Stonehenge

Each morning he’d anoint the room’s four corners with an arc of piss, and then—until he was forcibly halted—beat his forehead open on the eastern wall, the “sunrise wall,” incanting a doggerel prayer about God the Flower, God of the Hot Plucked Heart; and she, if loose in the halls, would join him, squatting in the center of the room and masturbating with a stolen bar of soap. This isn’t why they were sent to the madhouse: this is what they needed to do once in the madhouse: this is the only meaningful ritual they could fashion there, created from the few, make-do materials available. It isn’t wondrous strange more than the mega-boozhwah formulaic splendor of my sister’s wedding ten, eleven years ago: her opulent bouquet of plastic flowers (for the wilting pour of wattage at the photo session), nigglingly arranged to match the real bouquet she carried down the aisle, bloom per bloom; the five-foot Taj Mahal of sculpted pastel sherbet; endless “Fiddler on the Roof”; I’m sorry now I cranked my academic sneer hauteur in place all night. I’m sorry I didn’t lose myself like a drunken bee in a room-sized rose, in waltzing Auntie Sally to the lush swell of the band. We need this thing. There’s not one mineral in Stonehenge that our blood can’t also raise. One dusk, one vividly contusion-color dusk, with my fists in my pockets and a puzzle of fish-rib clouds in the sky, I stopped at the low-level glow of a basement window (Hot Good Noodle Shop) and furtively looked in: a full-grown pig was splayed on the table, stunned but fitfully twitching, it looked as if it had grasshoppers under its skin. A man and a woman slit that body jaw-to-ass with an ornate knife, and then they both scooped out a tumble of many dozens of wasps, preserved by the oils of living pig to a beautiful black and amber gem-like sheen. I saw it. Did I see it? From inside this, over their wrists in the tripes, they carefully removed the wooden doll of a man and the wooden doll of a woman maybe two inches tall, a tiny lacquered sun and matching brass coin of a moon, and then a child’s-third-grade-version of a house made out of pallid wax: a square of walls, a pyramid roof, and a real smoking chimney.