The table end

It was a sun swept afternoon, like thoughts of Tuscany and the tops of olive trees, the American southwest, like my father’s cousin’s house in the field near the elevated train track where he went inside to the card table near the windows for menudo while we crawled through the gravel, like shade brushed picnics. This, instead, was drenched suburbia, a doorway behind a gap wooden fence, a fresh gate of glowing wood, a saw sounding on a different street.

We met at the door. She was there at the door to pull me into the old lit trinket home, through the door, a brush, an immense gravitational pull, through the door and into her. Her mouth was a living heater, and it took all of mine in, wrapped it warm and pulled my mind in whole, too, until before I knew, we were leaning against a wooden hutch somewhere close and across from a bright window, hands and bodies full. There were cubes on the counter, and plastic oddly shaped things I would never see, colorless, expressionless, without history, but I knew where they were.

There was more of the home somewhere. I never saw it. Before I knew, again, we were unclothed. My face stayed pushed against skin so that it was all I could see, finding air when I wanted, and I didn’t need to look past any of the encompassing skin, because the warmth rocked and contented.

From behind us through the door, an old black and white man with a short derby black hat to match his mustache stepped in, and he was followed by a line of two or three older women in respectable quiet, black dresses. Their confidence and silent hate proclaimed they owned the place, and there I stood standing pushed up against their daughter – an older woman – naked, chilled. I covered myself and dirt, dust, something inhaled we all looked past. 

“Clothe yourself, young man,” the old man said, and with the gray words created his own country, an ending independent entity. He wouldn’t hesitate to advertise the truth to anyone who came looking. He had witnessed the naked young man sinfully with his daughter. Let it be known throughout.

Then in the door, while my hands barely covered my damp self, while she scrambled bumping behind me, and everything hot again, with a bicycle helmet, tight shorts, with nothing of shock on his face, came my friend, friendly stabbing Howard, who looked in from the door and I denied it. I shook my head and worked to deny anything and he turned too quickly to go.

…

We were alone between the door and the gate, on soft grass in some shade, Howard, up on his bike, was yellow metal, and I was filled with bright energy to leave, lifting me up off the ground and bending me forward. I asked, “You still live with your parents?” She said, fully clothed, wonderfully warm, lovely and ugly, “Don’t forget to take the table,” the long outdoor reason for Howard’s and my visit, the errand. I huddled and lifted one end of the heavy teak onto my shoulders, began to drag the thing on the tall dry grass and over the hill home. Long, sharp grass stems tickled, poked and scratched at my ankles, fell into my socks, while me between the unshowered ground and the ever pressing boards, lumbering, I didn’t take my mind much from the dancing hot mouth and the photons like thickest dust clinging to the walls of that orange room.

The rest was crawling, up over the lonely hill, realizing who, where I was going and the probably warning direction that Howard went. Then set in the table end regret, knowing the now worthlessness of that unfinished heat, the ultimate unimaginable of the inevitable truth, the ways in which I would never see again, truncated like the picture you know so well, yet the only one you may ever own, the mystery of the horrible ways in which I may live tomorrow if the truth is what was happening here. I crawled slower over the hill, but always unmistakably forward, because the worst dreams cut off with a quick breath of relief.

I prayed to wake, pulled the pain forward and slowly over the brown green hill, she appeared like the rising sun, who I went to, her face, tender tended morning porcelain, entirely shattered, and it was me under one end of the damned sun drenched table I wish I had never met, me that had bashed her waiting, rising, traces of laced love face in. I killed myself to it if I could, and I woke.