Inferno
I have a new job, well-paying and clean, polite, even elegant at times, stupendously easy in theory, but also like dredging through mud mixed with dinosaur blood. Sometimes I’m so bored I feel like I might throw up or my skin might slide off my face and into my lap like a concubine impatiently disrobing. Still, it must be said that there are tall glasses of water, poland spring, pint glasses like my mother and I saw in the made-for-tv murder mysteries we watched in the months before selling our apartment. It brought some comfort to us, the orderliness of it all in the face of decapitation, the drowning of children, the murder of priests and bell ringers. Whatever face of tragedy can be met with a palm on the back, a sigh through one’s ancient nose, a calm, morose wit and a cup of tea with or without sugar. They have tea in the office. I saw people drinking it in the large white mugs they have in the dozens, but I never knew what cabinet they did or didn’t rescue it from—it seemed to me like some magic trick that I didn’t understand. Then, one day, in the middle of my day, I found myself in the cubby isle among flirters and drones, for I had lost my way, to boredom and hunger, to other things I’m sure, to horrid things I saw there which renewed fear. But then I spied a cabinet, and on the cabinet a sticker, and written on the sticker a word, and the word was:
Q & A
It isn’t the worst Thing Living like a beatle Crawling acrossComplicated Soil In a world of Sleepless trees.
No
The worst thing is boredom.
Last time sitting at kitchen table, in kitchen of 2077
The house feels bigger than it used to. Outside winter has pulled back for a night. Familiar things will soon be pretty vague. Onwards lilliputions! To larger worlds!
Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice
I wonder, once in a while, if I’m the bad one:
if I’m everything I don’t like about whom I don’t like.
But the feeling doesn’t last long
(only as much as the skipped-step imagined in the first second of sleep),
once I remember whose team I’m on.
