Divine Vignettes
four loosely related scenes
Scraggly black cliff faces stretching upupup toward miasmic clouds, roiling pearls predicting a dark ink spill on downy white, a reverse incantation, a dissolution of magic from divine to devoured.Â
He of soft angles and dewy paw-pressed skin, porcelain man, feathered limbs tucked tight into the shape of a regal cloak–he cowered beneath the gnarled teeth of a cave’s opening, watched the falling thing from a calculated distance. The falling thing tumbled with ugly grace from a hellish hole in the sky, brackish light spilling from the cloud’s split like rotting orange peels discarded from the wrinkled hand of an ageless man. The falling thing did not fight, feathers tugging free, tears torn from flesh catching light like jewels even from a distance. The ocean welcomed him with little fanfare in the way of splashing and eruptions, then swallowed him whole.
He, angel of the cave, pressed the breath from his chest and retreated.
The mother’s hair was sweet and delicately coiffed, fresh from the salon chair. Her well-tailored jacket hugged her trim frame like a regret. Outside, summer cooked the black pavement and spewed garbage fumes up sensitive noses.
Inside, she stood before the dense display of cheeses in the grocery store and swaddled herself against the cold spill from the open fridge, felt the display crawling up toward a never-ending baby-blue sky.
She stared, unthinking. She stared, whittling away the seconds with refined indecision. She stared, cold and colder, the cheeses swirling orange-yellow-aged like fire.
She stared and wondered, is it over yet? Though certainly when it is done, the scuffed floor will open up and swallow her whole.
She pushed her dewy face into the fridge and took a deep, cold breath.
When the garden closed over like an envelope licked wet and sealed shut, all the chlorophyll turned orange and the wicked man knew the world to now be his skin. All the leaves honey-kissed by Midas or boldly burnt up like Icarus, the earth a sweet citrus rind spewing putrid sugar sickness like a child’s dying breath.
The wicked thing stretched his limbs and watched lively fire lick life into all the corners of his skin. He wandered on spindly, crimson legs, alone but never lonesome. After some time he understood there was no end to the garden, no boundary to his bountifully burning body. He keeled over in prayer to himself, kissed the fertile earth.
From the simmering place where his full lips pressed the soil, a new fruit swelled–hot, ripe, wet with potential.
A Cadillac manger: the un-bouncing baby laid out flat, black leather clinging to stinky fresh skin, back of the car in a bombardment of August sunlight. She cooed mercilessly like a pigeon. In her big, wet eyes, all the world a fishbowl that no one comes to tap.Â
Most of what she has known is darkness, a steady fluid throb, fleshy walls to kick with nubby new toes. So much room to stretch back here. Nothing permanent enough to have objectivity. Light so big and new, she’d never know to curl up in resistance to its penetration. She is new and wide, curious for all that might come.
What does pain feel like to the freshest thing? She won’t remember.
jw