William H. Dickey

Aiee! It is the ceremony of the first blades of winter. Horticulture, horticulture, the little steam train says puffing up the mountainside. As if he had never known a home of his own, only ditches. Three stomps with a stone stump and the colloquium started. Beggars under the drainpipe, another hand’s cast of the bone dice. Whatever name the event has, it can be understood as an invitation. Epilepsy, epilepsy, the little steam train said, descending at evening. They bowed so low that their wigs tangled and I had to laugh.

Popped from the womb, he began gathering property extorted from his wet nurses by threatening to turn blue in the face and die. Everyone gave in. His mother dressed him in guava-colored lace crinolines his father obligingly retired to the Côte d’Azur siblings were disposed of by the Beast of the Bassinet. Coextensive with the world, his hands become The Hands, his mouth The Mouth, his dingus The Dingus. Absolute power corrupts absolutely said Lord Acton. Absolute corruption set in: a foot revolted and proclaimed democracy and universal male suffrage the hairs of his armpit began drinking heavily and all over his body an asexual budding produced nodes of himself, his genetic encumberment replicated and replicated, an oblique hysteria. The absolute corruption of self is community. The absolute corruption of the mouth is to taste its tongue over and over, to be continually filled.

Aunt Mildred tied up her petticoats with binder’s twine, and my great-uncle Ezekiel waxed and waxed his moustaches into flexibility. It was the whole family off then into the dangerous continent of air and while the salesman with the one gold eyetooth told us the cords at our ankles were guaranteed to stretch to their utmost and then bring us safely back to the fried chicken and scalloped potatoes of Sunday dinner nobody quite believed. Edwina, my father’s half sister by my grandfather’s marriage to a former dance hall girl, who got her doctorate in tensor evaluation, she said whole galaxies have been known to belch and disappear taking with them the King Charles spaniels and the gold- plated fire hydrants from where the fire finally stopped in the earthquake year. But it was no good growing roots into the vegetable garden, not after the Monarch butterflies flew up into one whirling vortex and blanked out of immediate space, it was no good hoping Ken and Barbie, sexless, would anchor us to our interchangeable faces, or that our feet those flat independent anemones, could grip forever. The salesman smiled, with his face the size of the Empire State and growing bigger and bigger and into and through the face Aunt Mildred went shouting “Banzai!” into Great-Uncle Ezekiel’s inherited ear trumpet, shredding it to tin ribbons, and Edwina, dressed in the full commencement robes of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Mother and Father wrapped in each other’s reminiscences, and the goldfish, and finally I went too, out of the mold my body had been formed in and inhabited, as if place were the only realization of person and either the cords snapped, as any sceptic might have expected, or they are stretched out finer than a human hair, that keeps growing after death, even in the black melting that may or may not be the tight coral beach beyond.