No Exit
In the dark, the bully becomes something else. Primeval. Savage. Thirsty for something unquenchable. The snapping turtle doesn’t know why he snaps.
A dark space with running figures. Black tar paper, browning at the edges. Void returning to earth. Tiny yellow feathers appear white in the gloom. The sky outside is surmised to still be there, blue, more than theory, less than fact, it is an assumption, but one netherless. Nether. Ether. Neither, nor less than.
Chicken guano petrified on the sagging planks. Wood so rotten that it doesn’t squeak, it whimpers sufferingly. Or was that the boy?
The Assumption, what was it? Has it passed, or is it yet to come? Yesterday and tomorrow are only suggestions, so it must be happening now, right now. This very minute.
Minute feathers. Muffled sounds. Dark shadows. Slivers of light. Smell of ancient effulgence…? No, effluence. Sewage. Otherness. What are the figures? Why do they run? There is now way out, there is no way in. Trapped. Still. No escape. Forever and a day are the same. This day. That time. The moment, now.
The projected sounds don’t match the projected images, yet they are married. Shadows of each other. Act I or Prologue? Foreshadow. A reverse reflection. Forward to the past.
Overture.
Muted mewling, a literary pule. Heavy exhaled breath. The figures are cardboard cut-outs, black as the space behind them. Faint faces, imagined snarls, feigned fright, an ancient ritual sacrifice. Circumcision of the heart. Smegma. The things not talked about. These words.
Jack knife. Opens. Closes. Opens again. Rusted nickel folding out from genuine imitation tortoise shell.
In his dream—the boy’s—it was a dinosaur. On the street, it was a snapping turtle. A very large, gray, humped back, leathered neck, black clawed, monster thing, larger than the tiny pond it emerges from. How can that be? It came from the past.
In the dark, the bully becomes something else. Primeval. Savage. Thirsty for something unquenchable. The snapping turtle doesn’t know why he snaps.
Look away.
A roll of white paper covered with colorful, lickable dots. Bite them off with teeth. Paper stuck to the flat part. Eat it all. His own jack knife bought at the hardware store, from a glass case. Green paisley shirt. Buck teeth. Cow lick. Dippety Doo.
As an adult he went back. To the site. To the place that is gone. Forgotten or replaced? Erased with the houses of strangers. That photograph from the previous paragraph.
Not Yet. That’s the title of an art exhibit featuring oversized metal sculptures of imaginary beasts. Chimeras from someone else's dreams. Not Yet. Stuck at the edge of a precipice. Not Yet. He’s not ready. Not yet.
It was always much simpler than these words make it. It was just
dark, space, muffled running, a muted shout, the blade, the looming figure, a flash of white cotton, then
blackness.
Like the noir mystery, with a private... eye.
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