Tang was slumped against the edge of the sofa, his head totally engrossed in what he had going on with his tablet.
Tang, man. Doc nudges him. Dude, let us in. Timbot growls in a half cough. Fuckin’ Tang been at that drawing all afternoon. I thought he was passed out when I came in, yknow? All limp and shit. His hands moving. Doc says. No shit, doc. Well. Doc rises from his squat. Only one treatment for it. He slides the gasser into his left hand and produces the smooth Gf canister from his right palm. Smirks. Inserts the cartridge and twists it home. A tiny squeal as the seal is forged at microdegrees below kelvin. I can taste the acidic metal in my sinuses already. Hairs on my neck, the slight air current.
Hey. It’s Tang. He’s looking at the loaded gasser with us four. I got something you guys. Yeah, I figured. I says. He smiles his funny doll smile. Birds. He says.
Well, line up. Line up my gentlefellas. Let not yer pineal glands trip you up on your way to the doors of perception. He puts the gasser into Timbot’s hand. Anyone fancy a nip of the old salt before we dally? He’s uncorking his silver flask and tugging from it. Timbot tips it wordlessly as he is thumbing the tuner on the gas siphon. I hold my hand up in pass and Doc returns it to his breast pocket as Tang smiles silently. His eyes are like coated windows on a cloudy day. Timbot drops the Degauss-inculcator into Tang’s open hands and we move to the livingroom set.
Birds.
The cap of the world is aglow with a silvery yellow twang. Clouds moving in. Black shapes crowd the crowded horizon. Lifting and lapping twisting and flapping. Birds dance around the sun. Around and around. Wheeling like fucking retards garbage sifts lifted by thermals from decomposing methani-organics and the heat from a thousand tiny flare ups as the bacterium microbial turnover forces the third law of thermodynamics to manifest in a most spontaeous manner.
Or least that’s how fucking Shirley would describe it in one of her fucking awful boring ass poems. Talk about filling up your world with candy-coated emptiness. Give yourself something real to chew on, Shirley.
Candace sat. Dropped her ragged duffle to the edge of the swingset, where the pea-gravel spilled over a sunken railway tie to lace fingers with Kentucky Bluegrass. Hips firmly clasped in a hot plank of rubber—she’s dangling. A single toe tracing an arabesque across the cinnamon brown hollow beneath the swing. The heat intensified by her pressure against the seat, a flash-point x-rayed her hip bones and resolved into a warm internal glow.
She nudged back on the loop seat until she was able to grip the seat firly with her ass muscles. Yeah, she thought, ass muscles. She jammed her hands into work gloves that she’d pinched from Jeremy’s pickup truck. She hoped he’d never come back. Maybe. But only if he left again and took her mother with him. A fissure of a smile. She grasped the chain in each hand. Feeling the tension in each link. The vibration of her gravity. The relationship between the ground, the chains and her. Shit, these are nice gloves. Still, for a moment.
