the haruspex

the haruspex

Another night at this miserable fucking restaurant. No, no. You’re lucky to have it. Lucky lucky lucky in a triangle shape over your head as you go through the door so your mind doesn’t get clean. You go through your checklist about halfway and then start over and then a third of the way and then start over as you lock up. It’s important to do things right- there’s a momentum that needs keeping up and if you miss a catch or a check or a click click click you need to turn back to the start, not like turning pages which are soft but like the click click click of a puzzle box. Click click click a third time to finish the shape. Fuck him and no no, he’s doing his best. You’re inches from getting fired. You’re inches from getting fired. It makes the puzzle box important– this is an idea you can paint with, but it dries a different color. You work through the checklist. You work through. Okay. You have work to do. Okay. Your whole body is shaking, a little. Is it always shaking? You look like such a creep. Disgusting fuck. You work through your thoughts with your jaw like they’re made of plastic. You can feel the shape of them stabbing into your palate and holding your jaw open. You can’t close it. You’re going to suffocate. Customer. Car. What? You’ll be fired if you don’t keep it all in order. You keep the right checks in front of mind. You’re always keying in hidden combinations of words and images that change things in the world outside of you but it’s impossible to ever know what they are or why. Crystal decanters for RNA meaning folded up like something hard and sharp and cold but not brittle or cold. You need to keep the thoughts moving in a circle without moving because moving is a round word, feel it in your mouth, it’s spoiling them, everything in your head is curdling like milk and it’s pouring out your face like soft cheese. You need to circle the right way and fast so you don’t spoil them. You don’t think about how late it is, or how much sleep you’re going to get, or what new shit is coming up from your parents. When these things come up you stop and click your tongue and lock them away because your thoughts are going to spoil and you’ll be fired. You dig your nails into your hands instead. You focus on your list by focusing on how you’re focusing on your list– the thinking-shape of the thing, the crystal vessel of the meaning-shape like a virus that puts the meaning into the things it’s supposed to be in without breathing in the things not supposed to be in it or putting out the things not supposed to go out because people go in because deep down morally we’ll all be fundamentally good so we have to drink each other in and out can go for trash and concrete and hard cars in the hard cards in hard cars in the Pie. Pie? Pie? Like striking yourself in the face but without the sting. Like driving a knife into your leg but without getting the threads of your filthy shorts tangled in the wound. Why, it’s the scent of the most delicious pie in the world. Sweet like cinnamon sugar and tart like plump red cherries and rich as buttercream. You drift on aching feet towards it without a single thought in your head (your jaw says: no no no. your blood says: work to do, which means click click click.) but your brain is empty of all the buzzing spinning churning everything that makes it hard to even tell what you’re doing. On some level you know this makes you a bad person. It makes you stupid and cruel. You move nose first, spine slack, eyes closed, it’s the only thing in the world. Oh god (not to call)… it’s just sitting there on the windowsill, fully steaming hot… between the layers of flaky pastry you can see what looks like cherries, but not like any cherries you’ve ever seen, raw-meat red and swollen almost to bursting with juice. Your mouth is literally watering. Did you eat today? This isn’t yours, obviously. You can’t just take it. Greedy pig. You try to come up with a reason like “it’s wrong,” but when has anything ever been right or wrong? This is heavenly vision. This is the narrow way that makes your teeth shift forwards and your head loll back, this is the spaces enumerated click click click. It’s here and you can feel the lines of force that draw you to it, irresistible as gravity, like everything else you’ve ever done in your whole life except when you’ve done it wrong. God (not to call) put this (not to call not to call) here to show you the way, how it’s always shone the way like a spirograph with a laser pointer and a fist all the way down your throat and making you vomit wrong wrong wrong. It feels right but it sounds wrong in your mouth. Vomit vomit vomit. If you touch those words together you’ll be hurt. But you can have a little bit. You can’t just take it. It’s greedy, it’s gluttonous, it’s not even dinner time, but god is it delicious. The cherries pop and squish and their juice is so rich with sugar and spice that oozes out from somewhere inside. Marbled, marble steak, marble state, high white pillars and if you get caught you’ll be killed. The crust is thick with butter and cinnamon, you could eat it on its own, but you couldn’t. It crumbles with a heavy crumb like a cake. (Crumb, baking show, cinema is mind control.) You chew slowly, trying to drag a thousand years out of this bite. It only makes you hungrier. You reach out with red-stained fingers and pluck another little piece. Your whole body shudders in some combination of shame and relief. You can’t, and yet. Here you are. It’s done. No going back, only going forwards. Everything is done when it’s done. There’s a road, and there’s the true road and the false ones and you have to feel the lines of force that guide you to the true one. There’s no right and wrong answers only clever and stupid readings. Only failures of the only thing you’ve ever been good at and you can’t even do it right. You dig in with your hands and take a fucking scoop and god god (not to call) god (not to call no no no no) it’s even better the more of it you eat at once, like there’s flavors so subtle you can only taste them with all sides of your tongue at once. Something a little salty. Something like coffee. Something like pine. What were you thinking about? Some twinge of gut-spoon pain (do you ever think about gutting fish? scrape off the scales and then cut from the throat to the i can’t say those words and then peel back the outer integument like a plastic surgery video, layers and layers of flesh and meat and skin and fat are wrapped around you right now, rotting and full of maggots, maggots in my face, big fat pustules) is put back to sleep by another huge handful smashed into your gob. A little on your face and on your shirt but you take care of that real quick with a big scooby doo lick. There’s so much of it you haven’t even made a dent. They won’t even notice. (if this is the true road, they won’t matter. they could spit in your face and scream at you but you’ll know you took the true road.) One huge handful after another, and the full-body bliss stills your thumping feet and slows your rabbit heart. You didn’t know how ravenously hungry you were until now. When was the last time you sat down and ate a meal? Was it days ago? (you’re always eating, but you’re always eating trash and turning your skin into crumpled paper full of maggots face full of maggots big fat pustules) Your whole body trembles with hunger that years for satiation, with pain that yearns for relief. Filthy anodyne nothing shudder down your chest (i can’t say these words but i say them vomit fist down my throat and vomit) as you plunge your whole fucking head in but the shimmering black swash wipes away everything in your brain and in your body except the perfect bliss of this moment. You’ll regret it later (You won’t. You don’t think you’ve ever regretted anything in your whole life. How could you? What have you ever done in your whole life but haruspicy?) You close your eyes, let your hands hang limp at your sides. You taste and smell and feel with your face as you push deeper. It feels like sliding into the earth, there’s just so much of it. Every sound every sensation everything that twitches inside of you hurts like an electric shock. You’ve never felt anything like this. For once, for fucking once, the whole world is quiet and dark and peaceful and soft and delicious and good. You try to shut your eyes harder, to block out everything but this for as long as you can, but you don’t even have to try. You can feel your eyes melt like ice cream, trickle into your mouth sweet and cold and smooth. You could open them. What’s the way? You can’t feel lines of force or the inerrant compass pull you’ve spent your life calling god, you can’t feel truth and beauty like cold razors cutting the maggots out, you can’t feel the rider who needs to be free. You can’t feel anything but pie. What’s the way? There is a deep place this leads to. It leads to sitting in the middle of the street in the dark and waiting. You’re not waiting. You imagine your eyeholes filling in with smooth soft skin. No more holes. No more sunlight that makes you feel sick, no more filthy nest to huddle in, no more world that’s like being hooked up to a car battery. Just pie. Your ears close next. You don’t even know how, but it’s blissful. No jumping at every sound, no screaming in the street, no static in your skull, no hiding from alarms and hand driers. You lose track of your arms somewhere too. No more hands balled into fists, no more nails drawing blood, no more knives in flesh and bones in skin and skull on spine. No more rider. You can feel your shoulders at the pie tin’s edge and then you can’t. It’s not even scary, and everything’s scary. If you can feel them you can remember why you need them. You can remember rotting flesh and pus and pressing your face to the mirror and handfuls of stupid fucking anodyne nothing. And then you can’t. You can remember the fish-hook human things you do, the brood-parasite things you’ve acquired through careful observation, secrets of standing and breathing and shaping and speaking that hold you to the world and never let you go, and then you slip the hook, and you can’t remember anything. No more bunny rabbit, no more desperate terror to run away from everywhere you are. No more picking scabs, the skin that slides from your skin is wet and hairless and smooth. No more lockjaw, the mouth that slides from your mouth’s all tongue and throat. You fill with salt and savor as easily as breathing (no more ragged, shallow breathing) and it passes from you just as easy. An endless motion of you, out of you, into it. Once the last traces of you, of the sun, of the world, are far behind, and it’s pie on all sides, you might as well be standing still and feeling the pie move through you. No more moving. No place but here. No moment but this one. No more fear, and no more pain. You’re safe and warm here, in the pie, forever. Good night, worm.