We, who sleep each night in the coldest of folds, wake to find the sun never so bright; but always… always more distant – just as before. And while I cannot see you, I know that you’re there. I can touch you like sleep and hear your breath, thin on the air. Always along. Inside and with-out. Just like you said. Your love till the end.

And, just like you said – in this nightmare of sight, a cast of dark clouds and a swirl of life. A pallor; a paleness, grows from within. Here, before others. Bumps of no notice and trips falling from fright. Into some fear; each moment… Each movement has changed. No longer with purpose. No longer we strive. We recognize the impassable stands – where we were taught never to scale. Its walls without form. Unbroken by motion or speed. Divides us with walls but never impedes. And so, we move – we move harder, and we move faster. We dance, and we stir in the air. Only to jump. And land, lazily, where others might care.

And there… we slept; we slept all alone. And have… or slept with another. And at times we stared… and looked at each other. With wonder and fear, we look up through the glass, like a ghostly scope for the stars. Insecure and inspired by the oldest of thoughts. Intent on the truth during these, our last hours of less. Had things been born different. Or differently packed. Wrapped and rolled in ribbons of lace. Loved unlike this looping and lolling of plastic upon an ocean of sick. That which mottles and burns and clamps us in place like the bends in our backs. Scars from our serving… from swimming in circles… from standing too long, when we’re told to sit and to heal. The purples, they grow and spread wider and wider. That we might fight against fire – and forget that luck be a spider with lace like a web.

They labor each turn with an ache for the sea – long given away like the hunted and speared. Continuous needs – inalienable, written, and so they tell us to stay. As though food simply grows from the gravel below; not from within. Not from the soul. We whittle at limbs, hollowed before old. Hallowed when sold for the thinness of bark and lightness of handle.

The candle, always above, but rarely so dark. It’s in the moon that we find this most insolvent of friends. It rises like iron; slow but with weight. It swallows our prayers and crushes with fate. Rests us and reminds us. We’re more than our mark. But, too, it is shallow; lending motion to thoughts that corrupt and erode. Where dreams are waylaid and complacency sewed. Marred with the deeds of history’s authors. Fearing we might sound the greater of fools.

For fallacy is for fools fleeting from form like son from the father. Greatness costs more than… foolishness.

So I confess, here. Know now, that I have done horrible things. Much like teardrops falling from the wettest of clouds, which splash in my pool and stir me from sleep. Leave lines on my face, because I’ve been used by riptides of woe. I’ve been shaken, and I have been spun. I have been hit; and my spirit undone. And still I sin a great many things and sing an old song of still older praise – as though to a world through leaf litter which winter now brays. So many; with few having a wholeness. A world of wars without wars; in need of far more much closer to home. Closer to heart. We see no wilderness of wolves. No whales lurking our seas. Just a scene of some purchase we paint white like our youth. Like youth paint ownership or how republics escape truth. A land washed by telling our best, though the best will not do. We drown in an ocean – we plant green as the land. Build castles and cannons… while we leave nowhere to stand.

To the young and abandoned; and rightly rebellious. To the old and forgotten; who lead us between arms and depression. To toilsome trouble, disloyal and illogically lost. None of us share so well as unvisited age. But mock, we all, the sight of a girl who won’t drink from a bottle. Like phantom of angst. Like cherub with spear. A cap most tarried to open. Must we forget and sink in our fear?

On the table, what’s bottled is incredibly blue. Fixed and familiar and nowhere at once. Printed like ink, and full of some body of truth. Lost and unseen and never retained. Lost like a dream; which rises to be never regained.

“So, how was school?” asks the young mother. Pale hands with the loll of a single, scarred russet; hard as a stone – under the faucet, after a day of searching for profit and class. A day of the bone from which most cannot stand. Continuously carved till marrow is missing. Never restored. The tips of her hands haunt as they go through the heat of hot water. Blanched of their life, they wilt as they scour. Dirt from the pores like she’s washing her face.

Smoothing her sculpture. Another lap in her race.

Her white sink, white apron, and white marble top counter. Country white cabinets and white tile floor. Stainless steel knives reflect a sterilized sun. Everything neat, and all in its place. Bought from the years like the chrome-sided toaster; its bread in the box. Plates on the shelves; the good silver below. Pots hang from above, just out of reach. The stove boils a kettle, for the mug set aside. Tea on the table, beside a dark swirled vase. Ready to steep.

“The same,” says the girl with the side of her face flat to the table. Tears in her eyes, within her arm’s hollow.

“What was for lunch?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t eat. Didn’t even… get in line,” she finishes it softly and slowly. Any more and she’d be bound to explain.

“You need to eat, or you’ll become sick. You’re thin enough.” Contradiction for bait. That’s what mom does. More so, in the morning. Increasing… of late.

“How is Angio?” Mother continues but doesn’t look up; never looks up – like friends in the hall that say hi and ask how but never break stride unless to be loud. Just a game that is played. Sincerity bouncing from portent to portent, but held by the roots.

She stands and gathers the bottle and bundle of books. Slinks out from the table and heads for her room. She’s quiet; silent in fact. Drown by the rush of the water and a thirst she now stacks.

“How is…”

Alone – if only presence. School, an upheaval; a place for some to chatter or twinkle the acts that they play. But home is a shallow; everything settles and the surface is smooth. Under a roof, most harms become stagnant. The smallest of things settle on every corner and lip. Her closet, filled with her dreams.

Just like white curtains hide the light between seams.

Her pack hits the floor with the thud of twelfth grade abridgement – Melville‘s peg leg and misguided fink – but that’s not what they say. Paper is sandwiched in sketchbooks, journals, schedules, and textbooks. She drops them all beside the bed where comfort sleeps cozy. Like kudzu, saps sleep and chokes pages of lines. Every lesson she’s taught. Criticism of culture bought with the egos of lectures and repetitions of minds. Marks made of arguing. Not treating others as kind. So long as proof can hold fiction, anyone’s history builds a studious mind.

She leans from her bed, a bed without pillows, to hold the bottle in hand. Holds it close to her face. A smoky blue sea hiding gypsy, glass beads. Seesaw like seaweed. They tilt and then swirl. And soundlessly fold like Neumeier silk

Unscrewing inside. Unsure of what they’re to be.

At the length of the room, a fish bowl; it’s empty, save for its dainty pieces of home. A pool of clarity above crystal-clear quartz. With a sprig of some green stirred like an underage julep. She dumps him out from the bottle beside a small, plastic tower. Watches him turn in the flow; Angio looks like he’s sleeping.

Though his eyes are half open. Or sleepily bored they sink to half closed. He glides to the bottom, a hundredth time more.

Always sleepy, this friend in a bottle. But never he sleeps. Always on watch; always he stares and listens for words of some need for some care. A black moor with butterfly fins; he flutters with speed – what’s lent from a moth. His motion, not straight, loops in the currents his tiny gills cough. In zigzag vibration.

Flights of kite tails in breeze. He’s spun wet with silk ribbons and kisses for air. The water he parts bares the marks of the bubbles he blows. Those that float

and then pop on the surface of unfocused perception. Unanchored conveyance. The drift of too perfect a voice.

“Angio… Angio… My little lily root. What’s that you say?” Leaning her ear close to the bowl. Where understanding gains face, “Oh, you’re hungry!”

But there’s no answer.

“Yeah, me too. And since you didn’t get lunch, neither did I. Lunch is for satyrs that blend with the grass.”

She sprinkles his pellets lightly across the tension of water and watches them sink. Within moments he smells them; his fins shake as he hunts. But he doesn’t eat. He only inhales them to move them, with no notion of taste.

You can’t be thirsty… so she sits on her bed. But the fish continues to stare. Eyes through the glass; above a shadow of care.

“Fine, Angio. I’m sad. Is that what you wanted to hear? I can feel myself slipping. Like food for a ghost. And we both know I won’t see twenty-five; not for a day.”

Clamp finned and torpedo. He reacts to her words with a wooosh woosh of his tail.

“I’m like that book that no one will read. That story of a man, how he worked to need more but never was happy. A blah-blah event, so tragic no one takes note. How he died a young age though he wakes with each morning; while his life’s roses grow wild, he’s no closer to it.

You can see it can’t you, my friend? That’s why you won’t eat. You see me. You see me and feel less, because you see me feel sad. Understand I feel less.”

Big-eyed and wide as her youth, she sweeps to her studies. A forest of paper. A taste of the hunt. Like a fox-born bounty; the bugles up front. Bundles broke loose across the beach of her bed. Her glories marched to the trumpets of ink.. Worksheets dissolved. Six lines and then ten. Spanish jacks sailing the green and godly sea north. Searing at Gravelines against storms and Anglos

⥈

And again, north, sinking and stranded on the shores of Scotland. She learns her lessons. Studies shortfalls none are taught to remember.

Her sketchbook unfolded She sink each of those sailors with strokes. Eats them with folds of foam and salt speckled wash. Sends soldiers to the bottoms of slavery and solitary loss. Each breath getting darker. Each cheek, a dream thirsty for life and short-tongued by muffled silence unbroken. Apologies bubble.

Vulnerability loves. The vulgar kept secrets – burst silent from lungs.

What’s said in a scream, cannot be unsaid with a whisper. No current can take those souls back to the moments they lost.

Across the room, she watches as Angio stares. Bumps the glass with his nose. Puffs his gills and flutters the bowl. Black wings for dark angels. How they flap, those which flitter and flutter. Slow as a brownie woken from an uneasy slumber. With her bristles, all loaded with a wash of some ink, she dashes drafts over the Spanish. Crashes black on their souls. Waves again rocks and sprays across bed. Each face stays just barely above. Each wave becomes bigger. Arms tangle in lines. While those, on boxes and masts, fall victim more slowly.

Eyes shine above a torrent of surf and then disappear into black. They knew they were last. Floating body to body, trying to stand on the shoulder of drowning. Till everything’s inked and blends with the cold. The paper is dripping. Everything’s soaked.

She looks up to her fish and sees that, despite lacking waves, he’s drifted from center. His fins slack and held still.

“You don’t approve? It swallows hope. Just like every sea. Just like every question, a game… they get us with rules. That’s why we’re taught. Hope swimming to her shore on the back of some other’s big loss. Or we go down drowning within sight of the coast.”

But Angio simply sinks down to the gravel. His gills slow too. She watches him put no effort in moving. No blinking, because goldfish can’t blink. Just puffing dispute of bubble-free silence. No voice to be heard. A cloud of denial. Unhappy. Unflinching. Unwavering. He meets her young gaze.

“Are you pouting, Angio? What about tomorrow? Will you pout then?” She drops her chin and stares at the soaked paper. It’s running. Watches it bleed into the sheets underneath. The black splatter. Wet spots flung on her bed. Great… I have to sleep in this mess.

Paper erupts in the air. Each black draft torn from its spiral ring. Flung to the floor. Beyond the depths of the sea. She believes the whole which lays deepest and collects more discord is the hole we will trip on, before it swallows with the cold.

Again, she raises her brush to the paper. Black ink poises firmly intent. Hands reach forward, start scratching, for victims. No air.

“Angio! Can’t you see?! I’m drowning in lessons where no bubbles can flee.” She stops and rests on the bed. “You don’t even know. How could you? How could you? … How could you?” With a leap from the bed, she springs to her feet. Walks up to the bowl and winks at the glass. Angio rises with a rare whoosh of his fin.

“You’re so cute. You know I love you,” as she walks back to the bed.

Angio circles. Bubbles over his head. Around the back of the plant. Over his pile of uneaten food.

She shifts the papers on the floor. Kicks discurrent texts and lesson plan plots. How we grew the legal fruits of havoc fields

How, since Leo, we’ve used two offensive tracts

And by some will of slavery, the trained and massed still remain at the doors of time and always-in-need. And there she finds her dowsing rod capped with its nubby bulb and glassy tip dip. Its matching pot of deathly-ill suction. Top like a stopper. Mouth like a sink.

“Because I love you and that’s all that you know. And because I can’t see what surrounds; what mustn’t grow swims all around. Me, there is no limit to… cutting. Task of lost words. Like stolen food. Do I file and rasp… or fight like the… No… You’ll understand if you think. This is how everything ends. And then another day starts.” With a squeeze, ink spurts in the bowl. A swirl of clouds like a storm from the sea. Night falls over the castle. Clings to the walls.

“I’m going to do worse in less time. This way you won’t see. Be happy I loved you. When I could be me. But everything’s sinking. Black like the sea.”

The door slams and not for less than a score of old moments can she recall. Black splatters on walls. Wet prints on the floor. Textbooks abridged with hard scrawl.

Inside the fish bowl, nothing is floating. Nothing will stir. She picks it up from the bottom and exits her room. Returns to the kitchen, where Mother resumes.

“Trouble with homework? I can help after dinner.” Hands pull down a plate from the cabinet above. A fork from the drawer.

She sets the bowl on the table. She sits in her seat.

“Angio’s dead.” The girl rests her head on the table. “I don’t feel like eating.”

“You need to eat, or you’ll become sick. You’re thin enough,” as Mother turns to set the single place at the table. Returns to the counter. A russet. Hot water. The pop of the toast.