Photo by Mathew MacQuarrie on Unsplash
So Steve, Esteban, Tebi (what did the name matter?) he (though felt more like an it, or some disembodied pronoun-less abstraction) wrote the words on a yellow paper. But they were the wrong words, so he erased them, with a thick pink eraser. Then, he could still see the marks on the page, so he crumpled it and tossed it in the kitchen sink, which had served as a trash can for quite some time now. No one lived there anymore, just him and the humid house, the creaking wood, the wet rot smell, … and the wrong words. First time in ages that there was no one to listen.
He went to the porch, lit a cig, and tried to think of the right words. But all he could think about were the erased words jumbled in the sink, surrounded by empty beer cans and a blanket of mold. Three drags latter he got up and fetched the crumpled paper. So then he went back to the porch and holding it by a corner, lit it on fire. One of the neighborhood kids played on his skateboard on the street. So that kid knows nothing about erasing and burning. Kid won’t even notice. So he held on to the paper until the fingers started to burn. Then he laid the blackened remains in the ashtray. Then he lit the tiny Achilles heel of the paper and watched the last bit turn to dust.
He looked at the kid, doing tricks, oblivious. He felt ritualistic so he lifted the ashtray over the head like a priest with an offering – Tebi’s Catholic mass memories buried somewhere in there. So he said something Latin sounding. Then said it again, loud, and stood there like part of the house. Then, kid looked over. And he emptied the ashtray into his mouth, all of it, and licked it clean. The ashes filled the mouth and dried it out. Then he washed it all down with some leftover porch beer and sat down, lit another cig and tried to think of the right words. The kid made the finger-in-mouth gross sign, and went back to trying some trick on his board.
It was almost distracting, but still, all he could think about was the erased wrong words, ashes now in the belly. Except now he could no longer remember the actual wrong words. Not even the general meaning of what they were. The head hurt. The stomach didn’t feel good either, like there were burning embers in there. So maybe some of the cigarette butts were not completely extinguished. He finished the cig and the body went to get another beer to help settle the gut. But all he had to drink were barium sulfate suspension smoothies. That’s what you drink before you get a CT scan. They call it a contrast as it allows the x-ray machine to see the inside parts. So those were words from the clinic. Drink 40 ounces of water the night before, don’t eat anything after midnight and in the morning, drink one smoothie at 7, another one at 8:30 and another one at 9:15. So the idea is to fill the body until it is a huge balloon full of barium sulfate, water, and in this case erased and burnt wrong words. It wasn’t the first scan. The first one didn’t show what they were looking for. Neither did the second one. The third one wouldn’t either, of course.
So the stomach was feeling worse. In its mind the ashes lit themselves back on fire and were burning their way out. The damn words would not go gentle into the silent night. Esteban had read some English poetry. Stop it! it said no one.
So he figured, make the body throw up, but it couldn’t. No matter how far the finger went down the throat. It hadn’t eaten anything in two days, not because of doctor’s orders, but because the fridge was empty and last money he spent on cigs and beer. So fuck it, it drank one of the smoothies. So it chugged it and it was disgusting in a familiar way. Almost couldn’t hold the stuff in long enough to make it to the porch. So it vomited on the gray wooden floor. So it sat back, feeling a little light headed. The smell of vomit wafting into the hot air, seeping into the sweat. So it lit a cig. It did feel better with the ashes out. So now they were all over the wooden porch mixed with the barium sulfate and other stomach fluids. Then he noticed the kid on the street looking over, looking over again, this time with an exaggerated pretend surprise expression. Mocking.
It wished the kid was like the other kids. It wished the kid would scream afraid and call for mommy who would then tell him not to stare, don’t even look, pretend it’s not there, the foul body, don’t linger there, cover your ears so you don’t hear the sick sounds, the sick sounds like an animal trying remember words, some wrong words, singed, into the lining of its gut.
So it went inside and turned on the little trash radio. The song sounded like something Steve might recognize, so it turned it all the way up until it was just disjointed crackles and pops, and went outside to growl along.
So back on the porch the barium vomit was already drying up and looking like sun-damaged paint on the hood of a car. That was fast, he thought, like a last thought. Then sat down and lit a cig. So then tried to think of words, any at all.
Nothing. As hard as it tried all it thunk was erased, all it thunk was wrong, burnt and vomited. Distorted. All it thunk… it couldn’t. Some useless time. So the human doctor said the name of the sickness: a fire of unknown origin, or some words like that, but it still couldn’t think the erased words. Later, in some sort of time, they sent it home from the hospital saying there was nothing else they could do. And still no words. Words weren’t much to begin with. And now they were gone.
Finally, in the hard bed in the rotten empty house, all it thunk about were erased words. The fool! They floated in front of the eyes, no no, inside the eyes, erased, burnt, vomited, unreadable, meaningless. It could barely walk, but it dragged the body to the porch where the barium vomit was still caked on the floor. It dropped to the ground, landing hard on the bony knees, and not able to hold the body up, the face came smashing against the dried vomit with a low guttural groan. Looking at the vomit sideways along the length of the floor it could see the old words in the vomit. There they were, unreadable, incomprehensible. So it started scraping the stuff off with the long fingernails. Scraping, scraping, scraping.
Scraping, scraping, scraping. Like fingernails on a blackboard. The kid watches from the street. He considers whether he should tell someone about the animals taking over the old Freak House. Whatever. Animals be animals. He turns up the Odd Future mixtape on his pod, and pushes away mongo on his board.