecstasy. And when she stilled, her eyes went that way that they do when you first find the glory of the Lord: big and sort of wobbly, and I knew that she was pure.

We were sick for some days afterwards – Lucy from the venom and me from the lack of any, and I recognized the need for a second snake, which I found right off. An albino rattler, as pale as my Lucy – which I took to be a strong omen, even though omens are something of a grey area within the church. I kept her coiled in a coffee can next to Sammy, until I could find her a proper tank.

But Lucy couldn’t handle the white poison, and Lucy went and died. Not in an ugly way, but in a tender, soft way. Like a stoplight changing colors on an empty street: yellow to red, then finally green. And in a sulfuric rage I took that white snake and crushed it between two rocks, and crushed it over and over, even long after it was dead. I felt remorse for what I had done then, and pieced together that beautiful alabaster hide as best I could and pinned it in a high and honorable place within the tree.

* * *

In the sweat of new summer, it is all too clear how heat has become synonymous with Lucifer, and I scrape myself into a sprawled sitting position, with my skull pounding murderously. I try to measure my breaths, but my body is working against me, palpitating wildly. I lurch and spew vomit across the floor, and it’s only then that I remember the stench.

“I have to bury her,” I think, and God tells me that this is right but allowing my heart to slow. The thundering begins to recede from my ears, and a voice says, “I have allowed this time of your mourning, but it is time to return to the present.” And I speak aloud, “Amen.”

But my work is not to be done on the Lord’s Day, and I remain on the floor and stare into the sun, waiting for it to dip beneath the horizon.

* * *

It is eighty degrees, even at midnight – the darkness woven and palpable as down. I carry Lucy from the house, her body weightless as white shadow. And I lay her in her grave.

I pray feverishly over my wife’s body, and wish that I could cry upon her, to bury my tears with her. But I do not have it in me.

I touch her soft, waxen cheek, and gently lay the first handful of earth across her mouth, her slightly parted lips. And then I bury her.

In the semen tree beneath the moon, in a high and honorable place, I entwine her hair into the sticks and burrows and knots. Beneath my fingers, I feel the tree swell with life.

For the Scriptic.org prompt exchange this week, Barb Black at http://blackinkpad.blogspot.com gave me this prompt: It was the middle of Summer and still 80 degrees at midnight.

I gave Michael at http://MichaelWebb.us this prompt: "When you cut into the present, the future leaks out." -William S. Burroughs