We Stay Up All Night Because We Are Dissatisfied (#2)

by Pawl Schwartz

Fluff.

  Woman walks across the hallway waving her fucking arms like spoons in a strobe light, flames everywhere, crawling along the banister like tongues unrolling from a cartoon dog’s mouth at a movie opening. Wicked witch flying right beside, a cartoon from a paperweight VHS on sale in Wal-mart sitting in a flimsy cardboard display with Casper on the side smiling in pigment: pure empty space. Old time cartoons prancing at standstill and non threatening. Something sinister about those old cartoons. Something terrible about the fire woman with spoon hands, something that would be taken away by a cardboard

  Display, a show of affection or presentation. Something with blonde hair named Susan. The woman, not the hair. The hair is stuck in the first stage of fire, lightening up while the clothing hamper behind her burns. Her husband is curled up in there, everything he left. There are more of his skin flakes in the fibers of those clothes than there had been in the urn when it got back to her. So much of it stays in the incinerator, so much blows away. She had sensed so much of him in the laundry hamper she had thrown his clothes into that she had kept habit of talking to it. She would move it with her feet around the living room, tracing his old footpaths in the carpet with the thing day by day, the way she imagined that dead people saw time. She thought so because they faded from the world so slowly. Had to decompose and be put underground so that we are not disturbed by their strange disappearing act. At least they do it slowly so that we have time to hide the whole spectacle from sight. She thought it would be much scarier if people just disappeared quickly when they died. Then we would be for sure that there was an afterlife, that there was another piece of paper stacked behind this one that you could melt or rip through onto. She had been happy to prolong the slow fade by keeping her husband’s stinking clothes around. She was sure that if she wrung them hard enough that he would be forced out from in between the fibers that separated him, that he would fall to the bottom of the hamper like a giant droplet of water, that his hat and moustache would stare up at her from the top. It be awkward she thought, from inside her slowly cooking

  Head, an extension of the body similar to the hand, one that can communicate about as effectively, but with a wider range of sound. Hers bobbed on the stairs over her body. They were carpeted, the stairs not the body. She wished they weren’t now. Her head slipped forward towards the floor as it tripped over the laundry basket she had dropped. She didn’t remember picking it up. It was too full of fire to carry. Husband was all scattered down the stairs in dark little patches. Little spots of fire were put out. She thought that she could jump onto the little stepping stones of husbandclothes all the way to the bottom of the stairs. She could make it before they caught. Her naked head didn’t worry as much as her body did when she felt her dress stiffen as if current had been shot through the entire thing. She was scared she was already dead. She knew she had seen a wicked witch a second ago. The flower print of her dress was disappearing and her skin felt strangely energized, shamed and chapped as the ink burned to her then off, turned into a grey caul of crisp hot

  Fiber, a simple weaving of simpler parts. What men and women were supposed to do to create children between them, the same way a strong current of gravity can bring lesser specs together to create a sphere. This pull is greater than that of any smaller part on earth. It doesn’t have to be slow, but probably operates on the same timeframe as a body’s disappearance from this world. Like the hamper that seemed to have recollected itself and run up after Susan. After her charred red skin, her leather pussy mouth that she held in her crotch, always unshaved before so no one could see the sagging brown lips like an old left out piece of cut avocado. Hair was gone now. Skin disappearing quick with it. The hamper had scooted up next to her with gusto. She stopped and stared, jumped when she noticed that her skin wasn’t burning any more. Like pressing the flimsy little button on the E-brake and lowering the thing down, she became a skeleton and ran out onto the front lawn, tripped over the basket that kept up with her even though she knew she had dropped it. It lit up a cigarette, invited her to roll around, to feel her bones against the fried grass. She curled into it instead, fit easily, all her parts able to touch now without skin muscle and grit to hold her together. The neighborhood houses screamed and shuttered, reeled back from

  Death, a bleeding through onto another sheet of paper, an operation in an alternative time that runs perpendicular to this one, is only available when you aren’t paying attention, in between frames. The slow crawl that creeps us, that raises hairs and separates couples trying to finish up quick in the back of a Honda, maybe a leaned back front seat, much more practical, unless a girl’s knee knocks the shifter out of gear. Moustache bobbing and blonde Susan hair whispering I love you twenty years back and thirteen blocks over. That pesky knee now a flaming bare bone knee. Skeletons have no interest in sex. You can get in any part of them and it’s just the same as the weathered outside. Sex is a muscle and skin thing. A skeleton knows nothing of it, can fold up into it’s husband and stuff his outer husk and unused skin inside of her, fill her rib cage up with clothes and check her pelvic bone absentmindedly to see if she’s wet before remembering. The houses back away over the horizon as the thing stands up with empty hamper next to it, moustache resting on the girl skeleton’s nose gulch. Invisible cigarettes are lit by the multi colored sodden stuffed up girl skeleton with hat and moustache before the houses try to throw dirt over it, not worrying about the flaming house, but about the too swift disappearing act of Susan. Her stuffed up skeleton hobbles out of the way, wobbles between dirt clods until it’s on its way down the street, people all moving swiftly behind a firetruck, all in fast forward with light trailers. Susan is frustrated that she cannot blink. Thinks maybe she is seeing in between frames like that, not cutting the world in little five second intervals. She finds herself scooped up before she can turn around to see what is happening. Swiftly, between the beating of a hummingbirds wings, she finds that she is in a casket, surrounded and talked over by little chipmunk voices. The wicked witch flies by again at her speed, normal speed. She’s still stuffed, but the clothes are trying to crawl away to the husband’s grave. They hope they can still half make him after his months in the ground. A month is a second to the dead, but not to their body. They slip out from between ribs during the service, crawl away like mop-dog worms that live under rocks in children’s TV shows, fake coloring, filled with the same static and transmission, an overall red, lines all going through them. The skeleton jaw is chattering “fuck me” and reaching for the stick shift knob of a Honda, shuttering and trying to pile the clothes back in as they crawl, wriggle and resist, but the husbandfibers get out and over the edge of the casket. The skeleton is still chattering and trying to pull invisible things into it while gym socks and hat scoot around the folding chairs as they are taken up in double time, and towards the husband’s grave to dig him out with their limp edges. Cloth spoons. Greased shovels. The crotches of the husbandjeans stick around the longest crying over the grave, filled with shaft skin and sex butter from between leg gulches, fresh skin ditches with matter from

  A man, some kind of sick hormone transformation of the standard female baby that floats in the womb, it’s stupid legs stretched back like a sorority girl in sweatpants, feet out the window of a car on the highway and sex smashed against 3rd world stitched crotch midseam, a weak point for her privileged sex to press against. Relaxed in the womb until chemicals turn it’s important parts inside out, make it go to college, buy a Honda on a loan, grow a moustache and a hat right out of his head. Something that will later turn into a sort of permanent bone crown, golden like plaqued teeth, skin retreating from around it like a toilet seat bowl, old shed scab of a hat fixed over top, later painted to look more subdued like a store bought one, when classes are taught and Honda is still driven, no longer fucked in, tongue of a leaned back passenger seat cradling young grinders. Standard woman mostly unchanged from womb state, still girl, no parts inside out to fill others, to play a role. Husband’s skull
crown was molded like pinched up clay. Susan would feel his hat, would picture him teaching his class while she hung off of him in the front, arms around his neck and hips around his dick, grinding like a woman, but face like a kid swinging on his annoyed father’s arm while he tried to talk to an adult. The class wouldn’t be able to leave, and he would have to tolerate. She liked him tolerating her like that, made her feel sillier, like he was missing out on something serious, didn’t understand her superior sense for whimsy and kid stuff. She would take off his hat while she was grinding him in class she thought. If she could get it to come off. Hoped the lecture was on something interesting so that she would pay a little bit of attention in between consuming thrusts choked and stuck dry with chalk dust that always seemed to collect in moist places, as if it was trying to soak up and contain the moisture, a gravitational force, a round piece of

  Spit, flung from the mouth of a man in a hat with a moustache, standard model mutant variation of base level female body, what all women carry in them when they let their gravitational pull fuzz over the lines of someone else’s in the Venn diagram of their shared space. A feedback loop that lapsparticles together, wrangles them up into some kind of rolling soft gelled piece of

  Death, his sock and shirt patched dead body leading a slow life above ground in scattered burnt pieces, clawing with tree limbs at the top of her grave so that he could fill her toaster coil warm body with himself again, no remove. Mostly grave dust and dryer lint, but enough to fill her up underground, with tree roots exploratory snake route and water from his next door plot leaking out of them, unpolluted by her bitter skeleton. He wants to stuff her up again like a teddy bear’s innards until he catches fire from her heat, what she sends from the other

  Page, a thing that it stacked beside other pages, a Taoist notion really. Can also stand between pages, so that things may pass from one to another, can fill up with hot skeletons stuffed up like teddy bears, mustached, stuck in a Honda teaching a class and burning on the way down the back stairs into the teacher’s lounge for sex, starting a kids show and exploding into cathode ray fuzz like a cotton ball deep fried and run through with electricity.