Xili Xili

         The other day, a friend came to visit me whom I’d thought drifted away.  He sat in my chair and talked to me for a few hours like nothing had happened.  We'd been on different wavelengths for two or three weeks, but I suppose that’s just the kind of relationship we have. 

         I told my husband about it during a thunderstorm, but we never talk about what I think we will.  Or do we?

         “Tornadoes don’t come up this far.  Too many mountains.  That’s Kansas shit,” he reassures me, joking.  He never swears.  Xili xili huala huala, pitter-patter and a deluge, rain in a spinning storm. 

         “Are you writing?  It’s fanfiction, isn’t it?”

         Dancing lights in the corner whistle at me.  If I see Smilin’ Bob’s grinning death mask one more time, this TV is going through the window.

          “Shut up.” 

          It is fanfiction.  I can’t get away from it.  Sometimes making something gritty and real is just too much to resist.  Real is grey and brown, real is sudden and violent.  Real is taking cartoon characters and telling you exactly how each hair flutters in the overly detailed breeze.  Who hasn’t imagined Disney heroes in their underwear?  I won’t lie.  It’s crossed my mind.  I bet it’s crossed his too.

         Cell phone buzzes.  Are you… Doing anything? 

         Why the ellipse?  Why the capital?  Come to kennedy house my friends are here from u penn.  Grammar sometimes seems like such a flimsy construct.  If only it didn’t hold our world together.  Random-ass conversations with myself.  Random ass-conversations.  Replace the hyphen and any sentence becomes hilarious.  I tell her we’ll meet her at one.



         12:20 became 12:30, and that became 12:40.  Then we were late.  Missed dinner –they had meatloaf – but joined them for dessert.  Laughing filled the air, even though I barely knew them.  My side was the loudest, just my husband and me, strangers in a den of assholes.  “Don’t snap at me,” he said to me.  “I’ll snap back.  Except it won’t be my fingers, it’ll be your neck.”  We laughed, but everyone else just stared in shock.

         She left and then there was something black and cloying amidst us.  Do you really think she tells you more than she tells us?  They told me to be more of a bitch than I already was, but I wouldn’t have needed their encouragement.  The air was thick and hateful, and we fled the den of wolves.  “Epic fail,” he said.  Epic fail, epic succeed.  Most people say ‘epic win,’ but they don’t know just how wrong they are.

          Earlier today I drew a picture of a woman looking up into a sunburst of red and gold, hair flying back, like she was hoping for something.  The blackness is my sunstorm, my red and gold.  I looked up into the sky and closed my eyes and we skipped home through the puddles and the rain, singing with wide abandon.  Xili xili huala huala yu xialai la.  Pitter-patter, pitter-patter, here comes the rain.