Your Fictional Space 1

Nightly

You wake to rain like a rhinocrash over a glass pane savannah, all river and dust, and the trees outside whistle and howl like great hairy creatures-- dancing in the discomoon night. Maybe this is the apocalypse, you, squinting so your eyes now full of crust whir like camera lenses, hope as you pull your knees far as they'll draw to your chest and twirl your feet to gather loosened covers. Loverless arms, fetal, Tyrannosaurus, cramp from an awkward hour or more's unsleep so you stretch them away, realizing only now how your fingers have tangled the sheets beneath your chin, dreamkneading like with dough or a knot worked out of the shoulder of an invisible someone. You clutch at a pillow that's fallen and pull it in to be surrogate. This is the sleeping hour and you are a stranger here, pulled from a life next to someone. If you try, you can run your fingers through that someone's hair and breathe in to try and name the shampoo it last used or the ocean into which it last plunged, laughing. You invent a color for it, and a texture. American Black Walnut, and the silkslip of a memory passing.

In the quiet desk lamplight, all ten fourth-grade fingers work the ragged spiral notebook edge from the letter, careful so only the perferated paper tears. And in deliberate print you skip lines so your reader can make no mistakes. You steal an envelope from your father's office, journeying the midnight halls in sockshuffles-- the ancient creaking panels unaroused by your weight. You need to stand on a chair to reach and stretch your naked arms up, balanced half by your toes on a quivering armrest and half by your hands in the stationary box. When you fold the letter you run first one than three fingers to crease it, pausing a wink's time to feel if it will shiver. And when its tucked in a textbook and backpacked for the following morning, its reader's name looped across the front, you wonder if you'll be the man tomorrow who'll leave it to be found. Or if you'll find it some time later, crumpled and ashamed, go momentarily blank and whisper

"Impossible."

You surprise yourself by speaking. The rhinos and creatures rage on but there are ghosts in the room. Squeezing your lover close, you hum against the panerattle and wind, braving your hands along an imaginary skin and feeling it rise and fall with life. You invent a name for the neck you lie your face against, wondering it crass to risk your mouth an invader of the thousand little neckhairs but imagining them twitching at your kiss, the shudder and sigh of reception.

Under a blanket not for warmth so much as sanctuary you drag the pad side of your toes along the ankles you're entwined with. The ocean breathes in and the seagull sky calls in stereo, birds catching thermal rushes up and squawking with delight before swooping low to pick dinner from the sand. All a rush of feather and beak, naturally survivalist-- and your hands are not slaves any longer. They draw runes on sandysmooth hipbones with imagination of their own, no art beyond the memory that yes, you were here and ah, how could I ever forget it? The ocean breathes out and someone stirs, turning toward you and drawing the blanket round both your shoulders with the gentle firmness of a wheel-work potter and you form to the touch. Grace, it speaks and the voice is at once the oceanflow nearing, is easy. Water laps over your toes and the whole beach slides microscopically inward, sinking-- as it does-- to the middle. And you wonder, chancing a glance to the north where the rhinoceros wait, if anything is ever a dream.

Green world

Mark brings up a great point. If semester had ended a week ago, like I really really wanted it to, things would be awfully different. It's with a certain bitterness that I pack my odds and ends into boxes. A haphazard impatience like I'd be consciously anywhere but here because of what it means.

There's a lot to consider as the mornings become bearable and blue, as we pass on into summer and everything is soft and warm and strangely foreign.