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.