There are some kids who try to get into the building. At first, they may seem like a new breed of archangel. But no, they’re among the damned, their foreheads are creased with grime, incapable of anything but lewd cogitation.
They venture into the stillness that they measured with their exploding mouths. To them falls the mediocre task of adding up loose change on a tablet. They press their palms against the doorbell panel. Impatient, they light up cigarettes before anyone has a chance to answer. In turn, this triggers the smoke alarm. Before the janitor gets there, they extinguish their smoke on the steel frame of the front door. Their burnmarks blossom in patterns, five or six kids at a time, up to no good, eating away the sick green paint.
How can we reshape them? Can we remake them, reform them? This has happened before. The demands of natural selection prevent this. They will never be your equals. The best we can do is close their eyes with soothing fingers. With eyelids like the ones on mechanical dolls. In the world we live in, we deserve better treatment from these living dolls. Not I nor the janitor will accept their abject apologies. In a world apart, we could be awarded a Coupe de Ville in the State Lottery. And save our energies for the fight against rising fever, night to dawn.
Late that night, I stepped out on the porch landing and leaned against the railing. With a drink in my hand, I looked down. The windowpanes of this building were cracked and in pieces long before I got there. Somehow many of them remain that way.
I heard a siren sound like a cipher. I heard it the way I've seen the faces of the dead. Mirthful, I sat still on the patterned floor. I pulsed sleepless, far away from my center. The rain only honored my reasons for being alone. That my labors have long been in silence.
A Lodestar receded across the sky to offer impossible wishes. I am engaged in the practice of timekeeping. The minutes take the form of the digits on my hands. They seem gentler when covered with crumbs.
In the time spent here is all the time in the world the world is ever able to see. Apart from bereavement. This truth is a brutal one, but not an honest one. To grasp it requires tac derangement of the senses, after multiple climax, you’re beholden only to yourself the samewise. In the saving of lives we muster joy from others, like homicidal parasites. To acquire the glittering monotony of poverty, it’s necessary to slough off the logic of any genius, past, present, and future.
Michael Igoe’s work has appeared in Fevers of the Mind, The Gorko Gazette, and World Hunger.