Read Online Fell of Dark by Patrick Downes - Free Book Online

of a chair. A man’s death mask—open mouth, bullet hole in his forehead—shows up in the layers of a stone I keep in my pocket. I have a frowning man in a fingerprint.
    Once I saw your face in my breath. It was a February night under a streetlight. I can’t count how many times since then I’ve looked for you in the mist.

    I spent a lot of time this morning making faces in the bathroom mirror. I was supposed to be showering, but I’d just read about
grimaciers
in one of my father’s books.
Grimaciers
were French performers who put on performances of facial expressions in the eighteenth century. I stood in front of the mirror and twisted my face and closed one eye. I used my fingers to stretch my mouth and stick out my tongue, and I opened my eyes as wide as they could go. I pinched my eyes and pulled my hair. I pushed my nose flat, I plugged my nostrils, and I let my mouth do what it wanted. I did this so long I started turning into animals. The animals didn’t exist in real life. My skin turned colors. I got hairy, furry, and patterns came up. More than once, my teeth became fangs. A few times, I had a trunk and horns. My eyes turned colors, and I barked and laughed.
    I’ll tell you what made me stop. I made a face that reminded me of my father, but my face was not really mine or his, and I thought,
That’s what he looked like when he died, when the bumper of a car crushed his head.
Purple and his eyes backward, showing white, and his tongue rolling three feet out of his mouth.

New Year
Keep up the Latin
Read the Four Gospels
Write, read, think
Row
Discover my purpose
    I’m always resolved to find you. We won’t find each other until we find each other, but I keep an eye open. I search all the time.

Fantasy
    THE BATHTUB FILLS UP, and you stand at the window. A snowstorm clobbers the world.
    An icicle hangs from the roof. It’s thicker than your fist at the top and as long as your arm. The winter tooth scares you. If it broke off and struck a person, it would go through bone. You look from the point of the icicle to the ground twenty feet below. A person would have to be standing in the hedge for the icicle to hit. You test the water with your fingers and turn off the faucet. You settle up to your neck and watch the clouds pass.
    In this bathroom, you hold the sponge to your nose and smell my mother’s brand of black soap, which was my father’s. How long can you think about a sponge? How many times can you squeeze a wet sponge and watch the spill wind around your wrist, forearm, elbow, and biceps?

Headache
    THE PAIN IN MY head. The skinny knife, and the hammer and nails. The lights of an enormous city pressed into my left eye, and the green aurora borealis rolling past.
    Pain has no language other than growls or grunts. A headache for four days.

Nature
    ALL THE MIRACLES OF nature I miss. All the miracles I catch.
    My mother cracked an egg this morning and cried out. The egg had the beginning of a chick in it.

    An ancient fruit tree of some kind, an apple or cherry, grows in the park a little way from here. Every March, it blooms. Ten thousand pink and white flowers bloom and shake for a week. Then, all the flowers fall, and for a while the tree stands in its own memories. Last week, I went to look at the tree in bloom. I stood under it while the blossoms fell all around. I couldn’t begin to understand what held me in place, or if it would ever let me go. I know you’re like this tree. What will happen to me when I hear your voice?

Apartment
    I’LL TELL YOU SOMETHING that’s true. When you come into this apartment, you can stand in any room, reach out your arm, and put your hand on a book or magazine. It might not always be in English. It might be in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Irish, Chinese, or Russian. We have something in Dutch and something in Albanian, and something in a language I can’t even guess at. Basque, maybe, or Elvish.