Max Ritvo

A lavender fog breeds with our children. Our girls are dying on the roadsides, their wombs pried open by the scramble that grows inside. Save us from the lavender fog — it’s the ghosts of your dead people, who have never bothered our village before. Their shapes convulse in our water sources. When we get close enough to hear their ghostly voices, they say yum-yum pleadingly and shout out better better as in I’ll get better. Some of our children have taken these as lyrics. Your ghosts are corrupting the youth. Stop using us as musical instruments, this is a great taboo you have violated! Go back to making tubes of wood vibrate and scraping your goat gut.

Two bedtimes ago, through my window, I heard a cat get eaten. As the cat split, it sounded like a balloon string put to scissors to make curls so the birthday boy would smile extra wide. Last night, by the same window, I heard mostly my breath, inside of which was a small baby suckling my air for his milk. When I bolted upright, the baby grew up into a carpenter, nailing his brains into the side of my lung to babyproof the light switch. Flip the switch and it lights a picture of my emaciated, sore-ridden bum for my breath to laugh at. Why is my breath so unlike yours? My ears? Why do I only hear such unnatural things? Although, come to think of it, death is completely natural. I’m just exasperated. Everywhere life-sounds swarm this, our shared pond, like mating turtles. Cars whoosh, schmoozers hum, snakes spit poison, Martin and Martina say yes and sob and hold, but my ears fill up instead with eggshells cracked by the bumbling parents. I cleaned my left ear out, but my nail cut the drum. It filled with water and is deaf for now. I’m leaving the right one dirty. No sudden changes. Keep everything dry. Let it figure out a way to heal itself. And me:  just practice living with yourself  deaf. Sometimes your brain is as unwelcome as muscles or guns. It’s obvious to others. Maybe even everyone. Don’t wish for anything. Don’t get organized. Don’t buy a book. Don’t go to bed early. Seek out beige, in foodstuffs and landscapes. Chew gum if  you’re overwhelmed. You’re in this alone. That means there’s nobody to stop you. You’re almost at the finish line. But first, you have to pick a finish line.

After the cocoon I was in a human body instead of a butterfly’s. All along my back there was great pain — I groped to my feet where I felt wings behind me, trying to tilt me back. They succeeded in doing so after a day of exertion. I called that time, overwhelmed with the ghosts of my wings, sleep. My thoughts remained those of a caterpillar — I took pleasure in climbing trees. I snuck food into all my pains. My mouth produced language which I attempted to spin over myself and rip through happier and healthier. I’d do this every few minutes. I’d think to myself What made me such a failure? It’s all a little touchingly pathetic. To live like this, a grown creature telling ghost stories, staring at pictures, paralyzed for hours. And even over dinner or in bed — still hearing the stories, seeing the pictures — an undertow sucking me back into myself. I’m told to set myself goals. But my mind doesn’t work that way. I, instead, have wishes for myself. Wishes aren’t afraid to take on their own color and life — like a boy who takes a razor from a high cabinet puffs out his cheeks and strips them bloody.

His father told him never start writing or reading in the middle of a book. There’s a title, don’t go on without one. And he didn’t go on without one — he had the title Private. This was life’s taproot — the obedient boy began always at the beginning. Books start out with what the boy calls Beauty — the boat’s still in port. The cat’s alive. Pantry’s packed. Even present tense has some of the grace of past tense, what with all the present tense left to go. Usually, by the first page or second, a relationship emerges between text and title. Some of the words blur on the page and the key ones glow, as does the title, and a fat red arrow with two heads connects them. Yum. It was like owning something. The way when he paid for a fine hat and put it on, he felt a circuit through the rim and top and sides, swilling gray hat blood. And he felt like his heart controlled this circuit remotely, via microchip. If a book could not service him with this truth, which was all the pleasure in the world, he would usually stop reading. He saw the end of very few books anyway — who needs two climaxes? After that intense sensation the book always changed. It was like looking at a plate of food he’d half-eaten and had rendered him bloated and nauseous. Now he is on marches. Now his gun makes a nest in his arm crook with nasty red welts for straw. Now his rear leaks smelly water all day. His whole life he has balanced himself on an absurdly slender proscenium and as he continues to edge out he can’t tell if it isn’t maybe a gangplank. He doesn’t like the switch-up. What’s out there? he wonders, in what he’ll call ocean for now. To his right is an alligator. But the head-ridge has no bone. It’s propped up instead by fumes: rich, dark, and pungent. Far off, men are cradling cracked dolphins. Arrows of fire shoot out the blowholes. The wounds bleed silver. Perhaps they are connecting to a title in the sky. But he’s not seeing any of these things. The world is mostly brown and black, and smells like a rotting fridge. What is it? What is it? Is it a hand? Is it an eye? Is it a hat? It is time.

The guardian angel sits in the tree above the black lip of street the man walks down. He calls the man Cargo. The angel sees a pinewood box in place of the man, and the street he walks is a boat, the hull like a coal crater. Somewhere in the real world there is such a boat and box. The angels call these overlays dreams, and believe they crop up because angels can’t sleep but want to — space falls apart when you have unlimited time. • The cargo is rattling in the boat. Maybe it’s just the waves, maybe it’s rats. What’s the difference? Either way: it’s the box. The angel sends the man a happy vision from his past — the time he fed birthday cake to his goldfish after an unsuccessful party. The angel thinks he’s applying lemon oil to the creaky, wounded wood of the box. He knows it’s palliative, but it’s beautiful. • The man reaches the end of the street. He’s a sick man and he starts to ponder death as he often does these days: All of death is right here — the gods, the dark, a moon. Where was I expecting death to take me if everywhere it is is on earth? At life’s close, you’re like the child whose parents step out for a drive — everyone else out on a trip, but the child remains in the familiar bed, feeling old lumps like new in the mattress — the lights off — not sleeping, for who can sleep with the promise of a world beyond the door? • That night the child dreams he’s inside the box. It’s burning hot, the heat coming from bugs and worms raping and devouring one another. He starts the hard work of the imagination, learning to minister to the new dream. Perhaps all that’s needed is a little rain — for everyone to drink and have a bath. Outside: a car humming, somewhere, his mother’s singing.