David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

"Something like that."

"Don't believe it for nothing," Glory Joy wailed. (Woman could wail.) "T. Rex done something sinister to Chuck Junior, is what happened."

I agreed loudly. Plus two civilians, as well, with the sinister part.

The ceiling commenced to creak and precipitate dust, on account of the immense and shifting clerical weight on top. We was in the belly of something black and orange and numerous.

Now: "Where it all blew to," whispered the smooth steely Ranger. I remarked how his jelly jar's colors was overhung with lush and various floras. Was me asked Simple Ranger how floras got in his liquor.

"Gents, lady," smiled T. Rex, "in regard for your community selves I'm here today public to say that me and Chuck and Mona May's boy's struggle ended where all things titantic end. In meadow-physics. We done some together, that day. Some macrocosmic speculation."

This one previous civilian, cleft palate, red iron hair, up and levitates. We look up at his Keds. He asks the air in front of him: "Where did Minogue Oklahoma blow to?"

Commenced to just rain ceiling-dust.

"Boys, wrap yourselves around something affirmative," said T. Rex, his domestic bird now holding his box to his throat with one savvy claw. "Remember what's the next world and what ain't. Minogue blew to Minogue, neighbors. See you selves. You, me, the corporeally phenomenal Glory Joy, the Ranger especial, we been swirlin and blowin in and out Minogue land since twinkles commenced in our Daddies' eyes."

"Minogue is you, Minogue?" slurred Glory Joy duBoise. I couldn't say skank. We was all sleepy with vegetable fuss.

"Minogue blew to Minogue," Minogue said. "Under Dirt's curve she's whirled and fertilized her own self into a priceless poor. Lush, dead, elsewhere."

"So where is it at, Minogue," asks the palatal man, aloft in a cumulus of webs and dust and creak. "Where's the meat of the bones we crawl on, plus eke out of, plus die and sink back in without no sound."

"Ain't no difference," sighed the Ranger. He'd growed him half a beard in just time. He sniffed at his liquor.

"Where you at, there, Ranger?" smiled a uncertain and far-off T. Rex.

"At the window," whispered the Ranger, at the window. He stared into a wormy and boiling black peppered with eyes, red. "Me and Mr. Minogue is at the window looking down at what the life and death of every soul from Comanche to Nunn done gone to fertilize and plenish."

"Showed him what we own," said T. Rex. He smelled at his old hands. "Showed what we all done gave via the planetarial actions of movement, wind, top-soil artistics, to the landed spread my own personal Daddy first plowed. That I first fertilized to humud black with the juices of his arrow-punctured self and my grief-withered Momma."

"Ain't no Chuck Nunn from Minogue Oklahoma that ain't eternal and aloft," sighed the Ranger at the window. The cleft rigger got levitationally joined by some more civilians.

Things was dark and singular.

"Aloft," intoned the damaged man. "My eyes are free of my head and flat grey temper and I am able to see directly below my dangling self the plumed and billowing clusters of the tops of trees of meat, dressed and heavy with the sweet white tissued blossoms indigenous to Minogue, fertilized by the wind-blown fruit of the toneless Curve on which me, my woman, my people move."

"Indigenous?" I slurred.

"That voice there, John Billy, that voice there is Chuck Junior's voice," said Glory Joy, flat, toneless, curved, Klan-white.

"When the high winds blew off Country," the Ranger said, "I was able to hear the infinitely many soft sounds of the millions of delicate petals striking and rubbing together. They joined and clove together in wind. My eyes was blowing everywhere. And the rush of perfume sent up to me by the agitation of the clouds of petals nearly blew me out that window. Delighted. Aloft. Semi-moral. New."

Glory Joy duBoise up and levitated. Also myself. Soon we was all uncommitted except to air and vision. T. Rex stayed where he was at, under us, by our pyramid of bottles studded with jars.

"Shit," he said.

Buzzards was gone. Flown home with a violence that set the edge-of-Minogue soil to lifting and tearing, twisted and grey, only to get beat down by a sudden plus unheard-of rush of clean rain from a innocent and milk-white sky. It fell like linen-wear, strings of technical light. Other such things. Windows ran smeared, then clear, then the rain shut down as abruptly as it had etc. etc.

The land commenced to look wounded. Dimpled puddles stretched off into nothing, outside — coins of water bright and clean and looking like open cancres in the red light of the low hurt red sun.

"Fore I die," whispered the malignified T. Rex, "I need to know where y'all think you live." He looked up. Around. "It's why I'm public today. Think what this is costing me. I need to know where y'all think you live at," he wailed. (Sucker could wail, too, gravelly vibrator or no.) His fowl got ornery.

"Maybe we'll just have us some fine new liquor first," whispers a aloft Ranger beside me, old, unbearded, sky-eyed. I saw for the first time how cataracted he was.

T. Rex commenced to hand up jars. "Tell me, Ranger," he said.

"Lord but don't it look clean," I was saying over and over.

"Show me the Chuck Nunn Junior I love, plus need," Glory Joy petitioned to a T. Rex maneuvering into a position for looking up her dress.

I grappled with some unsayably fearsome temptations to tell Chuck Nunn Junior's loyal and near-lovely woman who in all this landed world I loved.

"What's all that again?" said the Ranger in a flat grey gurgle.

"Have some liquor."

"Tell me where y'all think you live at."

Should of seen me grapple.

9. MY NAME IS JOHN BILLY.

Was me supposed to tell you how, on that one fine dark day a pentecost's throw from Ascension, we all of us got levitationally aloft, moving around the seated form of Minogue Oklahoma's expired T. Rex Minogue. How we passed, hand over hand, jar after jar of his unstable sweet-potato medicine, each jar deeper in color, duskier, til it got like the washed and bleeding land in the colored outside. How we all, even and especially Glory Joy, got glazed and apolitical, also torpid, docile, our minds in a deep loose neutral gear; how I started the story how Chuck Nunn Junior done wronged the man that wronged him all over again; and how at a point in time,[keep]

which is where we lived at, if the sucker'd asked me,[keep]

we all, me and civilians and Woman and old lone listening sky-eyed Ranger, we all crossed the thin line and slept. Aloft. How we dreamed a community dream of Chuck and Mona May Nunn's good luck boy Chuck Junior, riding his own mixer and might and absent purpose high, chasing a temper, a Daddy, Simple Ranger's DeSoto and farm, an everything of flora, sheep, soil, light, elements, through the windy fire of Oklahoma's roaring, watching stars. Now go on and ask me if we wasn't sorry we ever woke up. Go on.

[scanners's note: Unconventional paragraphs were in original text.]

'Her photograph tastes bitter to me. A show of hands on the part of those who are willing to believe that I kiss her photo? She'd not believe it, or it would make her sad, or rather it would make her angry and she would say you never kissed me the way you kiss my chemically bitter senior photo, the reasons you kiss my photo all have to do with you, not me.'

'He didn't really like to kiss me.'

'On the back of the photo, beneath the remains of the reversible tape I had used to attach it carefully to the wall of my room at school, are written the words: "Received 3 February 1983; treasured as of that date." '