The Rain on Hollow’s Eave
Ever since my uncle dropped dead, there has been a gaping hole in the family, flapping as a collapsed lung in a staircase, a hole like paper windows in Japan, post-rain, thrashing. The hole is dense like Nietzschean philosophy, drenched in rhetoric, saccharine, ever-expanding blackness pregnant with itself. I lean on the ledge of oblivion screaming his name into a megaphone. I scream his name so often that it has been forgotten. The syllables bleed together like inkblots fucking. Sometimes the echoes take centuries to ricochet, a miscommunication between open palms, palisades and crag of an immeasurable canyon. I scream his name often enough that I can’t decipher the difference between screaming his name and silence—standard procedure like I love you over the telephone. They have ordered me on look-out like a tape recorder that plays the sound of a dog barking. At times I scream his name and I think it’s him screaming back. These years we’ve been kindred skeletons on opposing shorelines, screaming over shipwrecks, airplanes ablaze, those screams caught on the spires of chandeliers, silenced by the shhh of the ocean’s whipsaw currents—smoke signals to the moon. There’s a masquerade ball raging on a bed of rippling glass. According to the manual I’ve been given, should my uncle show his face, an iota of skin on the wall of the void, I’m to do this, this, and this. I’m to say that, that, and that, as though I were a fireman coaxing a severed lover from the edge of a parking structure. You spend more time dying than living, I say, these being the first of my words that I have understood in some odd years. In ten thousand seasons we’ll have successfully compressed the ocean like a pearl as to mend the shores. I hope the pieces fit. The living and the dead will interact on an equal mind-body ratio, like ventriloquist’s dolls around a dinner table discussing politics. I’m to do this, this, and this. Yadda yadda. I compose a mannequin on hollow’s eave out of TV sets and flimsy pillows.
We share the same eyes, static. Sleep. Awake. The pillows, gutted. Feathers tumble into the void like helicopter leaves, as a thousand grains of static, Technicolor, antennae like arms, the void expanding. Home. Holes in the paper windows, guns that shoot rain. Couches against the doors, jars of change rumbling. He shows his face, an ever-expanding blackness.