2/22/1999 G.g.Ashbrook
They grabbed hands and ran down the steps, the screen door flapping behind them letting out the sounds of bubbling soups, the smell of breads, and the clanging of utensils. They ran across the yard and ducked behind the first tree they came to, but already standing there was a Catholic priest hold a torah with a jar of decomposing gefilte fish hanging from a rope around his neck. They dashed off deeper into the forest but everywhere men dressed like construction workers were marking off trees, roping off areas. They ran further in and found a clean looking cabin and no one appeared to be inside. They went in and shut the door, but as soon as they began to compose words to eachother, using their slotted boards and letter chits, hands and tubes of mind, moving shadows and mechanical obstructions, would reach down or across through the air and distort their efforts to put down their words. Soon the owner of the house arrived and they picked up their boundaries and carried them out past the figure with the shaking finger and the chalk board. They ran and ran, passing bazaars, festivals of sport, venders of rainbow-gold gauntlets for the running, and the peaks of circus tents in the distance, all beckoning with word or image, and at last they came to a lake. At the lake the two stopped. The water was full of canoes and gondolas, kayaks, yachts, schooners, dingys, inner tubes, and the surface under the water was boiling with the bodies of eels, trout, bass, rays, seals, crayfish, all packed into the lake with barely enough water to cover them all over. On one edge of the lake, native children would play a game where they would balance on a log spinning in the water, and they would grab fish and hurl them and the other person, to see if they could get the other person to loose balance first and topple in.
The ground seemed to be sagging under their feet. Off in the distance some of the larger trees would fall through the ground leaving a jagged hole slowly sucking in all the objects around it. As the clouds moved past, the couple looked up and could see, now visible behind the fluff, centuries, millennia, of sewn patches, zippers with pad-locks, buttons, snaps, broaches, laces, Velcro, scars, burn marks; and masses of entities, too far away to distinguish precisely, who were rapidly repairing the thin spots where it was beginning to give way for whatever reason. It was not uncommon for a huge hole to appear, with anything from void to brilliance behind, but it would only last a moment, often too quick to be seen at all, this quick are the workers who repair the sky.
The two stood there, latent was the thought that some epilepsy might require the untangling of their fingers. He bent down and picked up a seasoned crouton off the beach and tossed it into the water, where a frenzy greeted it. She in turn launched a saltine, which skimmed against the surface a halve dozen times before a herring gull caught it in the air, itself nearly catching the jaws of a grouper as it soared away. Still finger wrapped they turned to eachother and kissed a moment around, the only word they knew to share for now. But even then, almost before the close of a moment, those undistinguished hands reached in to untie the hole.