Four Thoughts

1
Tick, tick. I can hear the face and I can see the noise. I can see transparent rhythms gliding behind my eyes. I can smell acrid seconds dissolving bitterly on my sour tongue.

Staring at my teacher’s shoes I wonder where they’ve been and who they’ve kicked.

The window of the door is a portal to freedom! The looking-glass where I stare and wait for a head to pass, enticing me, daring me to walk out. Trying to focus, I groggily misconstrue the words flying toward me into whatever I want them to be. I’m waiting to get out, but I’ve only just begun.

2
Lying, sleeping? Lying, waking. Lying, waiting for something, but also for nothing. Thinking of something, but always forsaking it as an impossibility. I renounce my thoughts and desires as impractical and ridiculous. They confuse me by showing their roots in reality. For one moment each night my dreams surface, sweet kisses on my eyelids that I either dampen or imbibe until parched. They shove me out of bed and send me sleepwalking.
“I shall not speak again,” I tell them, “unless you offer me unending love and devotion. Further waiting will kill me. I shall become too choked for words; too choked with love; too choked with regret if I offer this to you and you decline.”
You make no sense, they tell me. We hate you.
I sleep, patiently. If only I could thrust a word from my throat.

3
I’m waiting, here! My mouth is open, and I’m drooling all over the fucking place. I thought this was supposed to be an emergency? Yes, that’s it, get your tools, and put me in the most excruciating pain I’ve ever experienced. We’ll pay you thousands of dollars! Yes, it’s art, I know. Thank you so much! As soon as I get home, I’ll put my self-consciousness in some Tupperware and wrap it in Christmas paper, and ship it to a tiny egg in another woman’s womb, and smile my heart out.

4
She’s gone, the ransom note calling for just under my five-year before-taxes income. I sigh, elbows on my knees, low to the ground on her soft, pink bed. I feel resigned to my spot. I awoke in the night to the creaking of the front door, believing it to be the wind, only to find my daughter taken from her bed.
It’s 3:30 AM. I figure I may as well let my wife have this one last night of peace and normalcy. Maybe I’m just giving them time to get away.
Nothing feels much different. A blade of light from the moon strikes my foot and I’m more focused on it than my situation. I realize that my daughter’s window faces east and that from it I can see directly into the neighbor’s dog house. The mutt is fast asleep and I think again of my wife.
The maple tree outside needs trimming. I can hear it scrape the window with each strong wind. It sounds as though a storm is coming. I wish I could just go back to bed.