Ellis Island

There was the crab man, above the street where the angel was.

The crab man had been in Harlem once, that is where he made a name for himself. Right now he is not frying any crabs.

It’s the horses, it’s the horses, was all he could think as they went by him. They weren’t real, the horses. That is, their bodies were a hologram, a kind of language, not unlike a girl with one green eye.

Across from the corner where he was standing there was a strip mall nearly emptied. The strip mall was no place for people. It had boldly gathered itself into its center skin, and as soon as it became still it began sinking, as it knew that it would. It quit breathing.

This was when the wheel had just been built. So many men had been killed building the wheel that the bodies became a dam in the river. Each body was an empty reed. Finally a storm washed the men loose.

Things were moving too fast, and no one was surprised when it all quit working only five days after the grand opening ceremony; a clearing had been opened inside every man, and in the enclave of every woman’s voice.

Down the street was Ellis Island, and at night the crab man left his cart beside the east-facing wall of this building. It was a monstrosity this place, a place famous for its lemon custard and its meringue. People always said

The meringue is better than anything.

And, the pie is so nice.

It reminded the man who made the meringue and the custard and the pie, it reminded him of his mother just before she gave birth to a girl, his sister, who was dead at the age of nine.

Sometime soon I will make a mousse, the man often thought.

[[[[This was 10,000 years after the spirit had come to Earth.  ]]] ]     ]

It was unclear what mousse actually was. After all this time, the proof was in the pudding. The mystery was in the mousse.

At the age of seven, his sister had carved a magic stick. It was held like a bow, with little rivulets on each end. She called these the rings of other planets.

I’ll make a river here, where there was one before.

How are you sure there was one here before?  

You remember anything if you ask for it. She put her wand on the ground and began rolling it in the dirt.

The thing is unlocking little strings, and letting them go into music.

Her brother remembered when she was an infant and he sang to her about the ocean. He told her their father was a Beluga, that he was white white, and he was in the moon so when she looked at the moon she looked at him. He had been on Earth once, their father. He stayed in a neighborhood with strings of little white lights and streetlamps that were the small, beautiful kind, and people spoke quietly there. People spoke quietly.

He said they should call each other God so that is what they did.

Dear God,

I am getting the sun inside. It comes through my head and I feel it making its way in all four places. I fill the sky by listening.

Dear God,

My body is mountain and fire. In the space around, I see white birds. 

His sister had known about animals. She remembered everything, his sister. She remembered 10,000 years.

At this moment, the man was taking lemons off his tree. He twists them off one at a time and sets them in a yellow bucket. Making custard for Ellis Island. It is the best custard in the world, that is what people say. Everyone says it. Everyone who eats it says this.

Suddenly the man began shaking. He held on to the tree and the tree also shook. It was not as a child who eats a lemon shakes from the inside. This shaking was something that took hold of him. The man saw the ocean. He saw his father in Lake Mead, his sister, and the river opening from Earth.   

They stood there shaking, man and tree. The bucket of lemons was far enough behind so that the man would not spill the fruit onto the atrium floor, into so many waves of light and string.

The sugar was grown in California. It was something like Agave, and it was always deep blue, at times mostly black, and it had the taste of sulfur because of iron. This gave sweet food a kind of glowy taste, it had agency, and a natural leavening. Because the sugar was so blue the lemon custard and meringue looked like a greeny moss. If there had been any mousse it would have been this color too.

The crab man used a little sugar in his crabs. This was his secret—a little sugar, a little lime.

The horses had gone, so he began to fry a few crabs. It was almost mid-day and people would be coming soon for lunch. They would make a little line in front of him, waiting for his good, fried crabs. He would give them the crabs in a cardboard cone, and the sauce in its own tiny bowl.    

Sometimes he also served clams. But not now. Today, just crabs, fried with their shells on, all of them soft enough.

(The crab shells would take the blue sugar very quietly, the sun folding the crabs into a kind of heat as it touched the crystals.)

It was not unusual for the crab man to serve his old friend from Ellis Island, and of course he often stopped in for the meringue. They had known one another a long time. They had been on this road for most of their lives, and before they knew each other as men they had been friends as children, growing up on the same street, playing in this street until sunset and even into the dark. There was a pool for children called Lemongrass. The boys made a fort on top of the wooden patio cover at the edge of the pool. A wide tree grew up and over this structure from the other side of the gate, and the boys kept jars of curry and cans of iced tea in these branches. They often watched the children below, sitting in swimsuits and wet towels, pool water falling off the girls’ hair onto the table, even sometimes onto the sandwiches.

One time a kid said something that neither of the boys would forget, and both of the men remembered even now. They remembered even though they did not remember being boys together. They did not really remember the tree fort or the pool; they never left that place.

It was actually these words which opened the river, when Lily moved her stick through the Earth.

Neither man remembered this river. It was this river which filled their bodies. It was this river which came upon the man picking lemons for the Ellis Island custard, now carrying him into the old Colorado basin, a valley where once was water and now are ravens. The man saw the ravens and he cried out for the valley to free him, but the valley was already inside. The man would be there forever. The crab man would not serve him the soft, fried crabs in a piece of rolled cardboard with the special pink sauce to dip in [[he loved that sauce]]. And now no one would eat the meringue. From now on, they would be served lemon mousse.

They would say, this mousse is better than anything. You know that is what people would say.

The Air Field

To be rooted and unrooted as a tidepool, to spread into the world.

Dear God,

Desert Inn is opening a hole into you. A bird is hollering from a man’s shoulder, as the man is making his way around the earth. The bird sounds like a white macaw. Across the pool, it is a black cat on the wall, ascending the stairs to your apartment and lying around on your bed and beneath your desk, a big fly coming in through the window, the sun rising.

Everyone is going someplace. The sound the bird makes is a whisper, a string of green lights into the heart as true love.

Remember the olive tree which sang these songs, dressed as a noble savage wreath. Remember the blades of grass reflected the moon and those lights, another cat inside crying, slapping its tail.

Dear God,

The horses seem to have switched in advance of the switchboard—the ground is not what you thought!

Dear God,

We see that you have ruined your streets and made your people sick and fearful. You have grown lonesome, and now nearness has come for you at last. See you, all the foundations of the earth. See, you are moving.

It seems to be expanding. It seems to be expressing
its true nature.

Look at that, someone said, the whole is becoming wide. The ground is opening like a bowl. Into the bowl goes the rubber tree, and the air, the high leaves, the yellow ball.

In goes the world’s largest mineral store. God has become so dense, and he is sitting up in the back room. [[the largest crystal sphere taken down out of the truck]]

Dear God,

First put the stone on your head. Open your hands and face, palms up. Now move the light around

around

around

Do you feel it through the air? The world in your hands.

Dear God,

In the darkness I feel the voices you sent through grass when the moon was the light reflected beneath the olive tree. I am in the white shell.

Dear God,

The white shell goes all the way to Ellis Island, and once you get there the island will have become a woman’s breast; there will the oceans give way to a forest, and there will words give way to sound and finally voice, and will the pain become a blanket, will it become an hourglass pulling, its sand become crystal, its mind become crystal, the web getting its rocks off with the windows shut, the frontier exploding.

Above the children’s table, so many jars of curry. The children were dead leaves blowing across the cement. No running! The boys would shout at them, No running in the pool! But the children were dead leaves and all they could do was run. And when they finally ended up in the pool they would float for a while and then they would sink down to the bottom, becoming the sound of the gate spread around like an electric fence.

The operators watched the hole grow open for one hour, and then it became them. It took their eyes and their batons and used them to open itself faster, so that everything around went inside. In went the dead animals, their tender pink sores. Their eyes became the opening also, their blood and skin became the wind rushing all around.

We’re losing the animals, someone said.

In went the black cat, and the stones stacked outside the fence.

Poetry became the opening with the rest of them. It became the feeling in your hands when the stone is on your head and your hands are a bowl. An echo around the rim.

The field was a long wild mole hill. There were palm trees of various sizes and there was one tree that was a fruit called Manhattan fruit, an ornamental. There was its shadow and the grooves running outward from its trunk.

Beneath the tree there is Lily, since she died at the age of nine.

A man and a woman are eating at a table. There is a television on the wall of the restaurant with images of mountains and clouds and valleys, and the man is berating the woman for using fork and knife to eat her chicken wings, didn’t she know how to eat those damned wings!

The woman was fat and frowned.

The man said he wanted to watch something other than the mountains and valleys, anything else but that.

Everyone in the restaurant was enduring an enormous pain.

Outside, the crab man thought he saw an animal, like a beaver or a huge raccoon, but he didn’t see any tail and it seemed to be running upwards on its hind feet. It reminded him of a sloth and an anteater and a wild hog. The animal was running from beneath Manhattan, and it ran across Paradise interstate and disappeared behind the row of restaurants, but to the crab man it looked like the animal ran into the window of the saloon, and he saw it run across the tables, which were empty except for the one where the man and the woman were beginning to act sick, and the animal vanished into the far wall. The man and the woman were hot inside. Their noodles were in the bowl. If anyone prayed, a storm would pull the man out of stratosphere. A black crow drifted across the sky.

It’s the ravens, it’s the ravens.

The fire and the rose.

Leaving Las Vegas

When JP Moonsberry speaks, his words become a boat, and the ship grows as out from a shell; the air around becomes abuzz with tiny ghosts, who pick and gulp at the strings. The ghosts gather around the edges of things: a tree, a wall, a shadow, and the light beyond the arc is where they sip, as the redness takes them. Some of the ghosts are not ghosts but moths, the size of a small hand; these nest inside moonflowers. The flower pulls its center up from roots so that the ovum eat.

JP Moonsberry is standing beside Darwin with an umbrella, shielding the enormous bird from the summer sun.  \\\ (He also comes in the rain, and he whispers to the timeless, lapping sea.)

Moonsberry looked towards Paradise Park, and there, suddenly, there she was: a white opalescence moving out from the grass. She had gold crystals around her neck, crystals which fell from man’s knowing about her, and she wore white gloves, though her fingers were free—she had the most beautiful hands anyone had ever seen—and on her ring finger she wore an enormous amethyst. Gold wire was wrapped around the stone and around her skin. It was not difficult for men to know what to give, as the things became a part of her, the jewels and stones and shells. She had an abalone pearl in the shape of a seahorse. She was as a bird but belonged to a species of lily; this was Stella.

Stella had come from a pond in the desert, only a one hour car ride from Las Vegas. She had been the housekeeper for the town’s hotel and their café. She was most beloved by the owner of that town and all the people there. Her air was as mycelium. She had no need to eat or drink because she ate directly from the sun. She drew from the soil.

In the morning you could feel her as a ghost come crawling next to you, her long soft hair smelling of a floral lawn, the rooster crowing already and her silk nightgown flowing in droves in the air around. The space she made was infinite, but could fit perfectly beneath your desk.

Well,                Stella               said JP Moonsberry. [[and the first two little ghosts: bzz bzz, grabbing at the words]]

Moonsberry had given Stella the gifts she most treasured: a little cloth pouch containing seven tiny dolls---a a family, made of little sticks and colored string. She told them her worries and what made her frightened. The dolls stayed with her all night. Of course Moonsberry had also given her the night, had given it to her on a dish with almonds and cranberry. It was Moonsberry that had given her the amethyst in gold wire and with it, he gave her the sphere.

At night Stella prepared her body for ghosts. Ghosts from all places and all times preferred to visit her; once she had had an old man come from the apple country. His body was light as snow, just flurries from the dark sky. She had white foxes, some of them made of paper, some of stone, some of them crumbling to sand or a fine mist, bringing with them the scent of their deep, green woods. She had a messenger once from her pond, and the messenger was a cat and her kittens, as well as a hummingbird. The lilies on that pond opened at night.

Stella was visited by the black widow, the very one she watched at night from her chair on the patio, stars from the spider’s eight feet sticking into Stella’s hair and unfolding upon her.

At this moment, Stella was walking from the park where she had gathered crickets and some thick nettle. (For even though she need not eat but for the sun, she often took dried insects, tied with a loop of string and baked with salt and sesame, and the bitter grass she took for calm.

{{        I can see vaguely the shore of some distant world      }}

Moonsberry's words were a great vessel moving towards the park. The ship was called True Love. The ghosts were spreading off of it, slipping in and out of one another, their sounds of verdant flame and wings.

In Paradise Park, there are growing many mulberry trees but only one which bears fruit. Sparrows and grackles and magpies eat the berries from the branches, and for Stella the tree lays its fruit on the ground.

A house is burning. This is just after a crack had been opened in the mouth of history; Rip was a Cherokee man, robust and healthy, running quick out of the dwelling place, rearing towards the meadow who loosed itself upon the night, so that he bit the ear of this man, so that he bit the ear clean out of the man’s head. When the man screamed it was the sound of a whale. The only one able to hear the sound was Darwin, and out of his eyes fell red and glowing roses, raised from Castilian seed.

Moonsberry was still holding the umbrella over Darwin’s body, his own body become as a stack of plates in the hot sun.

Stella knelt and spread her hands around the falling roses, the flowers coming apart so that the petals were carried by the wind down the sidewalk, through the wire fence and into the city’s flood channel.

The roses did not stop letting go. Stella laughed. JP Moonsberry looked down and a smile pressed across his lips.

Stella could not hear anything he said. The ghosts were in their own separate frenzy, having bound themselves; they were as a spider, the circles spreading out now, beyond the park and the burning house. [[The Indian would be found years later in a cave by himself; men would take a photograph beside his bones.]]

Darwin was steadying himself now.  

Stella, Moonsberry said again, and the ghosts went wild.

Stella heard an eagle in the distance, and she saw herself beside Lemongrass pool. She could see the eucalyptus towering over the field and something small falling past the trees.

The tiger and the rose are white as the sun.

The ghosts erupted in a roar. Darwin opened his eyes and from them came the sign of the bird onto the sidewalk.

Stella saw a swallow and a dove.

Take out the space

The bird appeared to be flying up from the ground, so that the arc between each wing and its tail made the shape of the letter m.

Stella was hungry; Darwin knew this. Inside she was already crawling towards the man who had lost his ear, and the spirit which had come from the hole. It was the basket-maker that materialized in this man’s death, entered into the shape of music, the shape of an owl.

It’s cleaning me, you see, I’m getting clean.

The ghost was on Stella’s hands, wet and clear between her fingers. She could hear the air going around and around and, as she held a petal to her lip, she could feel that which descended upon her; inside her every fold, its shadow moving.

Joseph, someone said.    

The sign of the dove appeared again in the cement, now inside the flood channel, now on the wall of the Burlington Coat Factory. It beat its wings.

Love is not rest. Neither is love a timepiece.

At this moment a man inside the flood channel started becoming a bowl of fruit. First his body became a tangerine, and then an apricot, and finally an orange and an apple, a plum and a strawberry. He became the bowl as well. [[To be at that moment one of the blue figures painted on the wall behind him—to have seen that transformation.]]

The sun was getting near the mountain, and so JP Moonsberry would return home. He closed his umbrella and patted Darwin on the back of the head. He turned and started towards the sun and the red rock. Darwin stayed motionless on the sidewalk, breathing.

IVANPAH

 there are three

Have you got the largest crystal? Called a man in a hat.

I’ve got it! Cried JP Moonsberry. [[He had the crystal in the back of a big rig. The door to the carriage was open and the pink crystal sphere was bulging inside.]]

Are all the children on board? Called the man.

Yes, here we are! Cried the children.

Have the children got all their dogs and pets?

We’ve got them!

How about a lunch box? Have you all brought one?

We have!

Well then! Shouted the man in the hat. Well, let’s be off!

Hurray! Shouted the children.

Bring the crystal! Called the man. Go to the Mulberry tree!

And with that JP Moonsberry began driving slowly across the park. [[Paradise Park marked the eastern edge of the heart of Paradise, and so also the heart of Las Vegas, and so too the heart of America. The citizens of the park are about to secede from the town of Paradise (and so from Las Vegas and so from America). If they do this, the rest will be left with a hole where there was its heart, and no one can be quite sure what this will do, though some are certain that it will give the place a certain buoyancy, so the body might become as a reptile, or a bird.]]

And what about the fabric of space eternal? We think that this cannot exist.

And what about the fabric of time and of timelessness? Well, nothing is certain. And yet, how should there be more than one piece? We think there is only light.

And…

We don’t know. This is the key to our awareness.

Make certain you’ve got your lunchboxes!

Now sing! [[And the children and JP Moonsberry begin to sing: For beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain!

                                For purple mountain majesties, above the fruited plain! ]]

                                America! America! God shed his grace on thee!

                                And crown thy good

                                With brotherhood

                                From sea to—]]

Stop singing! Hollered the man. It’s good, very good! You’ve got it!

Now, what would happen if the crystal rolled out of the big rig? (There is nothing holding it in.) JP Moonsberry drove carefully, watching for places where the earth rose and receded, driving as smooth and steady as he could. It was not easy to drive a big rig this way, on account of it being so large—containing the world’s largest crystal! [[ the stone did concede to this, though whether or not it was contained is a question. And you know sometimes chicken that has been cooked long and well falls right off the bone, even when it isn’t expected, because the night has come for it at last. ]]

Now SING! Yelled the man once again.

Stop singing!

And when the time had come, nobody knew it. The man and the children and JP Moonsberry—everyone looked through the air as if it were an animal, and all of their breathing took the form of a raincloud, and the crystal was blushing in its big round—indeed, it could hardly contain itself—and the children were looking up at the man and the man could see beyond the trees; he was the only one who could, and in the distance he saw something coming down, something big. It was a series of discs, a kind of spiral, like a slinky.

Hey! The man yelled. And time around them actually stopped. Except for the mulberry tree and the world’s biggest slinky, which was coming down slowly, past the treeline.

And so the ball rolled out of the big rig. Carpe Diem! Yelled the ball, and time was still stopped.

In the sky, a soft cloud appeared. It was being played by a violin and a candelabra. The cloud could see the rosa rotunda, rolling fast now towards the conservatory. The cloud put its face out as if to kiss the thing, of course knowing she could not be kissed, because she was a kind of bait; if the cloud touched her, the whole place would go back to being music: an orchestra with a section of trombones and a piano.

So the cloud did not kiss, but he put his face very close, and the cloud’s face and the crystal ball (or was it the space between them?) made the park start up again, the heart shocked as from the entrance to a night circus, the lights in the trees and on the ground as a great glowing nest, and the rotunda—

DARWIN

I feel now that I should write about Las Vegas, since I am going to leave.

For the past five years, I have been living in the heart of Paradise. I had often thought this, and when I looked at a map of Paradise Township I found that it was really the case; if Paradise were a body, this is its heart.

The thing I think is most important to write about is Darwin, a man who lives outside the Sunrise Villas (sometimes) as an enormous bird. He is not there now, and he has not been there for many months. The last I saw him he was in a dentist’s parking lot along Eastern Avenue, just on the other side of Harmon.

I have been watching Darwin for some time, and I have tried to write about him plenty, but it is perhaps a mistake to do so. Anything I write about him will not resemble the fact of him. He is listening to his headset, a sports game, I think basketball, and I think he roots for Kentucky, although I believe he is from Wisconsin.

I think what I want to say about Darwin, is why he means so much to me, why I think he is of course the maestro and somehow holding the strings of this whole place, holding them together in such a way that they make the sound of a mother’s cavalcade.

And too

There are the harmoniums right now in the caves of Mercury, diamond kite-shaped creatures, transparent, eating the song of their planet, eating the vibration, eating their planet’s light.

[[[ we’re a threshold]]

And there is the sound of fruit which Darwin makes, and this is the sound of a body becoming the fruit together: the body becoming an apricot, a cherry, the whole bowl.

The thing is, I like the way he uses space. He sits in an antique chair on the sidewalk, here in the heart of Paradise, with his five or six shopping carts: so that this is a place to sit, under this blue sky.

And there are not many people using the sidewalk, so it isn’t such a problem for him to use the sidewalk for his own things.

And he listens to his headphones.

And I used to ride my bike past him, and we both would wave and say hello to each other, and when we hadn’t seen each other in many months (because he was in the dentist’s parking lot on the other side of Harmon) we met in the office complex lot beside my house, beside the Sunrise Villas 9 and Bigelow Space Mansion, and we waved, red faced, and we both said

Merry Christmas!

Happy New Year

Merry Christmas!

Happy New Year!

And to see him was like a train roaring close in the night, and you are asleep in the little upstairs bedroom of a blue house that smells like the rain, and outside there is a tree as big as the big dipper, and there the train tracks; when the train comes by it shakes the house, and your bed moves back and forth like a bowl of pudding, like some wild eye of the sea.

Will you come back?

In another year! I might come back!

Because, I am going to leave.

[[[In war the dark is on nobody’s side; in love the dark confirms we are together]]]]

—J Berger

I like the way other people here use space, here in the Heart of Paradise.

My friend TK is living in a burnt-out house’s garage, one block from Paradise Park. When I first met him, it was four years ago and he was living in the flood channel. He was living with RIP, Melissa, James the young boy, and an older man whose name I cannot remember. They called their dwelling HELMS DEEP, because the entrance to it was like The Narrows. TK had, and still has, a dog named Spanger, who could hold a skateboard in his teeth, who can put his head into your real name.

There was a kitty refuge that they made when they lived in the garage that is now burnt down—Rip and TK—because the woman who lived in the house really owned two properties, though they were foreclosed, so there was a lot of space, maybe an acre of land in total, and so the cats got their fare share, they had at least half of it, and when the place burned down a lot of those cats died, and one wonders what Spanger the dog can smell now, what he thinks of this whole catastrophe.

I call TK my friend, but I do not act as a friend to him. I say friend in that the world has limits, and the sky only goes so far.

When I think about Darwin, and I think about TK, I think about what it means to survive here, in the heart of paradise, what it means to use this place as a cell to hold.

And I will not say too much about myself.

And you see, there are seven palm trees around me, and they are in the sun. It is the evening and it is August 17, 2014. And I have been told that it is the scorpions that are the keepers of these palms. Up there is a scorpion palm-tree council, and they are counting out our names in groups of three, and they are erasing them from the book.

I have never seen a scorpion. This whole time. Except for the two which are dead in a jar inside my house. They are on the table in the living room; Candy and Al gave the jar to me, with the two dead scorpions in it, because they had been hunting those things, hunting them at night with a special light, and these two were not the Mexican desert kind, they were the Palm Tree kind; they are small.

And my neighbor Nick helped clean my house and he said there were two baby dead scorpions in the ceiling vent in the master bathroom, though I never saw them.

It was Candy and Al that first told me about scorpions, told me the scorpion king would come in the sky and he would be riding on top of a pyramid and all of history would be open between these bricks.

Candy is pink and she floats in the pool.

I want to say

That the sky is so big here

blue paint

The house at the end of the block was skinny and blue and a little crooked like a bone knuckle. The house was old and the paint was peeling. Next to the house there was a large tree with leaves that became lemon yellow in the fall.

Now it was October and the house was watching the ground flutter with yellow. The house owned one man named James Moore and the man owned one dog named Frank. Frank was a chocolate lab. Chocolate cupcakes with berry frosting were his favorite but he also fancied chocolate souffle. Frank owned the blue house.

The blue house looked like chocolate to Frank. Whenever he felt sad he licked the paint on the front porch. Of course, the paint on the front porch was not tasty like cupcakes or soufflé, which was why Frank only licked it when he was sad.


James Moore came home one evening to find Frank licking one of the house’s wooden pillars.


“Frank,” James Moore said, “Frank, what’s wrong, Frank? Why are you licking the house again?”


Frank didn't stop licking. He didn't look at James Moore. His tongue was fat and oblong. It was pink splotched with a few dribbles of applesauce green. He licked the house long and hard. Chocolate blue paint flaked off into his mouth. About half of it Frank swallowed, the other half stuck in thin shards between his teeth.


“I know, I know” James Moore continued, squinting into the sun, “these leaves are all over the ground. I know.”


Frank stopped licking for a moment and looked at his owner. James Moore was very old. He had been born in the house, in the bathtub in the upstairs bathroom in the middle of the night. James Moore planted the tree next to the house when he was a little boy. When James he was a teenager he fell out of the tree, broke both arms and lost his right eye. His parents wanted to cut the tree down, but James Moore threatened to end the world if they cut down his tree, so they left it. When James was a young man, he got married underneath that tree. All three of his children also got married under the tree, and fell out of the tree before they were married. His youngest son broke his butt and the other two each broke fingers and toes. His wife said they ought to cut the tree down, but she didn't want the world to end any more than James Moore’s parents had, so the tree stayed where it was.


“Come on, Frank,” James Moore coaxed, “you get upset about these leaves every year. And every year it’s the same: the weather gets cold and the leaves die and they fall, but then they grow back again.”


It wasn't just that. The leaves indeed upset Frank quite a bit but he also despised yellow. One might say it drove him crazy and everyone would agree that it made him sad, very sad. To Frank, yellow was the saddest of all the colors and to have it blown all over the yard and the street like that, it was almost more than Frank could bare.


James Moore would have raked the leaves. That would have assuaged Frank’s sadness some, but James Moore was too old to rake the leaves and no one in the neighborhood would let their little boy go near the tree to clean up the leaves, because all the families on the block agreed that it had been cursed.


The paint was chunking off in long strips, crumbling all over the deck and all over the dog. James Moore remembered when the paint was new. He had painted it. It could have used a fresh coat, could have for decades, but James Moore was too old to paint. So the paint chipped and Frank licked away at it.


The year was 4048. Earlier this year, the house and the tree had been underwater for one month when the oceans spilled into the neighborhood. The townspeople had acted quickly to drain the water that submerged their home and when it was gone they built higher walls around the town that would keep the waters out. Still, the damage to the paint was irrevocable (lest someone should take a paintbrush to it) and the paint chipped even faster than it would have had it not been in the flood. The fish had sucked and chewed the wood before dying all over the lawn and on the floor inside the house and in the tree. Frank had eaten some of the fish inside and James Moore had thrown the rest on the lawn, where they rotted with the other fish already on the lawn. If the tree’s leaves had been yellow before the flood, they were really yellow after, since its massive roots had surely soaked up all the fish's guts. A few fish skeletons were still wedged between the highest tree branches. The fish had also been yellow.


“I’m sorry,” James Moore said again, “Frank, I’m sorry that I can’t rake up these yellow leaves.” Frank stopped licking and gave his owner a look so full of sympathy and care that it would make the oldest man in the neighborhood young again. (Could have, but did not, as James Moore was indeed the oldest man--oldest person--in the neighborhood and, although he felt completely at ease while the dog gazed at him, he was certainly not any younger. In fact, he was eight seconds older.


It didn’t matter to Frank that James Moore couldn’t rake up the leaves. It didn’t matter that there was yellow everywhere which made him feel heavy and sad. It didn’t matter because, just moments before, Frank’s fat, oblong tongue had grazed something other than wood and paint.


It was a morsel. It was a square with rounded edges, a round sort of square. The morsel was made of chocolate. So Frank bit. It was a delicious soft milk chocolate with one layer of semi-sweet.


He chewed and everything disappeared. The houses, the whole neighborhood, the river and the mountains, the clouds and the trees – everything was gone. Frank and James Moore were alone. They were alone with the house and their tree, the last tree on earth.


“Frank,” said James Moore, “Frank, you’ve ended the world.” James Moore had forgotten that the end of the world morsel was underneath the paint inside the center pillar.


Frank couldn’t believe his eyes. All that remained was the sky. The sky was the bluest blue and it was spilling everywhere. The sky was all over the ground and in the air. Frank blinked. The yellow leaves were gone. All the yellow everywhere was gone, except for the sun. The world that remained after the end of the world was completely blue. This made Frank happy. It was the happiest he had ever been. He stopped licking the paint and licked his owner, James Moore.


James Moore pet his dog and gazed at the new blue. It was beautiful indeed. Soon they had both drifted into sleep. In an hour they would wake up and go to the tree, settle into the branches and prepare for the business of cleaning up all the blue. It would be long but enjoyable work.

refill

My finger counts the keys from left to right. I touch the little toilet paper container key and the storage room key and then the square front door key. The keys are on a chord around my neck. The chord itches my skin sometimes but the boss says I’d lose them otherwise and he’s right. The clock shows two minutes until I have to open the bookstore. Several women and their kids are waiting in the parking lot outside. I do my best not to make eye contact.

Mark is leaning against the front counter next to the register, flipping through a magazine. He looks up at me. “One of the fish is dead.”

“One of the fish?”

“Yea. A silver one, a big one. The others are eating him.” He turns the page and then tosses the magazine on the counter.

“Eating him?”

“Yea.”

I imagine a hollow fish corpse bobbing at the surface of the tank, its old companions-turned-barracudas gnawing what is left of its tail and mouthing its remaining eyeball. “Do fish eat each other?”

“Yea.” Mark puts his hand down the back of his shirt, scratches, examines his fingernails, scratches again.

“How long has it been dead?”

Mark holds his hand close to his face, slides his thumbnail back and forth underneath the tip of his middle nail. “I don’t know.” His thumb moves on to the ring nail. It looks like his fingernails are mating.

I want to go look at the dead fish right now but it’s time to unlock the door. The women outside are eyeing me and peering through the glass at the clock on the wall behind the register. It’s fucking Saturday. Two little kids are putting their hands all over the window I just cleaned, smearing cloudy streaks of spit and skin oil. I walk, lean down, twist the key in the lock, smile at the women outside as I hold the door open.

Three middle aged women and one young-middle aged woman walk in. There are two little red haired girls in matching plaid dresses which I think is corny, two small boys walking behind the girls. The young-middle aged woman is pushing a stroller with a fat baby-kid wearing yellow Velcro shoes. There is another boy walking behind them – mop brown hair, hands in his jean pockets. I see him in here a lot; last week he started reading The Giver. He’s wearing a red shirt that says “I put Ketchup on my ketchup”.

“Hey, I like your shirt.”

The kid smiles and his front teeth bulge out of his mouth like they want to get out of there. “Thanks.”

One of the middle-aged women clears her throat. “Excuse me. There isn’t any music on.” 

“I haven’t turned it on yet.” I hate Saturdays.

“Well are you going to?” 

“Yes. I am going to.” She says okay, turns and keeps moving with the rest of the group towards the kid’s section. I walk to the café in the corner of the room.

“Hey Cathy.” Cathy is wearing an orange dress and her usual goofball smile that I think is wonderful.

“Hey Dennis.” She turns around and plucks a paper cup off the stack and holds it under the coffee spicket, pulls the lever so brown pours into the cup. She sets the cup of coffee in front of me and leans over the counter. I feel my heart beat a little faster.

“You see the dead fish yet?” She lowers her voice like the fish is a scandal. She smells like Chamomile tea.

“Not yet. I’m on my way over there though.”

“You should go see it, before it gets taken out.” Cathy smiles again. Her smile makes me think of cake and mimosas. I see Mark behind the espresso bar in a cloud of steam. He nods.

I walk to the condiment table, dump an inch of coffee into the trash can, pour three seconds of cream and four seconds of white sugar into my cup, fasten on a plastic lid. I tell Cathy and Mark that I’ll see them in a bit.

I go to the back room, kneel in front of my backpack, pour two seconds of Jameson from a metal flask into the cup. 

I need to paint more. I haven’t painted anything in weeks. I haven’t finished a painting in months. I stir the coffee with my finger and think that it would be great to paint with liquid pennies, brand new shiny pennies melted and globbed onto the canvas. If there were truly liquid pennies, I'd have something to work with.

I snap the lid back onto the cup, flip the music switch up on my way out of the back room. I walk across the store, around the corner past the photography section and the cooking section. My shoes look like dolphins moving against the carpet. The carpet is multicolored and formed into little nodules. It looks like what you see when you first close your eyes, like Fruity Pebbles and Coco Puffs cereal crumbled together.

The fish tank. I stop, put my fingers on the glass. The tank is a rectangle, two and a half feet wide and about six feet long. I imagine someone on the other side of the tank, looking through the water at my fingers pressed flat against the glass, the circle ridges red and obvious. The young middle-aged mother walks over to me. I see the kids' section behind her and about seven moms sitting there. There are kids rolling on the carpet and pulling books off the shelves. There are kids eating muffins and scones and getting crumbs all over the place, stepping on the pieces of pastry and smashing them into the carpet. Most of the mothers are talking and laughing. The woman is right next to me now. She has huge round eyes, dark angry eyes, outlined in brown makeup.

“Excuse me.”

“Yes? Can I help you find something?”

“No. There is a dead fish in that tank.”

“Yes.” I take a sip of my coffee. I sip it carefully. It is hot but not hot enough to burn my lips. I turn my head to look at the tank. The fish must be on the other side behind the plants.

The woman’s voice gets louder, heavier. “Are you going to take it out?”

“I have to call the fish guys. They take care of the tank.”

“Well it is scaring the children. You’ve got to have it removed right away. It’s horrible.”

“Alright, I am going to get it taken care of right now.” I move away before looking for the fish. I sip my coffee, walk away from the tank and the mother, walk past the cooking and the photography sections. I see a man walking towards the front counter so I go over there. I stand at the register and sip my coffee. The man’s hands are very large and there is a lot of black wiry hair on his knuckles. I wonder why he is buying hard cover. I tell him the book is better than the movie and the movie wasn’t bad. He forces a quick smile which makes his nostrils flare.

“$24.75” I tell him. I swipe his card, hand him the receipt to sign. I see the boss walk in out of the corner of my eye. The man wants a bag. I put the book into a plastic bag. “Thank you, sir. Have a nice day.” Silence. The man and the boss pass each other.

“Hey boss.” I put the signed receipt into the register and shut the drawer.

“Hi Dennis.”

“There’s a dead fish.”

“A dead fish?” 

“Yea. I haven’t seen it yet.”

“Well did you call the fish company?” he asks.

“Not yet.”

“Will you call the fish company and tell them to come get it out?”

“Yea. I’ll do it now.”

I walk towards the back room. I see Mark outside smoking a cigarette. I would like to join him. I go in and sit at the desk and find the fish number on the bulletin board. I dial it. I take a sip of my coffee.

“Hi. We’ve got a dead fish.”

“What is your location?” I tell the guy and he says he’ll send someone this afternoon. I tell the boss and the boss says that is great. Then he asks if I can stay late tonight. I do not want to stay late tonight but I tell him sure.

I walk over to the fish tank. I go quickly. I want to see this fish. Near the kids' section I look down at my blue feet and there is crap all over the carpet. I don’t care about it now but I know I will have to vacuum and scrape it out later. Four years of college to clean lemon poppy-seed muffin and maple scone frosting off the floor. I take a sip of my coffee. It has cooled down a lot.

The tank. I walk the length of it slowly. I see the fish in the bottom left corner. It’s upside down. Eight inches long, four high, a dull silver blue color, raw pink where some of its skin has flaked off. The water pushes the fish up and down which makes it seem like it is still alive. I get as close as I can. I feel the glass tank cool and smooth on my forehead, the only thing separating me from the fish. I imagine the glass bursting and water exploding from the tank, all of the fish flapping about on the floor, smacking their rubber bodies against each other, suffocating on air and carpet fibers. All except for the dead fish, which would lay motionless like a paperweight wherever it landed.

The water pushes the fish closer to me. Popping out from the side of its face is a bulbous yellow sphere, modest, totally indifferent: the eye. I step back from the glass to sip my coffee, more than a sip this time, a swig. One of the mothers is approaching me. The mother is fat and egg shaped but moves fast. A dark brown algae sucker fish moves upon the dead fish and starts opening and closing his lips over the gills. It is being eaten. The mother has huge fluffy hair that bounces as she walks. I can feel her behind me.

“Excuse me.” Another swig. My cup is getting light. The fish is staring at me. A child screams. Screams and starts to cry, starts to ball. It’s an awful howling cry.

I turn around. One of the little girls in plaid is on the ground next to the corner of a book shelf. The mother has stopped walking towards me and is hurrying to the child’s side. I turn back to the fish tank. Take the last drink of coffee, the sweetest sip in the cup, thick with all the sugar that sunk to the bottom.

The ketchup boy walks over to the tank. He’s wearing headphones. He takes them out, says hello. I say hi and he puts his headphones back in. We stand and gaze at the dead fish, bobbing along ever so slowly along the side of the tank. It looks kind of content, like an old man sitting alone on a beach, brown and wrinkled, sweating in his lawn chair. The child is screaming and screaming but the noise is getting farther away. The algae sucker leaves the fish and sucks on the glass in front of us. One of the other silver fish swims over to the dead one, nudges it, looks at its eyeball and keeps swimming.