A frog is mowing my lawn

A frog is mowing my lawn

By Tomás Sottomayor

The train

Charlie was lying in bed, hearing the train pass in its steel track.

He imagined a crowd inside it; all man, all dressed in black. He saw one of the older ones stepping on a red lily. He knew it was an ambulant funeral, like a train of death, of permanent emptiness.

The track never ended in his moving guts. His mouth was dry. The train was long gone and silence ruled the world. The pine needles stabbed the vespertine wind, like the nocturnal nails of a seductive mistress in a lust chamber, nailed to the drab back of an old man.

The red petals smothered on the wooden floor. The carriage cutting the soft veil of time.

"Where are you travelling to?"

"I'm heading North, where the clock can't catch up with me."

The old man stopped and took his black jacket.

"Time is always the same."

He had a flower in the pocket of his white shirt.

"Time doesn´t care. It just happens to take us with him, as a boot crushing the shell of an innocently placed snail."

He started to become as pale as wax, resembling a feeble angel, about to draw his last breath.

"This train takes you nowhere. It is always circling around the land. It carries the forsaken souls in its orbit, attached to its endless rusty track, perpetually through the gauntlet. Your road has already been sketched."

The snail enjoys sliming through the grass.

Charlie enjoys his rest.

The train snakes on through the wasteland forever.

There are two flowers in motion; one of them is red.

The desert

Charles played his ukulele, and every time he struck the chords, he remembered her. He wrote a song like he would write a story, every progression like a narrative string, conducting his ears to a silent place where words could never reach.

Sitting in his white sunlit bed, dressed with the scent of her legs, the notes reminded him of the sand.

"When we were crossing the track. When we were looking at the distant ships, imagining foreign flags flapping freely, feeling the breath of the sea. When we were tied up. "

The song composed itself with words, memories and paintings that were left behind. His eyes were shut. The song went on. The evening sun brightened his concealed eyes, flaring the darkness with resembling light, us the unborn child fought the never-ending night.

The kid was trying to leave home.

The kid was trying to leave the frigid well;

wrestling with the dirty water, covered in the original fluids of our mothers.

The ukulele sat down by the bedside. The door opened and the sunlight begun to clutch the staircase. Charles's shadow jumped through the surface of his family photographs that kept hanging on the tomb-walls like dead leaves, flickering, the light waving in the glass frames.

The shadow left his place with Charles.

There is no home, home is a project of the mind.

The garden

Sarah woke up in the grass, with her milky face smeared with mud and strings of green. Her curly brown her reflected the light in orange lines, sometimes casting a spectrum, as the sun does when it flares a glasshouse.

Her mother was taking care of the flowers. She had her red pair of scissors in her left hand, pink rubber gardening gloves and her usual plain white apron. Her yellow hair was tied up like a ball of wild cloth.

She knew her mother was there without having to move. Shubert was playing in the living-room, the trout, the door was wide open, it always was if her mother was gardening.

Anne sang along.

The fisher poisoned the river.

Sarah was a trout.

Sarah was being chased; but she kept on the grass, sitting in serene contemplation, like an old standing clock.

A cloud of smoke raised East, riding the rapidly moving sky. A squid painted the distant horizon with a curtain of afternoon gloom.

The ocean is wrapping around the earth, like the last wave of all moving waves.

Charlie woke up.

The fisherman reached the riverbank.

"Look at you! You are ruining the dress he gave to you!"

Motherhood

Anne left the jar in the dining table and went to her bedroom. She heard her daughter taking a bath, and waited like a cat for a few seconds, analyzing with surgical precision the bathroom door. When she arrived at her room she imagined the blue orchid. The blue orchid.

"They are beautiful Leonard! Thank you!"

She remembered the kiss and the walk by the harbor. She envisioned it with pure nostalgia, like she would imagine Sarah blowing her first stuttering word.

"Dahh..."

Then she felt what she was hiding from, and she tried to sleep.

"I'll never let you guys down. You hear me? Anne? Anne?!"

Impressionist skid marks in the crimson highway.

The rising sun.

Oxymoron

The train passed Charles's home at noon, while he was eating a toast coated with sweet raspberry jam. The circle of flames was high in the light painted canvas, as he calmly sipped his coffee, thinking about his grandfather.

"Is Charlie coming son?"

"I don't know. We've never come this far."

He was the owner of a small ranch, then lung cancer took him and Charles went to live with his aunt.

"The only good thing is that we're closer. I'm tired of that cow!"

We used to love cows.

We will always appreciate graceful milk.

A pure cup of plain milk.

There was a knock. Charles placed the raspberry smudged dish in the sink, and went to open the door as he finished his coffee.

He was sipping the sugary brown liquid that remained in the mug, and Charlie was finishing his cigarette in the burning porch. He closed the house and gazed at his friends back. A cloud of smoke raised from the dust in an ethereal nebula.

"Let's?"

"Let's."

The morbid carriage maintained its orbit through time, like an invisible dagger, piercing the bowels of imagination.

"A dagger of the mind. A false creation."

Distance

Dear Charles

I've been remembering our last conversation at the beach. I remember perfectly what you were dressing, what we talked about.

The more I think about the Dad, the more I miss you and our walks by the sea.

The waves. The piling up waves of youth. Feels like a tide of nostalgia will wipe me away forever.

P.s - Please write me back.

With love forever

Sarah

Inside this body

"We were here together last year."

Charles ceased and passed the train track.

"I know..."

Charlie answered plainly. He looked at the ocean in the dark horizon, which started collapsing like melting pianos. He had a massive headache. He couldn't see the world clearly.

"Charlie?"

"Come."

He felt the sand. He imagined his body as a mountain. The sand eroding his feet like sandpaper. He looked at Charles who was calmly bathing his feet and, he understood he was alone. Alone hearing the sea; and he was hurt

Hurt deep inside the fiords of his awakened body.

Illusions of singularity

They're gone. I'm the only one left. The trivial chewed off bone. The abandoned dog, covered in self-pity.

Feeling lost in myself and confuse and a fool and beat up dog weak-feeble-fragile kid.

"I want you! You! I want you! You!"

The monotone voice of my illness.

The stare from my empty eyes.

"They're gone. There is nothing you can do."

She said it so calm, like there wasn't any harm to be done, like it wasn't possible to hurt me even more.

Charlie won't talk. I can't write her back and keep on this cloud of pain. I settle in the dark. I maintain floating around. He is laying in the sand. The ocean almost feels like it is inside me. The waves keep taking me away. I feel hollow. The waves keep tearing me apart.

Carry her through

I look at her and I feel like a bright orange. She is passing the pastry. She is wearing her brown cotton raincoat and she is laughing. Her eyes get closer.

"Hi."

She says it really smoothly, almost whispering.

I put my hand on her back.

"How are you dear?"

"Fine, how are you?"

She speaks calmly as we pass the busy harbor. The sun is setting in the velvety purple sky. It looks like a dyed hippy cloth. A distant curtain of perpetuated light, cast towards our bare faces.

Our fingers laced. Feels like something is breaking inside. I remember work.

"Want a drink?"

"Sure"

She pronounces it, simple and precise, sweet as the morning rain that falls when we sleep.

She is sitting towards me. She takes her coat. I see a cross hanging from her collarbone. Her eyes glow with desire. She is distracted now. I want to release all of my snowy fluids, I want to feel it all, the whole place... Every single key. Every single piano key. This is the polyphony of sexual craving. She is distracted again.

"Anne?"

I'm climbing the staircase.

She lies in my tired arms.

Her face is sleeping.

Transfiguration

I'm in bed. I'm comfortable but I want to leave. If only I could catch the train to see him. I remember one of our childish promises. I hear the wind blowing the falling rain.

My soaked wet dress; white, hanging by my knees. With blue stitched butterfly's that sway when I'm in motion. Dad gave it to me. There is a butterfly missing in my chest.

"Stop following me around! Leave me alone!"

I feel guilty. I feel human.

"Your mom is great. She cares a lot, she is a mother, what were you expecting?"

He hugged me, like a huge bear. The train passed by the beach. We salute the diluting clouds. One year ago. We look each to other. We look each to other with genuine fascination.

The same old sensation creeps up my belly like fire ants. I'm burning. I'm in flames. The torch of youth.

Powerless impotence

I'm by his side, he is looking around, we don't talk a bit. I look at the blue. It reminds me of her.

Now the june bugs are moving. I imagine them in my flesh. They draw pictures in my frail skin, like snake trails in the sand; swelling mountains of dust.

How I hate and love all of my friends. How can I love and hate them so deeply? It is out of my control. This is out of my control.

"Walk. We will walk until we reach the lighthouse."

He was more than a father. Never even smoked. This is out of our control. This is out of our reach.

The lord has the scepter and the sheep. The wolf will feast on my skin. The wolf howls, stabbing the drowsy atmosphere of forsaken forest.

Can you hear this song? Feels like I'm in Scotland and it is grey. Seems I miss you. I miss the Northern beach. When mom was still here, in this silent place...

How can I worry about him? How can I worry about him when it's my life that is shattered?

The lord is out of our control.

The funeral