Several tombs and headstones in Market Park Graveyard are covered in thick blankets of mold and mossy growths. Upkeep of the grounds is limited to bi-monthly half-visits by a team of maids who are often much too exhausted after a stressful workweek with their daily City Hall account to bother much with Market Park’s prevalent issues with disrepair and subsequent corrosion. ”As if anyone truly cares,” one of the maids once said to me over drinks in her car in the City Hall parking lot. “We still get paid and it doesn’t matter. I mean, we still at least show up, but you know, I bet we could only just claim that we went, and report that we cleaned up or whatever, but not actually even go, and we’d still probably receive our paychecks on time. With no questions asked. Seriously, no one fucking goes there anymore. Do you? I certainly don’t. No one does. Not in half a century, is my guess.”
Opens next month…
In the search and subsequent exposure of the infected, lead pencils were sharpened to razorpoints and distributed to available hands. Rubber gloves were administered to all in attendance, though only the nurses themselves would be inspecting for evidence of lice infestation. It was a show, to be sure. The white rubber gloves made for a performance. Grimaces or blank stares were employed. I want you troubled, if not just plain hurt, these stares implied. The nurses, gloved up and pricking their sleek tongues with sharpened pencils, they hovered greedily over the frightened parade, murmuring slight prayers of infection to fulfill legitimate desires of progress and promotion. I sat down in the chair, queasily off balance, but once making eye contact with the nurse I felt both enamored and proprietary … I considered it my chair, and her my nurse. My head screamed, my body shook. Nothing in my life had meant much until today. I stared at the nurse as if she were a provocative scrawl on the side of a traincar presently passing through a populated thoroughfare in front of dozens, or perhaps wholly several dozens. Who knows what scenes she’s attended to, I wondered. What horrors she has witnessed? Just then my old enemy ‘sleep’ wandered in to my life yet again, and I blacked out under the nurse’s pencil. Automaton and regretful enthusiast. I stretched, yawned, though this was pure show, to cover the more serious attributes of my inability to focus on not fainting. It was my great interest that needed to be shielded, and protecting my interests was key. So I threw off the staff and the other gloved but wholly unnecessary staffhands, all with a glare. I grew so stiff with anger that I almost forgot to pay attention to the nurse as the first prick of that sharpened pencil lead bit into my scalp. Maggot to butterfly, I said to myself. Transcend. Molt.
We sat together in the small, yellow circle of a streetlight’s gaze, with our hands on each others’ knees. Probably this dream was the best one all month.
Follow things downhill.
Won’t, wolf.
When you pretend, on the telephone, I like that better than when you just disappear completely.
Bright violence.
After grandfather passed away the house fell into an almost immediate disrepair. Our grandmother took to resentment and bitter avoidance. She would refuse, for instance, to come out of the piano room when others were in the house, and soon that room filled with the rancor of the dying. Upon entering the house, it looked and felt as if a grave had been upturned and left open. Her spoiled eyes peered out from a sunken face, squeezed tight with rage, loss, and something of fear. When I helped her to remove her sweater this morning, she winced and smacked my hands away, growling like a frightened puppy. I took my leave of the house and drove to my job at the wharf, remembering fondly how cute my grandmother and grandfather were together when I was younger, and how much they loved each other; nothing ever seemed to hold them down. That’s the way a boy should have to remember his grandparents. Not like this, with a house unfit to bury the dead in.
On a weekday the church pews are empty until the afternoon. The chapel is silent, and the vestibule looks haunted. I can feel the room still echoing with ghost motions from distant Christmas services, funeral gatherings and baptisms. Alone on a Monday morning, with no sound but the creaking of the rafters and a vacuum drone seeping in from some unseen pocket of the House of God, I cross my legs uncomfortably in the front pew, back and forth from right leg to left, lacing and unlacing my hands, certain that unnecessary worry and phantom dilemma are going to undo me one of these days.