How the Days of Love and Diphtheria Read online

  HOW THE DAYS OF LOVE & DIPHTHERIA

  a Nephew of Mud Luscious Press

  ROBERT KLOSS

  first eBook printing: 2012

  eBooks ISBN: 978-1-938103-01-8

  cover design: Steven Seighman

  editor: J.A. Tyler

  associate editor: Andrew Borgstrom

  online: www.mudlusciouspress.com

  I.

  I don’t believe in innocence, he said.

  Few stories as old as the story of the boy whose family you killed. What authors of ruin, you with your black masks, your knives. Few stories so sorrowful as mother and father and how you left them strewn, cut apart and opened, how the birds and barn cats crawled within and slept, how they seemed under the wide light of the house you set ablaze. How your horses thundered the hillsides, clouds of dust and soot, the long green grasses gone black in your wake. How father was washing the car and then your knives slid into his throat. How father slept in his hammock and then before him, your black masks and long teeth. How father waited for you and your clouds of dust at the back porch with his repeating rifle, drunk on whiskey. Few stories so conflicted as who was found and how they were found as the story of mother and father found in each others’ arms, as the story of mother and father found disassembled and strewn and entirely apart, as the story of mother and father perhaps not found at all. Few stories as old as what you did and what the boy intended to do. In the long years thereafter the story of how the boy followed you and yours is the oldest story of all.

  Now this boy and how he lived under the soil while you—. How he mewed and dreamed under your hooves and vibrations, how he lived and slept under the burning house, the sirens. How he lived in a land blacker than your blackest masks, blacker than the sky you built from the soot and ash of his house. Now this boy, pale and ribs and trembling. How he dreamed his father’s heavy voice. How he dreamed his mother, the rip of her hair pulled, the clumps of skin dangling from roots. Now this boy and the cool damp of their world of soil. How he clawed and dug and buried and tunneled at the sounds of horses rampaging and snorting. No rivers but rivers of worms below the only world he ever knew. Now no women in robes the way he dreamed, their hands cold along his groin, the way he dreamed their dead-blue lips against his neck. How he dreamed them in gowns, amorous and rigid for the fumes. How no women but the flesh of the dead he dreamed beneath the ground. How you hunted for him with your horses snorting and kicking at the soil. How your long teeth dripped for the boy you could not find. How the blood of his mother, the blood of his father, on your knives and teeth. How the vibrations of your rampage shook his skin. Your horses and their wild greased hair, their dripping slather. How this boy and a world of soil and the excavations that followed. All the trucks and men with shovels. All the shirtless men, their burned skin flaking like sheets of Bible paper. How they dug with shovels and spades and their blazing knotted muscles, their sharp dried throats. These men and how they dug trenches. How they called the boy’s name into holes. How the house burned white behind them. All the grasses of the valley gone black and the sky filled with soot and smoke. The rumble of trucks digging into the soil. The boy who would not be found.

  Now, in those days a city, he said. Now a burst of light.

  Always this house smoldering, always the horizon blotted. Always this house burst apart and burning. Silence save for the crackling of boards and beams, the slow melting to tar of shingles, the house always collapsing. Along the hillside, overlooking the burning house, leopards with sooted fur, their yellow eyes. Always along the horizon, leopards gone mad for the fires. How the smoke clotted their lungs. How leopards, deranged along the horizon, gagged and vomited black blood. Always along the hillside, black sparrows, weighted down, hunched and shuffling. These molds of burn and char and how the leopards watched them, lurching and hungry. Sparrows disfigured in the light of the always burning house and the leopards who hissed from a distance.

  In those days of diphtheria, he said, we knew only to burn their houses and cauterize the wounds.

  For a while this sensation of publicity. Television crews from stations local and national arrived, along the highway their white trucks and television cameras, their images blurred for the smoke, the air bending against the blue flame. Reporters and the “rare phenomena” of the burning house, their makeup smudged for ash, their eyes and mouths smeared with charcoal. The redness of the heat. The way their eyes watered and blurred. Scientists arrived in station wagons wearing lab coats soon blackened for the soot, scientists carried thermometers and vials, and now scientists gauged and calculated, whistled and rubbed their brows, scientists wrote lengthy papers articulating the nature of their findings, the permanence of the flame, and they delivered these papers to men in ties and black-rimmed glasses, men of impassive faces who had only read what heat does to a man’s membrane. Men who did not comprehend how the house grinned with vibrations. Then wanderers and zealots arrived with gifts for the house. They left dollar bills and coins pressed into the soot mounded along the lawns, they prayed on their knees and stamped their foreheads to the blackness. They carried children bloated and wheezing with diphtheria to the flames as if these fumes would somehow clear their clotted throats. For awhile this sensation of publicity although all influence is soon forgotten, all horror and value is subdued, and a house that burns forever soon becomes as any other.

  Now a woman vibrated into shadow. Now her fluids gone into steam.

  Now this family and how they purchased the land. He, jobless after the factory closed, and she, a waitress in the café, and how they could afford no other. This young family who bought this house always burning. How they told each other it was not really so bad. Ankle deep in soot and watching the weird glow, the flickering. This what their lives had grown into. From their station wagon they brought their tent and their boxes of clothes and pots and bug sprays and hammers. Soon they erected their canvas tent and under the weight of the glow, this man and woman, waiting for the end of these flames. Now, secluded and playing pinochle, singing songs and strumming guitar, making love and dreaming of a child. Yes. For what is a man and woman together without new life between them.

  How the flames whispered in the voice of white flashes.

  How the husband would say, “I think it’s waning, some.” The glowing membrane of the canvas. Later, they shoveled the soot off the tent, always shoveling with bandanas tied over their mouths, always dressed in navy blue exterminator clothes, always the goggles, fogged with soot. Still how they made love, the slide of soot along their canvas walls as her nose against his neck and the burn fumes, the tongue along the rim of his ear, her teeth a soft nibble, and now her mouth slumped open with charcoal as they pant, finished.

  “I don’t think it will ever end,” she said and through the canvas, the never waning house, how it smoldered, always alive.

  How in those days we insulated the walls with hair, bones of children, farm animals dead, he said. Entire horse carcasses often warmed the children within.

  Now the boy who dreamed from the soil. How he woke and how he crawled from within. Now the boy and how he sat on the hillside and how he knew the breathing and strumming of the man and woman. How he knew their dreams. How they believed, some day, green lawns and above ground pools. How they believed a badminton net. A riding lawnmower and lemonade. How the boy knew the creature that rose within. Now along the hillside the boy watched the canvas tent alighted, yellow and red. Their shadows moving together. Their moans under the moan of the wind, the splintering of the burning house. How he wondered what a lit match does to canvas, the ash and red cinders diminishing everywhere around him, as if a snow storm or memories of Tokyo, the pape
r kingdom, set ablaze.

  Now the woman’s belly, mounded in low sickly glow. When the man felt the rise and what struggled beneath he understood the tent was no longer enough. So he constructed a house alongside the burning house. Now inside the tent the woman grew large. Always from her position the long shadows of construction, the ground of soot and ash. Hammering and the strains and groans and soon an entire wall blotted for the shadow of this new house. A two-story home in the English colonial style, the miniscule windows and the stone chimney, the wood plank floors and how this man pilfered the landscape for animals to insulate the walls, how he figured the fur and meat of these creatures would shelter them from the roar of the neighboring house, the fumes. How the kittens scratched and mewed and the hounds, their muffled baying until all was silent, until, finally, all were dead or too weak to mew and moan. How the windows streaked black and in those days, very seldom, the tar dripped. Their flower print wallpaper and how she scrubbed furiously with bleach at the first hint of black. Always, no matter the insulation, the soft blue fumes and the wood smoke, the pine tree air fresheners she hung first from the living room doorway and then the kitchen and soon fastened from hooks in the ceiling and all throughout the bedroom, the nursery. The subtle motions of a thousand air fresheners when the man or woman passed beneath. How the man’s eyes watered for the smoke and pine fumes. How he punched the walls, the bloody purple of his knuckles and how he said “this goddamned house!” There the drip of tar along the crevices. How the television antenna bent under the soot and now the man on the roof with a push broom. How the woman wept silently on the sofa while the man’s racket from the rooftop, the hoarse wind, the plummet of cinders. Soon the duct-taped rabbit ears and the flickering local news. Now the soon-mother mounded on the flower print sofa and the soon-father there sockless and half asleep on his reclining chair. How they tucked the exterminator clothes away in trunks in the cellar, how they said “good riddance.” How the woman pried open the trunks while the man went job hunting and the waft of dust and age and yellow and how she regarded these clothes, starched with mold and soot, some mornings, as she strung the laundry across the basement. The laundry she once thought to dry in the open sun and how she leaned at the window, and the thought of the grass and the wind and their sheets, thrashing against the breeze.

  In those days our women died by childbirth or by the flames. How many women we found as if tarred, sprawled on front lawns, within pantries. Yes, so often an unwed mother became a living wick, and her condition was cured by the long blue flames—

  Now the boy along the hillside. How he lay on his belly in a mound of soft ashes. How he watched the lighted windows and the mother and father who were not his and the son they bore. How the son was not him. How he watched them through the lighted windows, streaked with soot. The son, in those days and how she held him against her lap, his pink open mouth. Now how the boy dreamed of you, returned. How he considered your hooves and your white eyes peering through black masks. How the son grew and how this new family laughed and watched television. How they ate carrots and ham from television trays. How the son grew. Soon, almost a man. How the father snuck the old exterminator outfits from their chests and how this son and the father played catch in them, their familiar bandanas tight. Their slow ungainly trudge through the debris. How the cinders caught in the wind seemed like worms set afire. How the ball spiraled through this horror until it plunged forever into mounds of black. How father and son made black angels pressed into the soot and how their soot castles caught on every gust. When the two returned inside how the wife wrinkled her nose. How she pulled away, coughing, as the husband kissed her. How he showered with a scouring pad and emerged with beads of blood. How the mother undressed and the shape of her figure, her pink brassiere, through the lighted window. How the boy thought she would taste. How she would look strewn. The way this family who was not his family would look cut and severed. How the boy watched from the hillside and considered the voices and what you would do to this house, erected in the flickering shadow of all he loved.

  How the boy woke moaning the thunder of horses.

  How he dreamed these seas of worms.

  How the boy watched the mother in the lighted windows. How her skin seemed to taste in his mind.

  How the son slept in the soft glow of the nightlight. How the boy in his soot and ashes, and the light of your new fires, farther and farther away.

  Before us these people wandered bridges. These people gardened. We made them into shadows.

  How the son watched the boy from his bedroom window. How the son became feverish for this lonesome boy, a silhouette on the hillside of cinders. How the son waited until his family slept, how he dressed in exterminator’s clothes before wandering to the hillside, and how he woke the sleeping boy, naked under a scorched gnarled oak. How he handed the boy a mayonnaise sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. How the boy ate as if he had never eaten before, his lips smeared white, his greedy eyes wide at the taste, the son before him. Who are you, little boy? the voice of the son, lost in the moaning winds. How the boy pressed the son deep into the soot. How the son thrashed beneath him. How the meat went limp and cold beneath his fingers.

  Are you lonely out here? Do your parents know you’re gone?

  How the exterminator clothes stunk of the son’s last moment. How they fell from the boy’s figure like a sack, as if the dead-son had been twice his height. How the boy’s teeth trembled as he thought, They will know. How the boy crept into the house dressed in the black clothes of the dead boy, and how the soot trailed in his wake. How the parents slept somewhere in the house, their snores while he waited for them in the living room, and how they found him asleep in the morning, or what seemed morning under black skies. How they prodded him with fingers until he woke and how when they spoke he did not know the words. The father carried him to the bathroom and the mother stripped the clothes from him like an enormous skin. How they held him under the shower, no matter his thrashing, and how the water became pools of oil. How they called him the name of their son and dressed him in the dead child’s too large clothes.

  How he stood before the fogged mirror, pink and alive.

  How the father said, “Did you always have brown eyes?”

  How they poured him milk as if his throat were not clogged with soot.

  How they watched television and, when he snorted at the stupidity, how they said “but you like this show” and how in his mind the boy thought of you and your horses and your knives and your canisters of gasoline rampaging into the television house. The blonde family, blood smudged and torn apart while once bald eagles swirled overhead. The pristine house, wrapped in smoke and flame, and your black masks on the television.

  The son dead before him. His bulging purple face. His coal-stuffed eyes.

  How slow the son’s dead meat slid free of his clothes. The pale white against the landscape. How the boy kicked the dirt over and over until the son was a mound in the shadows along the hillside.

  “Looks like we need to do some school shopping,” the mother said when the son’s clothes did not fit him.

  How the mother kneeled before the boy’s bed. How they prayed although he did not know the prayer. How she must have known.

  What did he dream in these last moments? Did he consider his father and the soot angels they made? The arms of his mother, their warmth?

  How the boy and the father stood at the window watching the burning house, how it shimmered in the waves of heat. How the father said—

  I believe in what comes before innocence. I believe in the wide yawning mouth.

  Now the boy in the dead-son’s bedroom. How he laid on the son’s spaceship sheets, the faint green of the stars decaled along the ceiling. The shapes they spelled in their secret language. How kittens seemed to mew within the walls and how the boy slept, contented by the sound. How the boy read The Art of Lovemaking from the dead-son’s shelf although the words seemed squiggles of worms, how the pictures were black a
nd white photos of bodies, naked men with shaved heads, their ribs and shoulders, the bones jutting, naked men tossed and wrapped into each other, naked men piled and mixed with the dirt while smoke stacks loomed in the dim background. The coils of black smoke. He blushed when the mother asked him what he was reading and he said later it reminded him of her and Father, together. “How so?” But he would not say.

  How the father said, “Do you remember when we played catch outside—”

  And the boy said, “Until we lost the ball—”

  “In the mounds somewhere,” the father said. “And how angry your mother was, how she wouldn’t look at us. We were filthy, I’m sure. But a boy has to play, I said—”

  How he kissed the first girl he brought to his room, the taste of her wires, her blue rubber bands. Her smile and her neck against his kisses, the strawberry of her red hair. How she trembled beneath his weight, under his wetness, his hands. How she was firm and large and seemed as the mother once seemed through the lighted window. “Please, I want to see,” he told this girl. How she caught her hair, her braces, in her sweater. How her teeth chattered and her eyes darted. How the boy, with his lips and his hands, did not care even after her neck gave against his caresses and she seemed to fade in and out of consciousness. This girl, pale and fraught with freckles. And how her undershirt pulled free and how her gray brassiere and his fingers along the edges, the softness. Now pulling and unraveling and unsnapping until these, pink and erect and what he so long anticipated. How she whispered against his embraces that she should leave. How she heard the mewing within the walls, ghosts of kittens long dead, voices of kittens born anew. “There’s nothing there,” the boy murmured against her neck, his hands—. How she pulled free anyhow. How she scurried while he lay, exposed and ready for her. How her soot tracks disappeared against the gusts and fresh cinders. How the boy never saw her again.