Things happen but nothing is apparent.

A dry, dusty, day and yet there was dampness in the form of mud. The day itself wasn’t dry and dusty, that’s a slight of hand. If it wasn’t a slight of hand, days would be astonishing things. Any day that one might come to this spot, one would see an expanse of dirt. Dirt in the absolute dirt form, that is: dry. Wind frequently pebbled the rest of the landscape with the ground’s selfsame cousins. This scene repeatedly took place in the gentle way of the natural. Often the natural precludes what is gentle for a person, no one calls a catastrophe “gentle.”

A moment ago we had mud. The mention of “mud” follows us until we think of it gently.

The mud lay in a small, round, indentation to the land. This round area habitually collected moisture that would otherwise have made for a less-dry landscape. It was natural that this lower area should have some mud, almost a pond. Where the indentation’s side sloped upward, one could speak of small hills, and imprisoned by loose cattails: the reminiscence of a radio-haired boy. The boy came from somewhere before we saw. One shoe overly friendly with the stagnant pond, he thrushed. Rushing to leave, while low and sharp behind him a vision of terrible ecstasy moved from his left. These were the thrushing, rushing, motivators. Since this is simply his introduction that topic will be left to dangle from its own cut suspension.

Now in hand with Gina, Benk (no longer the reminiscence) walked toward his father’s house. His sense of the midday time conveyed several obvious notions. First, and all we’ll consider directly, is that his father was not home. Weekdays, as they teetered on their fulcrums, presented cordial work meanings. That is the sense that Benk’s father was at work. At seventeen, Benk had eyes for more colorful projects. He’d been dating Gina for nearly a year. He usually felt better with her than without. Gina, slight while thick brown ropes plunged from her head down her back. Along her back, these ropes retraced their steps to earlier years when they were less anxious. The ropes in fact only became ropes when every morning, Gina routinely gathered them to make them so. When she first started the routine it took a long time to extend just one of the ropes. It wasn’t routine then.

Autumn afternoons are different then their summer counterparts. In Autumn there is an implied bronze to the light. During the summer, the afternoon light provokes a latex, golden, sheen. Summer afternoons stretch around a body, filling its pores with special suffocation. Sometimes the body doesn’t care. Sometimes the body revels in reptile hours. However, bronze normally causes expectations more pleasant than the hints of summer light. A difference in this came today as Benk and Gina approached the house. The fact of this difference was itself redundant; like lousy lousiness everywhere. Against the front door leaned a well-seasoned stranger lacking smiles. His wide-brimmed, straw hat dipped low over his brow. Keeping still, he swung his eyes toward Benk and Gina. As they came near him he grinned wide and with distinguished gravity, heaved a handgun from his belt. Bronze nuances descended on the trio with unexpected effects. It’s clear this situation didn’t coincide with the aura of autumn pleasantries, sometimes expectations are similar to the weather. One can’t always predict the fluctuations of expectation and when those fluctuations are unexpected, things happen. The stranger, moving the patterns of motion from eyes to tongue, let swing an imperative to open the door. Benk cooperated.

Gentleman second: Gina crossed the threshold first and then Benk crossed. As the time signature of wit demands, so moved Benk’s mind. The moment he’d positioned himself within the house, Benk slammed the door shut. He bolted the lock and arteries pumping luck, he shut out stranger and gun alike. Inside faded from relief and outside simply relieved itself. Menacing the room, a doctor stood perspiring. Benk knew the doctor. The doctor delivered and tended Benk’s problems even before Benk was aware. It perplexed Benk how the doctor had entered the house. It might have been more important to know why the doctor was inside but a lot of things were on Benk’s mind. The doctor wore his traditional coat, Benk recognized the whiteness. The doctor waved a telephone receiver limply in his right hand. Noting a call had come to useless end, Benk assumed the doctor would put the receiver back in place and explain himself. Maintaining his grin, the doctor instead dialed a new number. Each number pressed on the phone lisped the way fingers, fat from plunging the depths of unhealthy sport and commerce would lisp (given that they had the ability of speech). Thus pressed the doctor’s fingers and his mouth followed in expected suit.

“Yes, mm, hello, mm.” the doctor’s lips bubbled aggressive insinuation.

“You know who this is, mm? Mm, you do know! I’m calling about the money, you will pay. Yes.”
With this speech Benk and Gina had crawled underneath a table in the kitchen as if its innocence would provide some sort of shelter.

The doctor spoke of his business, whatever it was, very comfortably. Underneath the table Benk’s mental canvas flattened, coagulated, regurgitated itself in some exercise only a person free-falling under the face of earth could understand. Had Benk the means or capability of clinically analyzing the ambiance of his locale, he’d see the picture just as he felt: enveloping air appearing no different than a puddle of oil and vinegar mixture. Gina felt this too. Women absorb ambiance less guessed then with direct apprehension. Ambiance like thieves along a shadowed fire-escape. Ambiance acts on people differently. Motives change, moments elapse, people respond, and from variance in these things ambiance plays. This idea is not built as a conviction that Benk (or any man necessarily) could only guess what happens around him. I merely point out that Benk found more of an enemy in his confusion and vague recollection, then he did with the Doctor. Likewise, Gina knew with certainty that there was a definite problem with the doctor’s presence. The Doctor’s speech was startling in that it lured moments on hands and knees from early places in Benk’s memory. Somehow related, these moments led to the present day situation and definitely included Benk’s father. The man Benk hadn’t seen in a number of days and may even have forgotten his face in the same increment. Then an impression of dirt and cattail doppelgangers, time flashes.

Away from the house now. Here I will interject that leaving the house was a simple matter and details are unimportant. Previous arrangements and great care to preserve certain situations allowed for this. I present this fact only to keep one from anticipating worries. At hand: dusk, while hand-in-hand, walked Benk and Gina. Ahead a grove of trees had little to offer in the way of human company. It was a good place to be. Benk began recalling what the doctor had lured from him. The pond in his childhood and the ecstasy he didn’t understand. Ecstasy he still wouldn’t understand. It was after all these years not something to be taken back. It was murder. This moment like any other, had no individual identity. The trick with moments is that they’re all different without being distinguishable. This moment mimicked the past moment if it did nothing less then repeat what occurred at the past moment. Benk, in quartz clarity, recalled a crocodile chasing him. Something dripped from its rare mouth. The grin-crocodilian on its head, seen as recurrent posture in both the stranger and doctor. This scene made its education, Crocodilia Ecstatica, on the Benk boy’s brain. Look closer Benk, the dripping, isn’t that more then a little rare? Drips which fell in the form of content-ridden, vine-fruit from the vein. Benk began his scene with the seizure of the ecstasy foreign to children, murder; and just as a child thinks, the scene rapidly fractured into forms exponentially unlike their original. That is the simple end result of what Benk witnessed. Standing just behind the cattails was a young man, healthy in body but nothing else. Like a blacksmith focused on the bounds of his hammer, this man put a knife to another - perhaps a woman. The man didn’t concern himself with the mess. To Benk, this was clear only now. The present moment shed light on a past moment, proving there may be some utility to the dilemma of different moments. Notably, in the dilemma, these moments give different perspectives on one another. Benk and Gina continued walking while he persuaded her of the crocodile. He colored with reptile teeth for paintbrushes. Shades of ancient film in the process of antiquating and static spats surfaced from their unique labors. In pregnant atmospheres these labors expand from single points, points cleared from clinical eyes. Lazy eyes get no further. A vision adapted to finding such points is very aware that it won’t ever see them in actuality. I spoke earlier however, on the better ability of women to perceive these things.

Gina was gradually readying herself to ask questions. She needed to sort through the dead man’s tale Benk had offered, scale by un-sorted scale.

“Benk, those men we saw at your father’s house. Do you think they know about the murder?”

In response, “I can’t remember them at the pond. There were a lot of cattails though, maybe they hid.”

“But Benk, surely you must connect them, you started to remember all of this after seeing those men. It’s for the best, to natural states.”

Leeched in the naked grove, Benk saw cattails in his memory. Each with its round top end. They gently dipped into the engulfing air. In small side to side movements the cattails presented themselves without excess. A collection of tactful restraint in motion is not something initially expected from their like. In his mind Benk followed each cattail along its body, he finished every time with the plant’s base at mud. They were porous and the pores after being watched so closely, began rearranging themselves. The more intensely Benk examined these plants, the more he could see nothing but the miniscule holes. Holes seemed to compose entire cattail bodies. He witnessed the first hand velocity of life for something to which he’d never testify. Not for lack of enmity but because honor touched the back of his knees with mercy. There was fear somewhere in this as well. He knew the sound of the Stranger’s laugh. He knew the secrets of the Doctor’s operation. He could differentiate neither the laugh or the secrets from one another. Meanwhile at home, the doctor still spoke to Benk’s father.

Benk recalled a length of memory like a cattail. Along the road, before the point where the pond lay, he had traveled in a car. In the company of his father and a woman whose middle clocked the number of months before humanity. “Didn’t you know her?” Gina asked, but Benk added pressure to his grip and she waited for his pulse.

The car had stopped like passing animals that don’t know better. Benk’s father turned his head to grin at the woman and she left the car in a rush, running. Across the road a small hill rose where the boy, Benk, could see tufts of freeform dirt clouds roll away from the woman’s panic. From the opposing direction of his father’s car, a different vehicle carved the sort of stop skid that happens with a driver’s lack of care. A man bounded from the other car toward the woman. Benk’s father followed just as the others disappeared over the hill. Not wanting to be left by himself he chased after his father and the woman. Then the cattails, the mud, the pond, the crocodile. Benk in the doctor’s grip, under sight of a black bag, a mess, every terror, every ecstasy leaving congruency to evaporate with anaesthesia.

Inside, Benk’s curtains tore and whipped across Gina. Benk and Gina left the grove. Their walk carried them to one bench, the only one to pock this stagnant road. They sat, quietly while absorbing the river on the other side of the road. A demeanor similar to Benk’s, casually walked past. The demeanor didn’t pretend to notice or avoid the couple. Its gait fell under the strict scrutiny shame instructs. The demeanor fathered itself a story without speaking. The hair on its head amplified like the reception of its son. From the distance craned by the noticed gait, Benk and Gina watched the road. The road was an ambiance covered by fall leaves. Dead leaves pave when the wind points.

This was published here on Monday, 13 July 1998 at 23:47 and is filed under Prose. You may leave a response, or trackback from your own site.