Nothing here
He wants me to lose my edge. He takes me to the edge and then tells me mine is wrong. He holds me over the water. We cross a great meadow in the dark. He glides through the grass. I walk like one leg is 7 inches shorter than the other because I hit every rabbit hole but not through. I am forced to follow him because he moves faster. I am forced to follow him because my body moves slower. In the distance, lights from a gas station in America stolen by men in non reflective clothing are suspended from the necks of swans, which bow over the cantilevered trusses and bleed on my head as they air condition the interim we want for. We reach the edge of the dark meadow and behind us in the blackness the Super 8 sign and a truck semi shining with full teeth. Sometimes he smiles at me as he tells me how I am. And he steps first into the floodlights, up off the grass waist high and now boots hard down on the narrowing stretch of pavement. We walk alongside the two lanes of oncoming traffic in the false light of the cargo birds and the broken necks. We are always in this light. He only sees me in this light. In the night on a bridge 1500 miles away the men wear reflective clothing and mill about the bodies of dead creatures. and I think my light is different but one night as we passed a shining steel tank full of liquid asphalt I saw for an instant the men multiplied and reflected, inside its belly such pretty-sitting in the dark because their edge is gone too. I see the it is a plain 800 meters away behind me and below me an honest 112 feet. We walk along the bridge until we reach a change some distance away, a coin becoming bigger. The cover of a manhole left ajar in the middle of a concrete section of the side walk. He opens it and lets himself down the ladder to the platform below. I am left above in the hospital. I follow him because he has something of mine. He broke the handle of an axe for me on some wood whether he lets me remember or not matters little because I can’t forget what I Saw. I don’t think he realizes how important the things he dislikes about me are. Rarely am I able to discuss the corners of my eye without losing them to his vision. He often must stop to retch in the bushes at the sight of the thought of people last night or in the street.
Under the bridge the platform extends like his very palm which has held me safe so many times before, and while he plays with its edges I move to the one which I know is mine, where the palm is no longer connected to the wrist. I twist my scarf in my hands and hold the cold railing to my. body and count the feet. The water reflects and the the wind directs and the forces of miles away count to 1, 2, 6 and nothing more but that’s enough to show me the design of my life. Me being out of this hand. Its out of my hands now.
When I was a child an incision of flesh appeared on my palm like I had been ritually gouged by a Buck knife by a boy in the back of the bus. Except hadn’t and only the scar ever appeared. Years later on the middle finger of the same hand a parallel but opposite parabola developed overnight. When he first doubted my edges I mapped them and discovered conjoined are my implicit curves. Oh do you ever confound those for yourself? I asked him. He hates it when I cant remember how he seems to know I am.