The plastic stitching
The plastic stitching of the bedspread and the other bedspread run together, seem to roll out to the walls and fill the room. A pressure not unlike the eerie weakness of distant thunder tightens his skin. He grows and swells like a voice forced to fill empty ossuaries or bleak circular conversations. The release of gritting his entire body, or punching himself in the temple doesn’t loosen the skin to equilibrium with the swelling. He turns quickly to ear the wall. Some form of voice is always present even in the pure silence of the air conditioner. In its motor and compressor is some complex human song evolved from the loss of biology and form that exists only to flay Jack alive, Jack who thinks of silent places even in the dark, unthinking intercellular spaces of his brain. The desert at night doesn’t hum with the sun. On walks before dawn Jack fabricates some shelter of sound around his new life as an author with no one listening. He has a dry studio shack of silver boards on the tail of a silver bajada. Flat files with vast drawers fill most of the one room and they filled with undated manuscript pages. So that each page desiccates evenly they are not stacked. He pulls one caliche drawer out with faint grinding to see a filmy array of days that bore the same punctuation, or that replaced one another out of order. A bird flies into the seedy float glass. The spare, airy sound of its feathered head against the glass masks the weak click of its breaking neck. Each day in artifact suffers a fate not unlike the edge of suburban dawn he has stepped into. To be forgotten by force of the next day. Arising yawn mouthed faces or self absorbed eyes of melancholy habit transmogrify the silent ink into a loathsome cackle by existing to read aloud. It was enough to keep pencil from paper just to silence the voices of the future from ruining the day that he could soon allow to be gone forever. He chooses to pass one more day in a bed beneath the pattern of a simulated rainstorm or at least fabricating himself there.
