The batter steps up to the plate and the crowd gets baroque with it.

“Heyyyyyy, 25, you’ve got too many things in your pockets!”

“What do you have in there? Your cell phone?”

“A pack of cigarettes?”

“A deck of playing cards?”

Strike one.

“Is that a walky-talky?”

“You can’t bring your copy of House of Leaves to the plate, 25!”

“25, you’re supposed to put the potato down the front of your pants!”

Strike two.

“How do you slide with all that junk in your trunk?”

“There’s just too much in your pockets! It’s spilling out right now!”

“Aren’t you worried about tearing your pants? With everything you own in your pockets?”

“Emp! ty! out! your! pock! ets!” Clap clap clap clap clap.

A long smash to deep right field and—well, it’s a homerun, what did you expect? 25 rounds the bases, high fives his teammates, avoids eye contact with the crowd. Alas, it doesn’t work. As he returns to the dugout, one final chirp is handed down: “Good thing you hit a homerun, you might have lost your keys if you’d had to really run!”

They go on to win 16-4, but, you know, baseball’s about the journey, not the destination, or so I’m told.

for Cody

An oppressive heat, the air still and hot as an oven, and the distant mountains, the lake, the hummingbirds buzzing around the railing, and the railing itself have become as flat as a painting. The sunset striped and gridded, a pixel vision of evening. In the horizontal light, familiar faces blur uncertain, hang slack or twist unexpected like the grain in a piece of wood. Eyes are everywhere, in the curl of a breathing fern, in the pulse of a watching cactus, in the open beak of a hovering bird.

Nighttime, stars stir unsettled through the bronchial branches of a juniper tree, an amber shape that might be a cat crouched atop a wooden fence. Numb inside the gate we weigh it with our eyes, count the limbs, count the tails, count them again as the numbers run away. Is it known? Is it knowable? A dog, five eyes arranged in an arc, wary beside us, fur aglow in the darkness.

Later still, and earlier, time slipping between our fingers, boundaries blur and bleed, ink leeching into paper, into chairs, into the deck of splintered wood, into the glass we struggle to raise to our lips, the cigarette pack we cannot reach. In the darkness, the click of a plastic lighter, the shock of recognition, the distant song of frogs.

It’s been a real bullshit day for Carolyn, and being damned to hell was really just the capper. “This sucks,” she tells the demon slowly flensing the skin off her lower leg.

“Tuesdays, amirite?” says the demon, who doesn’t stop flensing.

“No, really, I hate this. I don’t like any part of this.”

“Yeah, well, that’s just life in late stage capitalism, ain’t it? Life’s a bitch like that. Still—” the demon has the chipper nonemotive voice of a high quality voicemail system— “we struggle on the best we can. Other leg, please!”

Carolyn holds out her leg. “It’s just—” she screams hoarsely as the knife slips skillfully but incredibly painfully between the skin and the muscle of her calf— “I had plans this morning, you know? I was going to go to the bank.“

The demon pauses, looks sympathetically into her eyes for a second. “Oh, honey,” it says, not unkindly, “we both know you were never going to go to the bank.”

Flensed, he yet lives; breathes, moves, poses in wet and bloody glory. Cobbled together from sawdust and stage makeup.

Thus:

Pirates along the Levantine coast, and a beautiful dark-eyed boy. Leopards on the foredeck, ivy on the oars. Dolphins roll in the wake, eyes dark and inhuman and rapacious. Tethys, world-girdling Tethys, is dark and deep, bitter as herbs.

or

Abandoned by god and his maker, a collection of corpses, he crouches in a woodshed, teaches himself English (how) and reading (why) from a half-used catalog from Sears and Roebuck. Shoes are expensive this year; there’s a slimming machine, a complicated bit of deadly nonsense jerryrigged together much as he is, all leather belts and sharp edges and ungrounded electricity. Outside a Christian and a Muslim are planning an elopement, but inside he dreams of capitalism.

and

Westward, from the cities to the plains to the mountains to the cities. Once the notional roads swallowed armies whole in mud deep enough to drown an elephant. A future president broke his back, cursing, hauling a truck through the mud, dreamt of a vast network of tar black as the sea, crushed rock knitting the ruins of empire together like the veins god put inside him, thick, slow, and inescapably seen.

While I work, he sleeps with his feet against mine, warms me in the icy room with the heat of his body. I can feel him dreaming, running down some impossible hallway, skimming the top of a rolling green hill on a sunswept day in March, walking beside the lake in November.

We spend too much time together.

We stifle in this too-small apartment, rub each other raw with proximity. On bad days I close the door and clench myself against his incoherent yelling a fierce wordless sound as he screams at people passing our door toward the elevator, walking by on the sidewalk. Other days I rage myself hoarse and he runs away, huddles himself small in the bedroom.

We have been hurt before, know we will be hurt again.

Overcaring, we touch too much, comfort too aggressively. He pushes his face into mine as I cry, I hold him still when he shakes with fury. We do not want to touch, or be touched, but most of all we long for stillness.