The Little Tapes Warbled

Those tapes and tapes and the mud beneath the tarp. She slept on them every night when she slept. She would’ve traded her life for a little sleep. The rain tiptoed it’s ballet across the tent, stars pushed out of Heaven, never getting any bigger, remaining pinpricks as they fell closer.

Desolation is nothing new
It's a perennial fashion of youth.

Everyone agreed the world would end soon but they maybe expected it would be beautiful. The land a cookie crumbling in milk. The mowed sea, jumping into the air in decapitated blades. Mother Earth and her tits of fire, her volcano tits gushing hot milk. Angels lowered down on strings of flame, running through devils with long, thin swords. Operas of light deafening the trees. Skyscrapers bursting in ecstacy. Skulls dashed against the sidewalks. A lovely choreography of total destruction. She and he will dance ring around the rosy as the meteors knock off their limbs. This was what Wally thought. His dream. This is what Wally thought she wanted. The end.

But the world would not relent. It kept looping the same path it had been since the sun hugged it into orbit and wouldn't let go however many millenia before. It retraced it steps like it had lost something, left something behind. The hula hoop of years. They survived. How boring. How tiresome. The whole thing should just shut up already. She and he hated everything and that was their bond. She’d rather be a crusty husk dead on a tree. Ideas are dumb. None of them are right. In a land of gas stations and boutiques and ring tones and buckets of chicken and beer pong and toilet plungers and whitening strips and condoms and corsages you were either dainty or rough and she didn’t want to be anything at all. She wanted so badly to hear the sound shelled in her own heart and she wanted it to be true and not like anybody elses and purely her own. She scoured the air with strings, trying to make out her heart. Her breath went into the tapes and came out but the life was gone. It was her voice and no life. The little failures hit the tarp.

How to shoot into the Heavens
and become a pulse of light?

A voice in your ear becomes your mind. A song pumps your heart with its fist. Wally didn't really care. Grace cared of little else. Wally wanted to breath the sky and taste the flowers and prick the skin of the lake. Wally dipped his hand in the sun and poured it in his cup. Grace led him there. She was his path, his ladder. She didn’t want the responsibility of him. His jello heart wobbling on her dish. His little guppy heart crawling through her stream.

He was nothing.
He was no one.
He became his responsibility for her.

The bird tied to her wrist flew away. She let it loose, he suspected, leaving the rope still taut, dragging on the ground. Grace decided to crawl into her grave and sail out a butterfly. She sunk the proboscis in her arm and sucked. She traded blood for joy and the pain went with it and it seemed like a great deal.

Please don’t do it, he thought.
I just found you.

He thought with all his heart. Surely she had to hear him he was thinking so mightily. Grace could always hear the words volleying against the ramparts of his skull. The words lying like balloons waiting for his lungs to inflate them. Grace blew them up, read their messages, and popped them with her needle. He coughed and coughed. That was almost like talking. The sentences that surfaced herked and jerked their way up his windpipe through a slalom of detours, never arriving where they were headed.

Please just get in bed. Stay in bed.
I’ll take care of you. I want to. It’s all I want.
I could be proud again, preserving you.

Something was spoiling. Everything he said made her nauseous. He drove wooden nails into her stomach. The flies piled up, fat and happy. He rescued what he could. The tapes. Wound their tongues back to their teeth. He couldn't stop the flow. She became a stone. She turned into flowers.

She left.
His eyes had nowhere to rest.
Her vacant chair
was lonely with air.

Clumps of grief shuddered through his body. Reverberations through a world wrenched of a soul of magnitude. Waves passing from the new absence of a stone plunged through the threshold of water. She wasn’t supposed to leave him here. They were supposed to go together.

She was sleeping now. He was wide awake.

The little tapes warbled.