When someone asks years later he will say insert blank here. In the photo he looks uncomfortable, a one quarter grimace three quarter bent smile. He sits in the driver’s seat of his car holding his dog in his lap. During that time it was believed that oval shapes inside a car helped it go faster. He is not particularly attractive and is not use to the attention from a girl. They are about to drive to insert town here. The engine is running and the girl takes a picture. He is bald and wears glasses.
The trees rustle in the breeze and the autumn dusk air is a small harmless chill. The dog pushes the kite into the grass with his nose. They laugh and kiss at the sight of this. They just met and their skin is still a rubber shell. He takes the kite from the dog and the wind drags it up and then it falls. The dog has broken the kite. So simple it would be to sniff and break all that we loved. To fly a kite, one must get the dog away. To start your life over, one must get a dog. They’re still kissing and the leaves are the heart flutters of mice.
He heard the sound of a nail being driven into a wall. When he entered their bedroom, he saw a painting hanging above the bed. It was rendered in such a way to suggest slanting light on a meadow, only the meadow was far away, embodied in a quick dab of paint. To uproot a field is to discover its mirrored end. The growing dying world of branches and leaves and the wind that carries them to another place is tasteless without somebody there. It is only a picture, a pretend moment of rectangle. The light expands with the upward wrist until the straight edge ends it all. Nature, relieved from our vision, is a landscape painting facing the wall. Its silence goes the wrong way and drips on the floor.
She once explained to him the difference between an estuary and a lagoon, using her hands to mimic the banks. It was implicitly understood that everything besides her hands was water. An estuary, she said, is the outer mouth of a river extending into the sea. A lagoon is a shallow body of water ensconced by sandbars and coral reefs, its waves recoiling inward. Her hands, to describe the latter, were touching yet hesitant, the way one hugs an ill person. His arm, as the photo would describe, did not hold her tightly, even remotely with any hint of assertion, but rather, took on the resemblance of a sullen brainless worm. It lay there on her shoulders, and would have fallen off had it not been attached to its owner’s shoulder.
Some of the stones on the beach had holes the size of small fingers through them. The process was called erosion, in which material is slowly worn away from the earth’s surface. To break a mountain into a million pieces, one needed time. He picked up a thin stone and threw it at such an angle that it bounced four t-t-t-times on the water before sinking in. She picked up a stone and slid her finger in. A wedding ring, he thought. The process was called matrimony, in which two people of different genealogy are voluntary joined together for life. He picked up the heaviest stone he could find and lodged it into the air. They talked about whether it was actually rain, for it didn’t fall but hovered. Her face got wet and he used his shirt to dry the small beads of water off, slowly going over the mounds that made her forehead, nose, cheeks, and chin. In places where the sand was smoothest were patches of mirrored air shining like broken china.
They drove to a park to fly a kite. In the car she took off her boy’s face and said insert blank here. The car is made out of plastic and the road of crumbled earth. A long drive down the road equals a sleeping dog and girl. The slanting light through the leaves leaves a mute tap dance on his face.
Man with a modest apartment and a clean kitchen meets a girl. He starts a bank account at the new town he moves to. He traces the dry brush strokes of black branches outside the window and shoots the blurry black birds with his eyes. Rides his bike to the library everyday and the weeping willows touch his forehead as a hundred whips without anger. Sleeps in her arms and has dreams where tiny spots grow bigger and bigger as raindrops falling d-d-d-down hitting his face and he will never describe this because waking up is the only thing he remembers.
© 2006 Jimmy Chen
