Mama, The Swollen land, or Wonderland

There’s nothing special about where I live. I’m absconced within the same vast America as you, swimming in the waste of the swollen north. The land isn’t swollen; the land is flat, far-reaching expanses of mangled green-brown, long, smooth blacktops, the tough crisp of burnt gravel. But the land is filled with a swollenness; the mothers hobble around their porches on flat feet with their swollen bellies; the papa’s return from the factory with swollen blistered fingers and a swollen, constricting feeling in their throats, their feelings that they would never voice defiantly meshed in the space between the tongue and the teeth, silently ballooning; the young men run amok but look wary nonetheless, a swollen feeling of disappointment and hardened shame and dead straight faces; the young women all about with child, all a swollen womb, a pandemic of sorts; the mayor in his just barely luxurious office looking down on the dirty streets floating with garbage and rats and disease and violence and early teenage pregnancy and rising drop-out rates, rising murder rates, an always rising crime rate, he watches with an elegiac grief and his spindly hand casts a shadow over his burdened heart as he whispers softly, Oh mama, I’m swollen. Smoke stacks from the factory casting a dark ominous smog over the town, sickening some, sick, the children, Oh mama I’m swollen. Multiple gunshots fired over on Beech Daly Rd between 8 mile and 10 mile, a young man with a bullet between his eyes, a mangled useless body that’s just another statistic now, and he said to me before he closed his eyes, he said in a soft whisper that belongs to no criminal, he said Damn YOU for letting this happen to me, he clutched at me in his death throe, and pain and sadness did violently invade my heart and the very utmost precipice of my soul, and it’s swollen, and getting bigger, the soul of old once-great Detroit, the soul of old once-great America, the soul of all of man a mercurial haunt weighing our bony chests, we wipe our brow and lick our lips and we for once weep for what we have done, all the collective soul of America a sweaty palm holding tight to the bottom hem of your best Sunday dress, and recite, Oh mama, I’m so swollen.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On a particularly long, or draining, or rainy, or lustful day, he would masturbate upwards 4-5 times a day. It was a very convoluted and dauntingly quick process. He would double lock the massive oak door and gently press a chair underneath the handle against the aging brown grain. After moving said chair to the door, he would get on hands and knees and meticulously rearrange the rug that got uprooted in the process of moving the chair. He would then get up and walk over to the tiny window just above and left of the computer and stack of pornography magazines. He would look out the tiny window for many minutes, seemingly observing but in anguishing concentration, focusing on the right back end of the black jeep in the short driveway, and the slightly curved view of the sidewalk beyond the back bumper of the jeep. From the window he could also see two of the houses that were across the street from his. He didn’t know the names of either occupants and didn’t care; they were great enemies of his, they were waiting for him to goof up and then he would be caught and figured out and ridiculed and publicly agonized and persecuted under the dull blue sky of his dull, beige suburban neighborhood. And he didn’t like the dog of the second house across from him, either. He was a dumb mutt and the owner, an old, quarrelsome lump of fleshspots and thinning hair, didn’t chain the dog up, and it would wander over during social occasions and steal meat from right off the great oblong picnic table, and then proceed to either shit or piss on the giant elm tree that anchored the chewed-up tire swing his wife had excruciatingly insisted on buying for her niece, an overweight little monster with incredibly chubby fingers which gave him the vision of her having swollen red hands like that of a lobster, a big fat thumb and an indescriminate clump of flesh. He would focus on those houses a great deal too, scanning for any hostile movement or play of light or sudden forbidding shadow. After this 5-10 minute ordeal of skulking out any threats of the great green and tar-covered battlefield that lay beyond the window, he would draw the shades, which were ugly as hell, a milky-shit brown with stupid and baffling little designs of Persians clashing with each other, frozen in great struggle and begging for release. He would go over to the doors and check the locks. Try to jiggle the chair, which wouldn’t move if he’d done a good job and gotten it lodged well. He’ll go and sit in the burgundy computer chair and choose his weapon of choice; most often it was the computer, which of course made for the procedure using it entailed: making sure the sound was muted, making sure to delete the history and search history and various cookies and damned pop-up ads that cluttered the screen like little black bombs. He would go to his favorite porn site, which alternated between pornhub.com, when he was in the mood to see interracial sex or people having sex outside, which sickened him a little and gave way to a burning acid feeling in his stomach but got him off more effectively than any other kind of porn; and youporn.com, when he was in the mood to see what were advertised as teenagers (they usually weren’t) demeaned and bucked to the point of exhaustion, their bodies annihiliated and their faces flushed red. He would unzip his pants and drop them to his feet; underwear wasn’t an issue, he made sure to take them off at an earlier time in anticipation of his daily duty. He would watch sections of usually upwards 2-3 videos, one hand viciously stroking his cock while the other hand defused the mouse, mechanically and furiously scrolling and clicking and pausing and expanding. When he felt close to orgasm, he would begrudgingly but with lightning speed release his death grip of the mouse and inch the computer chair back a little and place his hand a little above his cock, a fleshy tarpaulin shield meant to keep any of the erupting cum from getting on the keyboard or desk or computer itself. With the pinky of his hand, which was usually clean, he would commandeer the mouse to exit out of the pornsite. He would grab an amount of kleenex that was greater than he needed and wipe all the cum off of his hand and cock, and put it deliberately at the bottom of the wastebasket, buried underneath all of the trash that was commonplace and not incriminating. He would then lean back in his computer chair and take a deep sigh. He would take a sniff of the air for the scent of a woman but only smell sweat and somehow, the thick aroma of his own deep entangled doom and weary silly shame. He would think of nighttime and stars and far off planets and moons, all insulated in the deep black sky in a cycle of astral destruction and regeneration. Once he was recuperated, he would thoroughly wash his hands with soap twice, dry his hands, go over to the chair and pick it up instead of dragging like he did on the way to the door, since he couldn’t fix the rug the chair solemnly rest upon since the chair would be over it once returned to it’s proper place. He would go and open the hideous shades. Sometimes he saw the dog prowling about, like an ancient feral spy, he envisioned, spat out by the great blackness he was so enamored with, Mother Night, just to watch him and ambush him during his vulnerable duty. He would go and turn the volume on the computer back on. He would go and unlock the door, exit the room leaving the door open, which he thought was a VERY important step; an open door wasn’t noticeable, it was amicably inviting to the subconscious, whilst a closed door, though for no immediate discerning reason, would seem ominous and wrong. He would walk down the hallway made of cherry-red wood, and turn into the bedroom he shared with his wife, draw his shirt over his head and toss it carelessly, lift the heavy floral comforter and crawl into the bed, kiss his slumbering wife on the forehead, entomb himself in the comforter, and quietly recede to an darkly echoing faraway land that is his sleeping brain.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- She rises, like clockwork, every morning, as well does every other housewife on Stanston Street (excluding Cynthia, the odd drunk with the violently short choppy blond hair, what the hoodlums call a “dyke spike,” who rises and falls and appears and disappears like a strange guileless phantom, her sighting by anyone being a strange event, and that vacant look on her face, how does she get that many lines on her face without smiling?, and then when she drove her husband into despair with recountings of an alien abduction, she should stay in the house..). She feels her husbands body against her under the suffocating heat of the sweat-damp comforter. She lifts the blanket, and is only mildly repulsed at the image of his pale flaccid penis as she is thinking of what new recipe Jazalyn from down the street has emailed her, eager to see what it would be this time, a complicated barbeque casserole or something to do with the squash she had spent all summer planting and growing in the brownish patched backyard, the heat of the bloodletting sun turning her skin into splotchy patterns of ghost white and tomato red and bronze and an unsightly orange color like that of decaying and unhealthy flesh. The unclothed body of her husband suctioned to her body all night hastened her to shower. He had left the TV on, and she heard a tiny disembodied snatch of news about a meteor that had miraculously made it all the way to the bottom of some lake in Oregon, the night air being so mercilessly frigid that it acted as a counterpoint, cooling the temperature of the compressed air the meteor was hurtling with at the speed of the great fist of god himself hammerjacking angrily into the middle of that murky abyss. She chuckled nervously and shut the set off with a quick brush of her hand, and made her way to the bathroom across the hall. She flicked the switch in the bathroom. The three bulb chrome fixture gave off a sickly wheeze of soft greenish light, due to the fact that they were almost all burnt out, and one of them was in fact burnt out, the other two bulbs damp glow illuminating the dark deathly ring that bulbs get around the apex of the bulbous orb when they’ve revealed their last flicker of illuminated flesh, the last image of bare skin cindering all along the twisted coil of the filament before a light pop and fizzle and that lightbulb’s memory is vanquished like the cool onrushing descent of darkness. It was as thought that little ring was a knowing wink, a foreign reminder of awkward nakedness and flabby self-pity; everything leaves its mark. She undressed quickly and only scowled walking past the mirror instead of stopping and picking apart, and got into the large cylindrical shower that has a smaller door than its dimensions required, a miscalculation she bore because she let her husband do the work instead of doing the sensible thing and hiring someone who knew for the love of god what the fuck they were doing. She set the water pattern on the sharply round stainless-steel showerhead to three jets of hot scalding water. When she showered, the water was so fervid that it left her skin red and peeling and made her whole body tingle and itch. She washed herself and turned the water off, steam wafting from her very bones like the photoplasmic light of a naked and blistering phantasm materializing out of the confines oh her misshapen tomb of a shower. Her skin was on fire, itching like a thousand little fire-ants fornicating with the burnt saggy epidermic crests of aging flab. She itched and itched until it hurt, and it was unbearably pleasurable relief, itching and scratching and scraping across all of her body, writhing in an orgasm of painful relief, the itch faded and her body sore and bumpy with little pocks of torn-up flesh. By the time this miasma of pain and pleasure and duty is over with, her nipples are erect and her breathing is ragged, and she dresses in an awkward hurried shuffle. She does not do up her long bushy red hair, she wants to see what new recipe awaits her. More important things to think about. She flicks off the light, the ghostly iridescent pallor of the weakening and aged bulbs swallowed up into the great black yawn of the tiny unlit bathroom. She makes her way too the computer room, her damp feet sticking slightly to the hard wooden floor. She sits down in the computer chair, which creaks, an inorganic scream of opposition to her frame. She weighs only 126 pounds, but she’s getting fat and skin is beginning to fold and stretch, and she hears things creak and groan, if only ever so slightly… She checks her email, which contains an advertisement from Joann Fabrics, 5O% OFF ALL FABRICS AFTER LABOR DAY, LMTD. TIME OFFER!!, an invitation to meet singles in her area, young, intelligent african-american men waiting to get in touch with you today!, which is left over from a site she perused when she thought of leaving Paul, two letters from her great-aunt Gina, and an email that simply says CLASSIFIED: WONDERLAND. This one mildly gets her attention, enough so that she decides not to delete it along with the others, but the sinking disappointment of no email email from Jazalyn turns her off from reading it. Since she had haphazardly planned her whole day on the preperation of a new recipe, her day was no a formless echo of sleep and TV. The clouds outside were a great ivory white and rolling, and the wind blew the dead leaves of trees into the crickety shutters and promised rain within an hour or two at the most. The grass was unnaturally green at the moment due to the amount of rain they had gotten, which seemed slightly odd in its unrelenting succession of a week and a day of great blowing gusts of rain slapping the neighborhood in sharp sheets. The sky was a colorless gray trench gully and filled her with an uneasy feeling of asphyxiating boredom and listlessness, so she drew the shades, which were her favorite in the house, Persians fighting bravely anon like her father used to tell her. She smiled at the little brown-skinned men, fixed her face into an agreeable slack-jawed acceptance, and left the computer room to face the mind-numbing spectrum of the day.