“Parenthetical #2“ by J. A. Tyler
--page 2

He parked the car on the sidewalk and wove in and out of buildings. And he rang two doorbells where no one answered and one where man in a pair of boxers called him a fucker and gave him the finger. But soon he was home because his key worked and there was his bed.

(the bed ate him in one solid bite. He laid down on it and it opened its bed teeth and showed its bed claws and gulp and he was gone. He was endlessly falling. And the bed was spinning and he was spinning and he wanted to throw up but he couldn’t. But as he fell time slowed and things clarified and he felt sometimes okay and lucid. There was something about the way the walls of this falling space were oiled and black. They cradled him in their nothingness. So the spinning wasn’t so bad and he didn’t want to throw up anymore. He was just eaten by the bed and gone and that was the end).

She murmured and slept. Her hair smelled like pumpkins. And he didn’t know how she felt. He felt fine. He felt drunk.

(he saw her giving birth. He saw her ripped open by the claws of a baby tearing its way out. It had nails like spikes and shredded her body as it made an entrance like a highway. And when it was out it drove to a liquor store and bought a handle of gin and made like it was going to kill itself. It went home and drank and wrote a letter to its mother who was still ripped and tearing and torn and shredding. Its mother was laying in sick and red sheets. And the note didn’t say anything to its father. The lack of a father was what it wanted to say. That and the way it tore open its own womb).

He hung his pants on the dirty clothes hamper and looked in the mirror at his hair. He ran fingers through a newly defined beard. He drank palms of water. He ran the tap from hot to cold to hot to cold.

(she was a bed and warmth and he needed her like he needed to find himself. But the himself he needed was drunk. And the himself he needed was stumbling. And the himself that he needed was off playing mini-golf with twelve friends that he’d never met. Twelve friends wearing knitted hats and torn flannel shirts. Twelve friends smoking cigarettes and twitching their fingers at imaginary holsters and imaginary six-shooters that had bullets shaped like pineapples and cream cheese. Triggers made from ricotta. Friends like stemmed like apples. Friends wavering on the horizon like how heat radiates. Sitting with their backs against crumbling brick walls and shadows of themselves. Rotten or rotting or broken or breaking).

The sheets wept when he slipped in. And her face grimaced and changed. Like a bird becoming an angel becoming unhappy. So he rubbed her back in drunken fighting circles.

(in the sand too many people sifted their fingers. They were searching for something that wasn’t there. They were looking with combing fingers. And nothing happened except that sand continued to drift and float from their hands. And they were all solving a mystery. Wondering about making sand into glass. Thinking about making themselves into reflections. They wanted out these people sifting through mounds of sand. It was a landscape of heat and they wanted to leave. They wanted to run and dive and collapse away from there. But instead they were sifting sand. And he was watching them. And he was one of them. He was the one who wanted to run and dive and collapse outside of the way this was).

There was a time when she woke up briefly and smiled at him. And he returned the smile to her closed eyes.

(there was a man on top of them and he was all fists. He was swinging his body like a hammer and pummeling their bodies like nails. He’d broken the lock and broken the window and shattered his way in. And now he was beating them to death. And she was screaming the baby the baby the baby and he was just laying there and taking it. He was just being beaten like a man does. He was taking it and she was screaming. And he didn’t fight back because he didn’t want to. It wasn’t important anymore. So the shattered windows became him and he was cutting things down and making her bleed).

In the morning he was still awake. And the next night he was still awake. And she was sleep smiling at him the whole time. Trading her clothes and eating better and expanding in fragments.

(he saw them on the rim of a canyon. And they were holding hands and wearing wedding gear. She was in a white dress with a trailing drape and he was in a tux with black and white and black. And they were holding hands without wedding rings and looking down deep into the tan and brown and orange of the sunset in the bottom. There was a river down there that wound and snaked. And there was a crowd chanting from the rim come on come on come on. So they jumped. And the wind stripped their clothes and they landed naked in the river. And it was free and clear like them in the canyon well).

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