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Bloom
The thought of the slaughter for the Spring feast that feeds the Earth to bring in the rebirth of the land in twentyfolds comes over me with phantasmagoric sensations and shivering premonitions. All the rot in the soil from the death of Winter being absorbed by the life of Spring has had an ill effect on me and events coinciding with the arrival of these morbid sensations have not helped in my convalescence. It may have been the sound of the wind that brought clouds back to Portland which settled in my heart a sense of gloom and trepidation. On that day I tried to nap on the couch but even then I couldn’t escape the impending doom I felt. As I tried to sleep, I drifted into a vision of driving through town in my Volkswagen Bug and suddenly, for no apparent reason, losing control and crashing into the guardrail on the Fremont Bridge, flipping end over end, hopping the barrier, and plunging the hundreds of feet to the river below. The imagination of being in the driver’s seat was powerful to the point that a tingling sensation of weightlessness went through my balls and as I imagined falling to my death, I started thinking of every possible way to escape. I thought that I should open the door and bail out, but then I realized I would probably land on the car and so I decided I must push off from the car to ensure that I clear it on impact with the murky Willamette River below. But of course, that still only gave me a 1% higher chance of living and dying still seemed more certain. So started the simulation over and imagined hitting the guardrail again, the car reeling up on its side and going into a nose over ass-end flip that catapults the forest-green Bug over the railing and I descend towards the river for a second time. I begin to try to open the door and jump out but now inertia is pinning me to the seat as the car is falling upside down—and because the engine is in the rear—and ass-end first. It is a long fall with too much time to think about my life. My life. Do I ever spend enough time thinking about it? There is so much to know. To do. Do I even do it all as I should? I may hear the crumpling of the roof as I hit the river, but hopefully will not feel too much pain. I don’t want to drown conscious. I hope for a death like being put to sleep in the dentist’s chair looking at the needle in my arm asking the nurse what chemicals she is injecting into my blood and as she opens the valve she replies an answer I can no longer remember and I look away out the window at the tree enclosed within a wall of brown cinder blocks. This was back in Phoenix and I hated the desert so passionately, but now I seem to find a romantic desire for it again as I think back to looking at that tree wishing there were more trees like it in Phoenix because looking at that tree suddenly filled my soul with peace I didn’t even know I went under. When light returned, it came in like an aperture being opened and the voices of the dentist and his assistant gained volume in proportion to the growing white glare of the fluorescent tubes above. I was told my teeth were gone and the dentist and his assistant left me to come to my senses telling me to sit still while I waited. My teeth! I had to see them! I stood up to find them but my knees wobbled so I held onto the arm of the chair and peered into the waste basket along the wall looking for my teeth. But a cold blackness came over me and it held a fear in it that I might pass out so I sat back down only to get up immediately to look again. I was driven by strong compulsion to see my rotted wisdom teeth in their decayed condition but I couldn’t move without feeling sick so I sat down and waited. I never did see my teeth, but I did experience a practice run on my death in the dentist’s chair and this is the type death I want. The type of death without fear. The type of death like looking out a dentist’s window at a tree with pink blossoms and the drug of fate coming over me peacefully, swift, and painless. So when I plummet off the Fremont Bridge, I must somehow contain my terror of death if I want it to come peacefully and without the pain of terror. I must be at my peak of mental strength in order to ward of the terror and when the car hits the water, death will come swiftly and with peace. I use the sky to negate the terror and look out that windshield at the giant clumps of gray icy clouds and lose myself in the wonder of their beauty. I hit the water in a calm state of mind, but the terror of thinking about actually hitting the water and dying jolted me awake and up off the couch and I said that was enough death for today and folded my clean clothes. But later a cat that came in our apartment knew something strange was in the air and she too could smell the slaughter even more than I—whom couldn’t smell it at all. The gray petite feline marched right in when we opened the door to go to the store for milk. It marched in with such a confident air that I told Camille to wait, and I watched it. It ignored me, and it ignored Camille, boldly looking in every closet, every box, every room, everywhere, as though it had been summoned to our apartment. We had never seen this cat before nor since. It’s half-tail made me think maybe it had lost it in some gruesome accident with a door, but it may have been born with that long gray hair hanging from it like large feather fan. I watched and watched and watched, but even now there is no reason for its behavior. It was neither cat-like, nor human. Some of more fearful heart would say it was a familiar owned by a witch and spying on my home and that all that this cat could see, the witch could see when locked in a trance. This notion would not seem too far from the truth the way it investigated our apartment and it seems to be the case that those with abnormal amounts of confidence and focus are looked upon as supernatural and even feared at times and this cat did creep me out while making me curious at the same time. But late in the evening of this same day, a stench rose in the hall outside the bathroom door that was not a toilet stench but more of a rotting trash or dead animal odor. It was strong, very strong, and Camille and I looked high and low to find the source of the reeking filth, but the putrid aroma lingered like the reek of an evil spirit, so I went into the basement and looked below in the boiler rooms that supply the apartments with hot water and searched the space below our hall to be sure that the unthinkable didn’t happen in our basement. But the smell was absent and no bodies were found in the dark rooms. And by the time I returned to the apartment, the smell had faded into the ether. But the sounds of a few nights before, they disturbed me then and as I pondered the evil smell, I began to think of those sounds again. Could those little clicking sounds have been the sounds of mice dying and clawing at the walls as the life was snuffed from their bodies? Or could it just be that a reeking haunt simply passed through our home?
The feast of Spring feeds off the slaughter of Winter and the air is full of the scent of death commingled with fresh soil and tendrils reaching into the rot for birth and rebirth and when I transverse in the moonlight on a cigar and soda walk, chills run up and down my spine and I expect to see corpses hanging by their necks from the bare branches of the trees, feet swaying, the streetlights blinking between their legs. Why? I don’t know. It could be the still barren trees and the empty fields—or that I am just a bit crazy—but I am holding on strong for summer where grass and trees and flowers cover the dead in a body bag of thick verdant foliage and I can sleep with the windows open and the warm breath of summer putting my soul at ease.
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