Tony is a crouching lump in a flat field. He pinches the dirt and puts it in his mouth and sloshes saliva until the soil dissolves. He spits into his hand. In the bitter slurry are the little black balls he finds everywhere.
In his hair, after showering.
In his anus, after wiping.
In his blood, after bleeding.
He’d tried bleeding them out, the black pellets, when people thought there was still a way to undo what the Founder had done. They said to sit in a bath of leeches, so he did. And they sucked on his eyelids and his scrotum. His knuckles and his nails.
But the black pellets are everywhere and the sun is still exploding and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

It’s five thirty am. No one knows that, not Tony, not even the Founder. The time Tony sees, through the bay windows, on the clock in the living room, is a guess.

He remembers Phoebe–legs in yoga pants standing on the loveseat, bare arms reaching, then the minute hand, sweeping left and back around until–
“How do you know it’s midday?”
“Because I say so,” she said. She was her father’s daughter.

No, every day has become a day in and of itself and the ones before it and the ones after it are as distinct from one another as the little black pellets Tony lets fall back to the dirt. Tony holds up his hand. He wants to feel the warm light push on his skin. Yet he’s aware of the other side, the darkness of his palm. Damp in anticipation. Both the light and the dark, the warmth and the damp, he feels and finds significant, somehow, like the two faces of the moon. He longs for her changeable glow. Her mutable rhythm.

Phoebe’s father has always slept the deep sleep of a man who answers to no one. He didn’t care about the kind of light streaming through his windows. Whether it was morning or golden hour. Whether it threw patterns of broken light and dappled shade.
He’s asleep right now, Tony thinks. Yes, fast asleep on the other side of the only house as far as the eye could see.

Tony peers through Phoebe’s living room window. He cups his hands on the glass. A strangeness overcomes him, as if, this wasn’t a room. This room-shaped room. Nothing dusty. Everything perfectly placed, never used. It’s just a painting. One of Phoebe’s.
If that’s true though Tony shouldn’t be able to jimmy the window like he is. The window he broke five years before, helping Phoebe move the loveseat.
“The light over there is much nicer,” she said.

The window opens and he’s inside. He stumbles on a new piece of furniture – new to him, at least, and a picture frame falls on its face with a crack. It’s a photo of him and her, not him and her but him and her. Thoughts, old thoughts, claw their way to the front of his mind, but Tony is focused.
He floats through the parlour like in a dream. Maybe it is a dream, yes, it’s a dream, all of it, and soon he’ll wake up in the dark.

Tony finds her bedroom upstairs open. The bed’s enormous. A pearl white spread hangs off the mattress and onto the floor. Pillows like puffs of cloud lay on the bed and on the side table. In the middle of the bed, the sheet is wrinkled and creased. He flattens it out. The touch is warm. It’s warm on his cheeks, too. He lets himself fall and closes his eyes and breathes deeply.
On the floor beside the bed, a pair of knickers. He picks them up and holds them like a cat's cradle. A crust on the inside breaks as he pulls them taut and imagines legs stepping into them, those same legs on the loveseat, stretching.
“Tony?”
Tony drops the knickers. Now he’s focused.
“Hello stranger.”
She draws her paint stained hands to her chest. Her overalls are the same colour as her knickers.
“I’m dreaming.”
Tony is close enough to smell the solvent fumes coming off her, the fumes wriggling the air, wriggling like she did now, back against the door thud door against the wall and Tony with the hand scars tucking a lock of Phoebe’s hair behind her ear, his soft, leecheaten finger nail tracing the shape of her auricle to her lobe until his thumb found her throat.
“Then wake up.”

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Pub: 20 Jan 2025 21:15 UTC

Edit: 21 Jan 2025 00:54 UTC

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