Author: The Ammonite

The Panel

I had the second scoop ready when the panel fell. My black Clarks, rounded at the toe, must have knocked it out of place. My foot must have advanced too far in the direction of the oven, under which was a drawer and the panel beneath it. It fell.

When the panel struck the floor it made the sound of a twig snapping. But in the empty kitchen it sounded sharper, more percussive. I laid the spoon in the tub and knelt to adjust the panel. Before I could crouch all the way down I stood back up again.

With the same foot that had knocked the panel loose I pushed it towards the wall. When it made contact with the wall I used my toe to prop it back up. Then I knocked the panel back into place. I gave it a few extra taps, just to ensure it would not fall again.

—Fixed, I thought.

—Fixed.

I dug my spoon into the tub. It lifted up white scoops, chocolate chip.

The Blue Point Dock on Saturday Morning

The fishermen cast their crabbing traps into the water. Pulling the traps in by the bright lanyard they’re attached to, they inspect the trap, see bait, and cast back in.

The wooden wall of the dock is pale green and white above the water line. Beneath the water stains the planks silver brown, the line of the water a gossamer line of silver.
On the margin of the dock, on the strip of concrete between the guard rails and water, people crab.

The water this morning is ribbons of dark green, silver and blue. The further out on the bay the smaller the waves. They appear to drift sideways. On the flank of the parking lot the heads and tails of cars. Looking out to the beach or facing the water, their paint shines. The mailman’s truck turns at the entrance of the dock, pulsing golden lights.

The wind stirs up the waters, which begin to rise. Downshore they lap the timbers of bay houses. Tall, their many windows look out.

A pewter sky, with soft white thumped into the layers reflects in the tumbling eggs of waves. Slowly the crabbers circle the dock. They lift up their traps or monitor the water. With a silver net in his hand he tries to peer underneath the waves.

The air tastes humid and silver. The note of brine hangs on their lips. A seagull crying fills its beak with the air and the smell of water drifts over the damp planks.
A family trudges along the margin and stoops to inspect their trap.

8/18/2018

Untitled Despair

It’s the first of many such nights for me: the saxophone grinding away in the lightbulb and nothing to fill my belly with. Alone in my world: no friends to greet me and no one to talk to: the beetle that strikes the wall again and again. Sprinklers hissing in the night.

Dark black cold lonely night, as dark and cold and black and lonely as space. Is that the same motorcycle which grinds by every night? Going by like clouds torn in half?

I can’t call her name. All of my mind is exhausted. But replenished by passing through a scale of colors. Flute notes going out into the dark.


♪ Antonio Carlos Jobim – Wave (1963) ♪

Fighter Jet

 

Jetfighter

High in the mountains, gaunt and confident, the jet fighter slips into the capsule of his plane. The cold air beneath the plane’s wings stains the undersides with frost, but the engines come on: a red coal burns in each exhaust port as the plane rolls and takes off.

The jet plane rips past my face sideways. The tip of one wing points at the sky while the other wingtip follows a line on the ground. Passing, a spot of light flies over the cockpit and darts over the wings. The thick crackling of split air hits my ears. I watch the twin embers in the exhaust ports dissolve in the blue.

I allow my eye to wander from peak to peak after the crackling of the engines dissolve. April snow still clings to the lonely summits. My heart yearns to follow the mountain road from summit to summit, to see the snowy fields beneath me, but I have no water to drink and the thin air causes my heart to pound against my chest.

From distant blue air the white speck of the airplane grows. It rips past my face, changes sides, then curves up and away. The black spore print of its exhaust drifts over the mountain range. I watch the plane bank and turn around. Once more it approaches me, only this time it rises higher and higher into the air. As the plane disappears I trace its ascent by the molten white cloud spreading behind it. Now the cloud banks downwards and a black grain shoots up through my field of vision. I watch the entire plane slam into the mountainside, fire forming an orange shell around the wreck, snow and rock.

The fighter pilot stood beside me again.

—To the pagoda?

A flow of conversation passed between us. But in my mind’s eye I kept watching as the plane struck the mountain. This vision repeated as we walked: the plane dropping like a stone again and again into the mountainside, its wings annihilated in the rising plume of fire, smoke, and ash.

I was alone on the mountain, sitting on a rock stained by rusty lichen. Below me two travelers walked on the mountain road. And in the sky white contrails followed a fast silver plane.

Craterellus fallax // Black Trumpets

Found: August 12, 2018 in damp humus under oak trees.

Description: The bodies of Craterellus fallax begin as skinny tubes with thin soft gray flesh; as they age and the tubes elongate, the topmost edges peel and unroll until the whole resembles a vase or, to the musician, a trombone’s bell and tube. Just inside the bell, on grey-orange skin, lay small gray black-tipped scales. Wrinkles run the gamut of the fruiting body, from which ochre-orange spores waft down. Black Trumpets have a sweet pale fragrance. They blend in with the forest floor.

-Some of the rubbery, curving tubes resemble marching tubas, sousaphones, that encircle the player’s waist like boa constrictors.

Black Trumpets