Those were some muscles he had and Sally Potawatomi wanted to eat them. No, he thought, it had to be another Potawatomi not the Sally he sat behind in fourth grade.
That was a nasty thought he had then going back to the small classroom where the grade school kids all huddled under their desks to hear stories of the great white light. When you see it run to it said Mrs. Oxley as she prepared to whack another poor sap with her rude pointer. What he saw then, with all of existence in the balance was Sally’s behind; calico dress with off-white undies.
A flash and we are gone gone.
But he had not thought out where he was going on a slower arc of personal development through the subsequent thirty years of non-instant-annihilation.
As if he had to make up for the lack of the instant nothing by slow methodical rotting away of his connections to a life well lived his kidneys and liver and brain.
To find himself now derelict, collapsed, laid out in the wilder bushes amidst a floss of empty bottles, used butts stained with teeth, tarnished paper wrappers, dead condoms, behind the public pool house.
A Robert Moses monolithic expanse empty of shallow water, vast blue-painted concrete vessel to hold laughing summer bodies of common humankind in full swelter, this giant public pool it had lain dormant, nothing more than a solar sink of flat concrete for the last twenty years as the local ethnic community of Italians and Poles, not quite so long ago immigrant laborers themselves, resisted the light of those other slightly darker funny speaking people, like him and Sally.
To move up as they would a great tide of unwarranted energy from the neighborhood to the south, with Sally Potawatomi hacking at his left arm with a dull rusted hunting knife.
Wherever she had got that?
And there was a cattail growing there in Brooklyn.
He almost dreamed as he lay there half insensate with a marinade of vodka, his sweat was nearly flammable in late July, that this harpy shade would have gone after something more in the succulent family of genre… but this Sally now in the lonely morning fog along Leonard Street as she huddled and fussed over his carcass like a fledgling vulture was no more sane or reasonable than that Sally he poked with the point of his #2 pencil under her desk.
It was a subtle squeak that Sally let out into the panoply of elbows and little asses like a secular prayer hall, heads huddled in with their small delicate bodies, anticipation of the cinder of bone in a black silhouette flashed out in dull contrast, pointed to the concrete wall away from the bright expanse of the window wall, and it was recorded, we presume, her feminine bark not yet matured, as all of existence is recorded some place in a great bin or repository of such incidents but with a dull sort of push down and lean into it Sally managed a severance of his artery and he bled out.
Gabriel Orgrease is from the northernmost county in Appalachia which makes him a hybrid of between-hills and the Finger Lakes of NY State. He enjoys breaking hard rock into angstroms with hammers though currently he lives with abundance of sand near to the Atlantic halfway between Manhattan and Montauk on the flatland south-shore of Long Island. He blogs at Orgrease-Crankbait. A vid reading of this vsf can be found at: http://bit.ly/9D95sm.
Flammable sweat is a good concept.
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