"Childhood. Education. Art. Sex. And death." The freckles on Sam's phizz all but glitter. "We leave anything out?"
Our scissors stopped spinning a forever ago. The house is infinitely silent: fathomless stillness in the ventilation ducts, each as wide around as the boy I was. Staring into the ducts elicited a curious sense of coded time-- time suspended in light as perfectly as motes of dust performing a tarantella, the room tone of eternity preserved pristine as pearls of air in honey. Sam won't stop staring at me.
"I'm..." It's impossible to say why I'm nervous. "I don't quite know." Standing, my right knee seems to catch. Favoring the enormous irish-pale scar center outboard of the joint with a glance.
"Yeah, I don't remember you getting that one either." Catching a glimpse of himself reflected in the catatonic eye of the floor model wooden paneled Panasonic, Sam gives a subtle start. "Cripes, Kid. What'd ya picture me as, Ringo Starr in 'Shining Time Station'? C'mon. Shoes the sizea filberts, when I got corns the sizea walnuts, already? Christ!"
"So..." Words stretching and distending in my mouth as the captive afternoon strains to synch with my present. "Sooo... Whaatt ddd
But my words stick and hang, starchy and forfeit, in the bottled moment. Sam is three times my size and height, at the side entrance door, opening it. Kinetic blue discharge escapes, sparking from the hinges, freezedried momentum rasped free. Turned toward the field of red clover, pecan boughs frozen midruffle, adult back to me, Sam clears his throat. Cigarette clicks from left to right, right to left of his profile, visible just beneath the lobes of his ears, and Sam hoists a captain's lighter: the impossible flame there bejeweled in a painterly hash of nib marks and shards of letratone. The precise photo negative of fire.
"My young friend, I dunno whatcha do with whatcha got." Sam tokes, and an ellipses of french curves wafts out through the screen door. He opens the screen door, stepping out onto the creamy faded limegreen porch, heel of his brogan hitting the concrete with an inaudible crack.
The waveform collapses. Memory imploding abrupt as a soap bubble. And what's left...
"And what's left?"
Sam's voice a beacon in the black hollow beneath our dreaming.
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