Dilation

He has chapped lips and the cigarette breath blues. His fingers are clumsy, eager, tearing. He writes a hundred poems and hums them into her flesh. Along the way, they stop to buy ice cream and plastic guitars.

It might be snowing.

It certainly isn’t raining.

The words rise in his throat and freeze there. What, she asks. And again he hums, this time with less confidence. Tentative, but in key with the hum of every generator everywhere, every transistor, every idling engine, every low sweet drone. They strum their guitars.

It is not morning.

He might be sleeping.

He’s stopped writing poems now. She’s taken up the guitar, professionally. He always chooses paper over plastic when given the opportunity.

He sits at his desk, staring intently at the push-pumpable jug of hand sanitizer. He attempts to manifest a heretofore untapped telekinetic ability.

The jug moves. Maybe. He isn’t sure.

Meanwhile, she has become an auto mechanic in Saskatoon. Grease stains her coveralls. The spatter resembles the European continent. Snails. The Virgin Mary.

She’s cut her hair short and bought a crotch rocket. She rides it in broadening spirals.

Her fingernails are black.

He can’t stop thinking about her. It makes it difficult to will the jug to move. Instead he sanitizes his hands the old fashioned way.

Now, it is years later. Decades. The veins in his hands look like thick, squirming worms. Hungry. Breathing.

His lungs hurt. He is asthmatic in the wintertime.

It might be snowing.

His joints ache. It is definitely snowing.

He thinks of her now, but he swears, he doesn’t think of her that often.

She hasn’t aged a minute. She has a fleet of crotch rockets now. An empire of grease-stained clothing. It is all in heaps of varying sizes about her room. Mountains for rats.

Her bones are like Lincoln Logs. She stretches. She lets escape a soft moan. She bites her lip.

He is there now. In the room. Or in her memory. She shifts her hips. She writhes beneath him. Her breath collects on the windows of her recall. Off in the distance, a generator hums in D. Between her thighs there is also a hum.

Soon all things sing in unison. An old song, one he wrote, before he lost his voice.

He is undulating gently in his rocking chair. They all have rocking chairs here. Once a libidinous man, now he stares at the ceiling. In the other room, dinner is getting cold. He makes dinner for himself every night. A testament of sorts. A soundless protest. The others do not understand. How could they? They didn’t understand when he tried to escape, either. Why he tried, even though there was nowhere to go.

Well, maybe Saskatoon.

He whispers to her: Are you ready for bed? Your eyes are closing now. You are smiling so sweetly. It is adorable. But she is not there.

She is stalking in the tundra. She exists only in the past. She exists at all moments in time simultaneously. She lies there, sweaty, riding the final slow wave of convulsions.

She is ready for bed. Her eyes are closing now. She is smiling so sweetly.

2009