The Hyper-Condensed Pocket of Pure Distance

There was some kind of distance carried by the air. Alice moved down the sidewalk from concrete square to square, but everything around her carried some kind of space within it. She moved forward one step and found herself in the middle of a hyper-compressed pocket of what seemed like pure distance. Everything was, I don't know, really far away seeming, and the next chunk of concrete slunk horizon-wise as she approached it.

A curious feeling, she thought, moving through totally unoccupied, utterly vacuous space, while nothing around her moved. She walked forward, but the trees stood their ground, refused to fall behind her. She could not cross to the next chunk, even as she pushed forward. The hyper-condensed pocket of pure distance totally enveloped her. She turned left and ran, and still, though she was certainly moving, she was not going anywhere. There was a weirdly uneven temperature, and as she ran and ran, though the sky was clear and the colors sharp around her, she passed through shifting climates, cold patches and gelatinous globs of amniotic warmth.

Alice just kept moving. What the fuck else was she supposed to do?

The Poets

Alice decides to approach things as though everything were more or less over. The night is still and underfucked, a tree in the back yard does absolutely nothing. She looks out the back window, but it's dark outside and light where she is, and all she sees is herself where the outside should be. She grits her teeth and strains her neck. Her lips peel off her teeth and her neck cords strain against her skin and her eyes are open very wide. Everything is more or less over anyway, so who cares what she looks like? There is a table and a chair in the background and her lips peel off of her teeth and her neck cords strain against her neck.

She wonders what someone would think, someone walking into the room like they belong there. They would think, "Hey, there's Alice staring at the window," or, "Alice looks like a test pilot in a wind tunnel," or they would note simply note the most relevant fact, that the night was underfucked and looked it. This person would then make a sandwich and retire for the evening, leaving Alice at the window, her neck cords straining at her neck.

Historically, Gods have had insatiable and varied sexual appetites, and the poets have depicted their various fuckings and awkward morning metamorphoses. Alice recognizes that looking at the whole situation as if it were already over might offer some possibility for poetry, whereas the scene itself, her straining at her own skin and trying desperately to get the tree in the backyard in her sights, is merely a present reality, subject to breathing's sustenance and just the ho-hum of a churning body. Somehow, afterwards, if she were a God, the poets would get a hold of her and then the window, the sandwich ... that would be something.

W.A.S.P.

I spent the morning trying to crush a wasp with a broom. It lighted on a curtain in the kitchen and stabbed downward at nothing at all, which might as well have been my face. If I puff up and my cheeks fill with blood and pus, just open the window and I'll float out and out of your life, and you can wonder if the wind has blown me toward the hospital, or further into the territory. When the swelling goes down, I'll return and do you the courtesy of a proper answer: yes, it was the hospital, and now my blood is in a jar on a shelf and my skin is antibiotic. I'll come home and the wasp will flit and light and so on, and eventually I'll pick its body from the broom needles.

The Hinges

While humming along to the tupperware burps' satisfied stomach sound, Alice realized that this world's endless ostinato could give no quarter to the rabid critter burgeoning in her. So rather than gas, rather than pills to stop the floppy-eared Κέρβερος from loosing itself on the world, she went to her garage, and dusted off a six-sided crate covered in pre-war ewe droppings that a Sinti hairdresser had given her two-time amputee cum laude father in exchange for a workable definition of the holy ghost. The box's hinges, of which it had thirteen, had rusted open years earlier, and Alice remembered miserable weekend cleaning excursions devoted specifically to crushing the spiders and thwacking away at the top of the box - she tried for eighteen years to loose the metal coils with force, when she found out later that all you had to do was rub a dove on it and it would cackle.

But, standing in front of the box in her garage, feeling that something licking the backs of her eyeballs with its dog-haired tongue, she knew the box, firm and opinionated, would not open. Not even the multivalent logics of mammal-based physics would coax it open. She stood, the tupperware belching, the ewe drops aglow, her eyeballs tongued by an oxygen starved-something, and she slapped at the top of the box. But it would not open. She read the fable about the fox and the grapes, and then the one about Achilles and the tortoise (though she didn't finish it), and then mispronounced "Koran" as "Qu'ran." Exhausted after four days of trying to remember the melody to The Pelican Brief's opening credits, she finally devolved into telling stories about her life, like the dream-substance she saw embodied in Lenny Bruce's post-OD ass smiling up from the bathroom tile and the metaphysical dilemma it provoked in her father before the war, and the first time she saw a racist hug a lemon tree. She sat in the corner, knees pulled to her chest, arms wrapped around shins, sucking at her own teeth, and peered around the pile of discarded high school yearbooks at the box with its infinitely chaste dove-greased hinges.

Finally, the tupperware all but exhausted, the thing licking her eyeballs now complacent, knowing it was only a matter of time, she relented and, heaving her body up from the floor, pendulum arms swaying as she lumbered forth, she moved toward the box. It took hours, but navigating the viscous air-conditioning and the Hellfire Club decoder rings, she came to it and sat down beside it. She gave her teeth a suck, and a piece of broccoli left over from the Cuban Missile Crisis ceased its mourning. She reached over and worked her finger nails between two wooden panels, heir entry aided by the ewe droppings which, though tough on the outside, yielded an oily xylem once broken. She pulled and a panel came off. And she pulled again and another panel came off. And she pulled again. And she pulled again. And she pulled again, revealing the box's contents, of which there were none. The bad dog behind her eyes began its screaming and she could feel its paw pushing out, distorting her skull's delicate contours into bulgy hillocks. And jaws snapping interior brain air. Still she kept pulling and pulling, and soon only the lid floated before her, the virginal hinges still clamped, holding tight to the wood and also nothing at all except air.

Her hands moved fast around the lid, and already a dog mouth was making its way out of Alice's mouth and it pushed pornographically out and out. She had only the frame of the lid left, its hexagonal outline still attached to the hinges, and she pulled away at that as she tasted dog snot. She pulled down hard on the last plank and it came free. The hinges floated in the air for a moment, and then they opened with a snap. The tupperware was quiet, though filled with a kind of burnt-plastic vomit. The hinges fell to the ground and they clinked on the ground and were still. The dog was still, it closed its eyes, its torso hanging halfway out of Alice's mouth. The dog and Alice fell to the ground, and she put her hand over the hinges, and the hinges were stuck there between skin and the cold garage floor.

Prize Fighter Endeavors to Start a Flower Shop, But Then Just Punches Someone Instead

Yes, objects that go into their concepts always leave behind a remainder, an obscene protrusion into a alogical world - this is to say that objects always give their concepts the finger, but behind concepts' backs.

Yes, there is more thingness, there is always more thingness. There is always more thingness than you can handle, because things are giving you the finger behind your back. The tragedy, some philosopher said, is that you don't know what the finger looks like.

Give up on things? Before you go totally internal, they've given up on you, even before the always already. They piss on "always already." They're always already "always already," but even more so.

Give up on things? Who the fuck do you think you are?