A Series of Dreams

24/02/2025

I.

Lately I’m not feeling myself. The ex moves in next door. Can hear the heat breathing in our walls again. She’s suing for total custody and the alarm clock has me sipping gin by television light, just to keep awake. Keep stirring up on the floor with the ceiling fan tickering, body all soaked with sweat. The doll-shade comes over every weekend and sits on the couch, covered in cuts and bruises. She won’t say what they’re doing behind closed doors, by which she means some undiscovered business. There are green lights spinning in the streetlamps of an evening and a junkie died screaming day before last. Wild dogs found the body in a donation bin, feet out in the air, curled like a witch. Ex’s new lover ran over my best bucket, too. He’s a seven-foot hirsute former marine with methamphetamine diction and a desert eagle tattooed up his sleeve. ‘I begged you not to run over the bucket,’ I said, and he stared at me from the porch with dead orbs and the green street lantern flickered and dimmed to total black. Inside their townhouse I can hear the moistured air, squelching and teething like a dying owl’s song and the next day something terrible might happen to you. Seashells and molluscs sucked to your legs, like a drowned cadaver come back on the scene. Sealions mewl and bark on the rocks at the edge of the room, where the water comes in and I can see a Russian U-boat scouting the wine dark channel. There’s an AR-15 loaded in my closet under a banner that reads, ‘I’ll have to kill them again’. This time the waters will run with someone else’s smeared mascara. Have you ever heard the sound a body makes, when it comes to collect?

II.

My brother and me, out in the yard digging a hole. The moon is silver in the sky and the clouds are hemmed in lunar line work. The dead man has an axe vexation where his face should be and the bloody concave in his skull looks like two hands gripping onto rot and offal. ‘We should hurry,’ my brother says. ‘The night won’t last.’ There’s a tarp to trap all evidence. Two hills of dirt to cover damnation. We heft and haul and the night gets cool, calm, and collected in distant suburban hills and the neighbour’s television plays Crim and Punish, loudly. There’ll never be enough earth to bury the dead, I determine, and the disturbed ground of the yard smacks a poor place to rest, even for this brief eternity. ‘They’ll dig up our memory,’ my brother says, ‘on the day of answers.’ There’s not much time, I think, to uncover these forty days and nights.

III.

‘Stay at your father in law’s house while we sue the old lawyer down the street,’ she said. And so we sleep on dirty sheets and learn the masonic handshakes that’ll let us in the butler pantry. The judge is up on his fridge, banging a meat mallet against a bone that sends a wicked stink through the courtyard, and all the blinds whip towards an open door with the words ‘Tyrannus Semper’ gilt in gold whenever the breeze comes in. ‘Your honour,’ I say with my wig as a puppet. ‘This man is not fit to consecrate his fellow lawmen. Let us limit him by actions, and cast his pox from our compare.’ I don’t think he’s buying it. There’s blood on the prosecution’s face. ‘How strange,’ somebody with a bullhorn whispers, and it turns out I’m looking in the mirror. The jury of peers are frozen cadavers, propped up in a dusty supermarket aisle. At the end of the day, I go home to the sit-com life, and hang a slouched hat on the hallway ribs. With a cash register in one hand and an arm around the little lady, I announce, ‘let’s turn on the telly and watch the next episode’. We are to view Game of Thrones in Manhattan tonight. An excellent example. ‘Always wanted to be big in New York,’ the wife says, as usual, with a clink of her beak. She’s a duck, but a good and decent bird. The doorbell rings. ‘All your friends are here,’ says a voice like an avalanche of ash, cartwheeling down the mountain. ‘They’re coming in, forever.’