miracles

So we all get it. The boys are mostly fine after a couple days but for Tom and me it's longer. We fight through the whole thing, each of us half dead still mad at the other for not helping enough.

We get better. The morning we know for sure it’s a Wednesday, I think. I know something's different because he's looking me and the boys in the eye and smiling, showing up like he's glad to be alive. Like when we first met, like when Luke and Jason were first born.

Old Tom was basically a ghost, a divorce in the making. If old Tom showed up at meals and muttered something akin to hello as we passed in a room or when he wanted to fuck, you took it, like, Tom being Tom. New Tom pays attention.

Old Tom had a temper around the edges; the new version of my husband stays unflappably well adjusted. Old Tom lived and died by Philadelphia sports, listened to inane quantities of sports radio, became dumber day by day. The new one does yoga in the den, reads whole books to our growing kids, listens to classical dawn to dusk, calling out key changes and speculating on the raw glory of hearing intelligence from more than 100 years ago played out in a beautiful orchestral cavern, the sort of joy you hope is coursing through your addled mind all hopped up and dying at a ripe old age with a couple generations gathered to tell you: "Continuity, friend. It wasn't all for nought."

My old husband let the house decay around us. New Tom proactively mows the lawn and spares the stray dandelions for a bouquet. Makes us breakfast above and beyond toaster waffles. So above, so beyond.

Being around the new Tom kind of rubs off. Before, the boys would've been at each others throats too about everything, two years apart but perpetually fighting for the same patch of ground. Now they share chores, find new efficiencies, plot together. Before I was a bad conversation from trying to figure out leaving, a meet cute away from a move as far as a credit card's worth of gas and passionate introductory conversations could drive my second husband and me to a new free life. Now I find myself wanting things to last. Now the daydream now bridges back to things we both wanted, when we first fell in with each other over dumb movies and too much weed.

Tom's parents have always been such dicks. "Jamie," they never said, "we love you like our own."Now there's something more polite and peaceful to our Zoom calls. Something akin to the fear of God in them, like ownership of the fact that the world they've left us doesn't have enough gas left in the tank to get where we want to go, like they're realizing that they want to live, to love if they can figure out how, to laugh besides their evil quiet laugh when no one's listening. Like they want to maybe not die alone. 

Tom starts watching the President on TV on purpose. He stays calm the whole time. "He's just a guy," my new husband says. "He's scared like any of us would be in his situation. He's having trouble facing the horror of this moment. He wants us to win, but can't figure out the playbook. He needs us to know it's going to be okay. He's trying." The new Tom writes Trump a reassuring letter and stares for too long, too thoughtful a time at his Democratic primary mail-in ballot. After he's finished choosing he won't let me see his choice as he seals the envelope -- but I can see a lot of writing on the form, more than you’d expect.

"Miracles are in each of us, hon" he says, thoughtfully weeding the sidewalk in front of our neighbor's yard.

I'm not nervous when Tom starts reading our small town's Facebook forum for parents, or even when he starts actively posting thoughtful bridging political commentary to try to find common cause between BLM people and people still squeamish about 2008's results. "Dialog's important," I tell myself. And true to form, whenever anyone gets out of hand in a thread, he acknowledges their humanity. In his presence, people get nicer. A few even seem to change their minds.

I'm not nervous when Tom's engagement grows. He starts reading other town forums, state and national ones. The kindness catches on. Tom can end the fiercest and vilest debates. He has closet white supremacists wrestling with their own sense of justice, has socialists interviewing police with a kind understanding of how there's racism buried in each of us, how the adrenaline of first responding can fuck with executive function, especially in a pandemic time when no one's got reserves, they just need structure, a narrower job description, and maybe, you know, an allowed default effective nonfatal option. 

Tom stops sleeping and starts logging long shifts on Facebook. One morning I notice that he has 115,000 friends to my 300. Weeks pass; 250,000 friends. A near constant stream of judicious, kind posts from Tom, a succession of miracles in the making.

There's just one problem. Tom's so kind that people get tired of it and stop believing it. Suddenly the one thing Biden and Trump supporters and people who were never going to be happy with either can agree on is that Tom's useless. Maybe he's a sophisticated bot or at best a troll.

Tom swears he'll fight on. But today I get back from a drive to clear my head and I find him crying, his monitor smashed in with something. His account deleted.  "It's all bullshit, hon," he says. He looks up. His eyes are a child's, scared and lost, in need of certainty that I'm sure I can muster from somewhere. 

an archer's perspective on the 2020 election

My parents weren't keen on me becoming an archer. More of a prior age's pursuit, they said. But when I was seven I made States. At 11 I won Worlds.  And they weren't laughing then. They were a little tired of driving me places, tbh.

Once I mastered their game I started playing my own. See how close I could get to the target without hitting it. When it was really close it dinged the outer edge. Otherwise it was just messed up honor system, me telling myself what I wanted to hear, and that grew tiresome.

With the bow string taut and poised, focus on failure.

You can play a similar game with a real live person. It's better at night when you know more likely they're going by feeling than by the incongruous sight of you in 13th century garb out of the back of your truck. Too close and you've committed a genuine crime. Too far and they don't notice. When the arrow's just off target, they know it and they'll tell you. There's always a tell. 

I live in a swing state -- Wisconsin -- but I don't much think it matters at this point. I know who I hate and who I want to like. 

What I'm mostly trying to decide is what I'm going to write in for my vote. It'd be classic to pick something totally puerile, "C. Virus." Or to pretend votes can be split to reflect being the last American undecided, 0.5 Trump 0.5 Biden. Or maybe I'll vote for myself -- the arrow leaving the bow, continuing a full rotation of the earth and getting me. Maybe, really, I'll pick the lighter poison, buy my kids a bit more time before the world tips to full fireball and the whole enterprise is fucked.

We watch the sunset

Everyone is out on their porches, their lawns. Up on their roofs. Parked in fields and by sides of roads. By water.  We are all here for the last one. We watch the sunset together, knowing it will never return.

As the light fades who are you going to think of? Someone who died long ago and couldn’t see this moment. Someone you thought would have longer to live after you’d gone. Someone right next to you, holding hands? Someone you used to know. Or just yourself and how it’s not fair for you. 

Everyone is crying. Everyone talks in somber tones. Some of us are angry. Some of us want to burn what’s left, create our own light to read by. 

Then in the foreground a multi-racial boy pops a Coca-Cola. The sound is a revelation. He turns his gaze to the heavens, frankly away from the sun and toward that can. There is chugging. After: the widest, most peaceful smile. All turn to gaze at this lucky boy. We are not jealous. Our hearts know peace. 

Fossil evidence b/w Christine weather

After our civilization ends future archaeologists will piece together what they can from fossil evidence. That intrepid first batch on scene will scour suburban neighborhoods block by block, plundering radiated suburban junk and laying it all out on scorched front lawns and tagging every artifact over a painstaking year and standing there looking worriedly at the gathering clouds over all they've assembled. {Because there was that old cassette tape, wasn't there, marked DO NOT PLAY, and somebody got cute and played it and a whispered voice just said "Christine weather" and then it was time for clouds, a surprising volume of them.}

They hope it's not but it almost certainly is. The clouds gather mass and shape and over the radio as they do the best they can to shield the most more-or-less precious artifacts under futuristic tarp comes the words they'd feared: Christine weather confirmed.

And they run for shelter in the houses knowing no point in running really and deep down maybe it comes as a relief as it must for the fly numbed as object of the spider's kind attentions. Now Christine's with them as they float almost entirely suspended in time, slowed to the crawl she prefers. 

The only thing to be done in Christine weather is to give into it. With your body frozen and bound and her voice lulling and the faint screams of the others she's tended to still echoing in your ears and so much blood on her lips.

It's everything to have her close attention and see her eyes determined and hear her commands and feel the tracing knives of her fingers knowing that she wants it to be enjoyed enjoys it most being enjoyed, but that you also have to give into it fully and it'll hurt.

She kisses you close and surface by surface and you know in each soft one that those will become sharper numbing bites. And then scratches and more menacing bites that you know you'll never recover from but that also somehow by that point feel numb and sensual on account of venom.

She's all around you now and somehow, you, what's left of you, your ears and your mind and some tingling fragment of your spinal column will hear and feel her calling you to stop holding back, and you won't be able to help but come when she calls. It might be an hour or it might be a few minutes, but in that time she'll teach you home. 

all the words

A communications director dies, goes to hell.

Flames. Devil. Pitchfork.

"?" he asks.

"All those words," the devil says. "Where'd it get you?"

"So what happens now?" the comms guy says, no good answer to the question, watching the pitchfork nervously.

"We write."

In hell they use Macs. Day 1 is free writing. Day 2: the same. The comms. guy, we'll call him RICH, he writes.

Day 3.

RICH: So I've been writing.

DEVIL: How's it going, buddy?

RICH: Relieved. I think it's pretty good, I think I'm almost done this first part. I think you might like it.

DEVIL: removing stray eyeball from pitchfork. Great. Sounds good buddy. Better save, our systems are a bit wonky since the last downgrade.

RICH: clicks save.

Macintosh pinwheel spirals

RICH: How long you think that'll take?

DEVIL: Not sure, chief. Maybe a few minutes, maybe forever, amirite?

Hell days pass. Double long to normal days.

RICH: File's lost.

DEVIL: Great. Time for workshop.

***

Workshop table stretches farther than RICH can see in either direction. Papers stack in front of each writer, further off the table's surface than his eyes can gauge. The writers have been coached to read slowly, to savor the flavor of their own cooking. The conversation is a closed loop: writer to self. Each, it would appear, is happy here.

DEVIL: RICH, my guy, it's an honor to welcome you. You read first for us.

RICH: reminds file not saved.

DEVIL: Happens, boss. 

Workshop proceeds counterclockwise.

RICH: How long does this go?

DEVIL: Sorry buddy... might be a few hours, might be forever (pops Diet Dr. Pepper, the Official Drink of Hell, and leans back to watch the expression on RICH's face.)

At first the words are words. But soon for RICH the words amount to something. Now the words are hornets stinging his heart. Now they are ash burying him alive. Now the words are hell words, each punctuated by fire emojis made of real fire.

Slowly RICH loses the meaning of the words themselves. And he comes to know them as demon's names, each an incantation, meaningful only for the hideous shapes their syllables can conjure.

RICH falls into his nightmare, without agency, without terminus. In the back of his mind, a story yearns to break loose, kept at bay by the shrilly certain noise surrounding him.

a trucker's view on the 2020 Presidential Election

I'm a trucker. Call it exposition. You got me. It's also the truth, and that has to count for something these days.

Yep, just a plain-spoken trucker. Steve by name. A simple man. Not a particularly hopeful or intellectual or depressive man. Kind of just a guy who shows up and does his thing. In my case trucking.

And sometimes: philately. A quaint hobby, an old-timey one. But it brings me peace, it quiets the war upstairs. All that artistic intent and goodwill on a tiny adhesive square.  It's hard to put a stamp on an envelope or in a book made just for it and then blow your fucking brains out. It would be hard for me to. And I like to put a lot of road between me and that kind of thing.

Plain spoken trucker. Don't much go in for talking politics, and more likely to let my fists do that particularly conversing. But when I picture the 2020 election I picture it like this:

I'm driving in dense fog, just before dawn begins creeping in, or maybe midnight. Definite: I can't see a single fucking thing ahead of me. Ahead of me there is a little bit of a glow, a smidge more than the usual glow on a foggy drive. A premonition so sluggish I'll get there before I decipher it. It might be some dumbfuck city nobody gives a rat's dick about flickering its last dumbshit bad idea of the evening off in the distance. It might be the gathering light of dawn. It might also be the glow of a fire from the most fearsome wreck Kentucky (? someplace) has ever seen.

What I know: I've got the music up to keep awake and I've got to keep driving or I'm going to be too late. And it'll be my third/fifth/whatever strike. But the road just keeps going, and there aren't any signs I trust. The fog is formless and from sleep deprivation it's also playing its own tricks. Like there are these fucking white coyotes and small-assed untidy polar bears running zigzags from the corners of the windshield.

Maybe that glow is nothing but hallucination in itself. Maybe I'm driving toward the edge of a flat earth, and past that final fake mile marker it will be nothing but the void of space.

In that final moment: one last sip of blatantly terrible styrofoam cup coffee, and a silent but highly enthusiastic scream.

cascading closed worldview

Barbed wire gloves and a bulletproof  visor and a thick mask and superobviouscompletelynonaerodynamic ear plugs. The latter not because I think that COVID shit's going to get in through my ears more that I don't want to hear what you have to say or even pretend to listen. If I see you on my side of the street I'll smile sideways at you no eye contact and cross to like 12 or 18 feet away to avoid being reminded of whatever point of connection there might be links you to I. If there are cars in either or both directions I'm willing to take my chances. I and not thou; taking special care to avoid special you.

In all this quarantine loneliness for a while I went around town leaving chalk messages for folks: You Got This! Motivational speeches spanning blocks targeted to the people I knew and loved. Then the same types of messages increasingly targeted to people I did not know or know whether I loved.

Then I started in on more ambivalent messages. Cheer up: civilizations die! If they didn't then new ones couldn't be born. Lucky numbers 20, 20, 5...

Then I decided that language itself was too clear whatever layers and rotations of irony I threaded through. I started in on geometric drawings full of noise and without symmetry, devoid of clarity. My hope was to freeze people in their tracks; to interrupt the interpretative process. If we all stay in one place, even if do so having made the cardinal mistake of ever going outside, the odds of transmission decrease significantly.

To be clear, the barbed wire gloves are in case anybody ever tries to shake my hand, I'll do it and then hack off both of my own hands for microbiological safety using a device designed solely for that purpose right after. I just want to leave a reminder or set of reminders if you will that such things as physical contact are unsafe and we're in distinctly more of an adapt or die situation, buddy.

I managed to avoid Walmart for the first couple months of this shit but I got there today because honestly there aren't a lot of other go-tos for DVD-R discs in the apocalypse. Place was hopping! But also big enough that it wasn't purely terrifying, except for the moment close to checkout when I imagined no felt no was certain that COVID-19 was crawling around behind my glasses and directly into my eyes. And the people, I don't know how to put it any other way, they were just distinctly nicer than they are at Wegman's.