Saturday, November 15, 2014

SNAPPED FINGERS

The soda machine's noise kicked on and drowned them out their gibberish in the adjacent office storage muffles our noise with a noise of its own its own standing in the back alphabetized to the back or shuffled to the back the not so random shuffling to the back of the container of jarred cubicles he woke up with a headache and pain in his stomach after grinding his teeth through a night of nightmares there were several but he remembered only one at the moment and only a piece of that one was left something about a very large bug eating at his groin in a graveyard the pain was always higher up and he was dead down below the what they called the basement when they looked at the house by the ocean that flowed into the streets that must have been from another one of his nightmares earlier in the program more dust from the desert was getting in under the door where the weather stripping was missing.

"Can I bring him in?" asked the pale officer standing in the doorway.
"What have you cut out of your diet now?" asked Lurk sitting at his desk.
"Why? Why do you ask?" asked the pale officer stepping back a bit and thought about rubbing his hands together at the heels and how it would feel the bone and skin working the cud of his melancholy but resisting knowing the probing questions it would generate.
"No reason. It couldn't possibly be your dour imitation of a chalk outline," muttered Lurk listening to another screw pop out of his chair.
"I do feel like I'm slowly being erased inside the lines," offered the pale officer trying vainly to bring back to his mind which article of clothing that marked playing card had ended up in.
"What did you ask me about?" asked Lurk experimenting with the new fucked up position the chair tilted in.
"What's wrong with your chair?" asked the pale officer suddenly thinking of another definition of escort interrupting his image of his laundry room and the card swishing in a wet ass pocket."
"Curiosity dragged out the cat's life as it climbed the chart of most popular defense mechanisms," croaked Lurk staring at the weird shape on the wall drawn in brown marker.
"I need to change their litter when I get home," said the pale officer inadequately using cars to substitute for feline shit logs in his brain.
"If you get home," said Lurk.
"If I get home," said the pale officer.
"Did you ask me something?" asked Lurk.
"When?" asked the pale officer.
"I don't know. Why did you come back here?" asked Lurk an upside down neon tetra floated in his thoughts.
"Let me go to shift command and ask," said the pale officer taking a few steps to leave.
"You're going to shift command to have them dislodge your memory?" asked Lurk.
"Sure. Why not? I'll throw in an apology as well as a recitation of some barely related block of text of policy," said the pale officer.
"That's jacked," said Lurk.
"How is that jacked?" asked the pale officer.
"It's jacked like the jack of clubs," explained Lurk realizing he forgot to flush after his last restroom visit following that heavy lunch.
"Why did you put it like that?" asked the pale officer.
"Put it like what?" asked Lurk.
"All this talk about playing cards?" asked the pale officer.
"I bought this crappy deck the last time I traveled. The last time I traveled. The last time. Couldn't make out what anything was. The last time I traveled. The last time," said Lurk trailing off into a mumble.
"The last time," said the pale officer.
"The last time," said Lurk. "Why does it bother you so much how I put it?" Lurk asked.
"I'm not bothered," insisted the pale officer.
"The color went out of your face," said Lurk.
"I thought the color was already out of my face," said the pale officer.
"It is. It just looked like it was the next stage of some anemic fading," said Lurk seeing his one and only failed gardening project superimposed over his inbox.
"It," said the pale officer.
"It," repeated Lurk. 
"My place is a mess," said the pale officer.
"And you're telling me this because?" asked Lurk watching something bob in his water bottle after he took a sip.
"I was watching this thing on TV," said the pale officer, "this thing on TV about a bus driver who is waiting for one more person to start taking his route who wears headphones and he will decide that day to drive them all to their deaths as they listen to their music and audiobooks and talk although he hasn't worked out what would be the best place to drive them and then this old woman with her granddaughter get on and the little girl talks his ear off. At the end of the day he goes home to kill himself it was either a bottle of pills or something else I don't remember and instead he decides to clean his house and they show him starting with his toilet. And I sat there watching this smelling my couch smelling my house smelling myself and I got up to go to take a dump and I sat there holding it and then I let it go not all of it I held a little back some of it getting stuck on its own and then I let the rest go some of it letting go on its own. And here I am taking another shift staying over thinking I'm between shifts between cleaning my couch and not cleaning my couch between taking the garbage out now or taking the garbage out tomorrow between listening to something or not listening to something no matter where it comes from a flat-screen or a person and no matter where it comes from I'm listening or not listening something is telling or something is telling something is always telling."

Keys
I lost my keys
Can't get the cabinet door open
The potatoes have long arms
Scratching crouching
pulling at strings
dangling at the ends
of what they said
what they send
from outside the town
outside the distant town

Lurk went on, "I was playing a video game and after I had finished another quest I looked at the book of monsters."
"Book of monsters?" asked the pale officer.
"The monsters I had killed," said Lurk, "I could click on each picture and see how many of each I had wasted. I could click up to page 6, but the arrow went all the way to page 30 with a place for a picture of each species.  8 on every page. You know how many that is?"
"240," answered the pale officer thinking about whether he would go shopping or leave another item off his menu.

The soda machine's noise kicked on and drowned them out their gibberish in the adjacent office storage muffles our noise with a noise of its own its own standing in the back alphabetized to the back or shuffled to the back the not so random shuffling to the back of the container of jarred cubicles he woke up with a headache and pain in his stomach after grinding his teeth through a night of nightmares there were several but he remembered only one at the moment and only a piece of that one was left something about a very large bug eating at his groin in a graveyard the pain was always higher up and he was dead down below the what they called the basement when they looked at the house by the ocean that flowed into the streets that must have been from another one of his nightmares earlier in the program more dust from the desert was getting in under the door where the weather stripping was missing.


- Max Stoltenberg

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