Kyle Muntz - Voices

He said it didn’t matter, and dragged me in behind. Tonight, beating that nameless hour, the clock stopped, not spinning in circles, or keeping track of numbers. The grass sung. Wetness crinkled to steps, raining. No wind blew. It was not raining.

We went on a journey through the forest. Thirty feet in the canopy broke. Thick brush masked the path behind. It led nowhere: dark branches, silent, unmoving. The trees were bigger back here, and more real, with nothing scribed in the bark, no place to declare everlasting love. I left my own footprints. They were shaped very much like my shoes.

We went on a journey in the forest.

Inside, darkness swallowed us whole, a thick, hardening darkness, carving caves in nature, lapsing through the real. He might have led. Specters, silent stepping, owls flew overhead with a burst of winds. They hunted because they were less than human. Ferns, still browning, were almost but not quite dead. I felt like washing my hands.

We were travelers in a place where the real never came, nature imitating memory- seeing ghosts, pale-white; with hallow eyes and clear skin. Forgetfulness admonished them, millennia outscored them. If grasshoppers could moan, then they moaned. Moth patches fluttered, netlike. Trees held conversation.

An indigo rift, pulsating, scoured the landscape, smelling heavily of pigmentation and dynamite. It had electricity in it, cackling white and blue. Furious lightning sprung from it, making scars in dirt, trees, and pinecones, lighting purple fires and tearing new holes. Above, the moon shown down, judgmental. It heard very little. The stars were not kind to us.

I went on a journey in the forest, not where I’m going. This wasn’t science fiction, and this wasn’t a salt-sea mooring romance, killing great beasts from somewhere near the bottom of the world. Blue fire engulfed us. White lightning destroyed us. Whispering, the dryness of spiders, papery along the walls. Melancholy rebuked us. Harmonious music, transcendent, undid us.

I went on a journey in the forest.

Jacob spouting nonsense, stupidity. "I think she’s the one. Really, she is."

"That’s nice."

"It is," Jacob said. He wrung his hands. "I’m going to ask her to marry me. We could be together forever, we really could." Still wringing his hands.

Someone opened the door. I might have come here for poetry, though more likely I hadn’t.

Whatever it was, I hadn’t come here for Jacob.

"How long have you been together?"

"A month," he said, "or two."

The sidewalk repeating itself. Existence ran out of ideas. At intersections, reams of exhaust, burping and flooding. The light changed colors. Jacob buried his eyes in the nearest waitress. He was scum; he understood nothing of self-awareness.

"Do you have a ring?" I asked.

He said he didn’t. Not yet, at least. But he would. He was getting one from a friend, and it would be really nice, he swore, though he hadn’t seen it yet, so he didn’t know. "She won’t know it’s used." He took a drink. "So it’s a great idea." He didn’t deserve carbonation, or any amount of sodium water. The world had very little use for him.

"If you want," I said, "I’ll be honest."

"How so?"

"I could tell you how bad of an idea this was."

::::::::::::::::::::

his stupid fucking adolescent bullshit, regurgitation, He snorted.

"If you wanted," I said, "I could give you great advice."

"Like what?"

"Take back everything you just said, forget about that ring, and find a nice, quiet

corner to be embarrassed at yourself."

Jacob looked down. His upper lip wiggled. He balled his hands to fists. "What do you know about love?" he asked. "What do you know?" "Obviously more than you," I said, though when I thought about it later,

repeating myself, I started to sound and more like

a liar.

::::::::::::::::::::

I woke up

in the park,

at

the edge

of the forest, though somehow everything

felt

more

like a dream than ever before.

::::::::::::::::::::

I talked to an old man in the park, while I wrote a poem about the forest. It was thick/cornerless, a place/where wanderers/went, to find a part of themselves/still living. Though I abandoned it after a few lines, wondering at myself, for writing so horribly. Sometimes I feel like/for all the lines/I’ve penned, I’ve never written/anything/truly original… and those are the scary days. I experiment with punctuation because rhythm isn’t enough for me anymore. Someday I plan on chasing sentences away.

"When I was young," the old man said, "all this, all around, this city used to be grass and farmland, forests, grazing fields and patches of muskrat ter-ritory, where the gophers lived. Over there," he pointed, with an aged, crooked finger, "there used to be a path, winding, that led to the river, and a forest that went back further, to place no man ever came. Until, that is, he destroyed it.

"Yes," he said, "when I was young, there used to be wilderness here." "Does it matter?"

He dropped his head to his hands, wrapped them both around his cane.

Drooping. I’d never seen someone so old. His hair wisped cloudlike over a wrinkled skull. His clothes were fifty years out of date. All my life, I’d never feared such transformation. But he taught me the meaning of fear, the eventuality of age.

"How would I know?" he exclaimed, angrier than language could make him. "I’m just an old man. My generation didn’t care about the past either. The young are always the same." He cackled, frightening in his oldness. "But I have my secrets," he said, "I do. My past, the past I know, is something you can never go back to, and I’ll own it forever. I could be lying," he cackled again, "and you would never know."

"You are," I said. "There’s never been a forest here."

He looked at me bitterly. It couldn't matter. In remembering, he’d lost himself to something that wasn’t the past, glorified, imaginative. The history he knew was a magnification of the internal: embittered. I didn’t hate him, but I didn’t pity him either. He reminded me of vicious unreality. Even now I’d lost touch, forever, with the real.

::::::::::::::::::::

"Did you tell them?" Ashley asked.

"Yeah," I said, "I told them. Just once."

She gave me a hug.

"But I have to ask," I said. "Why did you want me to lie?

::::::::::::::::::::

I met her there. For some reason my life seems to have become a sequence of secret meetings in secrets places normal people don’t want to go- or I could put it that way, if I took the past into consideration. I considered the past: classes at the last minute, passing through doorways. Memory gave me difficulty. I felt like I’d separated from myself. Maybe I had.

"Do you…" Veronica touched my shoulder, brushed her fingers away. Still, we were asking the wrong questions. "Do you have anyone?"

One of us was nervous. I might have been projecting myself, playing a game of masks through a mirror.

Maybe. Maybe I had someone. She would be the first to know.

"I was just wondering," she said, "if you did, that is. Just because. I wondered."

"No," I said, "I don’t think… there was another girl, last year, but it wasn’t about us, really. So no, I don’t think I do."

"Oh," she said. "Oh."

I took her hand. It was longer than mine, slender and cool. She had many skills. She was an artisan of the flesh, a fountain. Our fingers came together. No, this wasn’t a time for innuendo. I wasn’t a teenage boy telling jokes in smoky places. That, for, was life, was. Could I feel, did I? Thinking back, and feeling, thinking. All I’m good at is playing games with words. The world escapes me.

"I wrote a poem for you," I said. "Has anyone… has anyone ever written a poem for you before?" She said no. She was lying, but I didn’t mind. She lied for me, if she was. I knew. I always know. "You want to hear it?" I asked. I hoped she did. I whispered