Ken Baumann - Say, Cut, Map

“Fine.”

The later you bought in, the better. They pushed one more time and the casket went completely in, and then they were all huddled, crying, heads together.

“Last time.”

Thinking of the trees. Everything so permanently elegant.

He’d talk about it indirectly. Reminders, to do lists. He opened his eyes wide then opened his mouth wide then stuck out his tongue then made noise. She smiled, idling. Sex. Most likely total folly Even probing. Believing there were questions. The knife slipped and stung him. Blood dotted the paper audibly.

“If you can get enough of it.”

He smiled and shook his head. Either cursing or blessing the transitional. I respect him, she said. Oops.

“Don’t let me stop you.”

He couldn’t exercise to exorcise. She cried. She’d run laps around them.

I want to look at the rings. He looked at the skin below his mouth. Wondering where the pure anger that came with not being able to clip his fingernails came from. He laughed and ran farther away. He could argue against being prolific better than anything else. She pointed to their son. He stared into it just long enough to see bars, flushing white when he looked down, blinked.

“Go ahead and stop.”

That anger will help him. Eventually. His friend called. She looked at the clock on the microwave. He pulled her in by her hips. They wanted hamburgers. They laughed and decided on The Church of Omission.

“We keep getting them, though.”

He had to stop thinking about it.

“I’m going to take a nap.”

It was a hard experience to describe because he couldn’t really frame it. Blame my mother for everything. The scale of the planets was off, or so he hoped. The dog jumped and came down in a puff of dust, the dog licking its paw now, intensely, while its owners yell at it to quit. He wanted to touch the gore.

“I need your finger.”

Only local anesthesia is what he’d heard. A minor work.

There was stuff in their lives that was clearly poisonous, and he oscillated between feeling tasked to find the more embedded harms, and wanting to leave them piled, left to the therapist’s invitation, collected in rooms.

“I’d recommend you turn it on first.”

He’d be cut and punished back home.

He saw the number and knew it was larger than the population of many cities combined, but wanted to know what that number meant, what it translated to. Thinking in defaults helped. His skin felt raw in certain spots, too sensitive, but he couldn’t explain it. She enjoyed noting their progress in quiet moments. He wanted to know how deep it was.

“Can we stay home?”

He warned her of their possible poverty, but jokingly, assuring himself by both laughing about it now and conditioning her to the idea, maybe just saying it at all, that it would never happen. The ditch seemed to suck the truck into it and spit it out, axle snapping, falling forward in one lurch, immediately fucked. He saw the knives from a distance. Mothers can fight, too, wiping her eyes, closing her mouth over broken teeth. There’s a problem with this picture.

“You need to see this.”

The office was high-ceilinged and expensive. He didn’t know what to expect. She raised her skirt. He pointed and nodded. The shoes had no soles. Local tax, the guide said and smiled. Faster.

“Hurt me.”

The look, those eyes, incalculable. He knew he’d shit violently. The sky rendered a new black every night. I’d shoot him. She shook her head, pointed up.

Just for appearances. The gasoline seeped out overnight, soaked his journal and the walkies. They couldn’t, really, but they would, they’d buy him another one. She got up in the middle of the night and he wondered if it was for show. She liked his eyelids. So rapidly.

“This will go away.”

He didn’t want to be hungry. The interior, trapped feeling didn’t die. She promised flowers. He ate. He ate. Nothing to do with it.

“Let’s try that again.”

It’s maybe the first time I’ve done that since I was five. The sun moving his skin, a tense sensation, the first pleasurable stride in the walk toward pain. She left her purse. He took a sip before her. He was surprised at their obsession with the weather.

“You have to find him.”

The pile of bricks gathered webs, brush, castoff weeds, bits of paper. He lifted the bat. He had to salvage the sex somehow, feign violence. Red bellies. Again, he didn’t want her to know how he knew that, who told him. The screen kept fuzzing out. He felt the old man’s tenets replaying, driving him further and further away from sleep, because yes, how could we deny the celestial on our skin?

He heard they wanted to find the prettiest worst case possible, and craft their story around her, which was typical, and successful.

“You have at least a month more of recovery.”

He skimmed the pages. She recognized the problem. They would never run out of gas.

“Will you fuck me?”

Insurance still felt alien.

“No lower.”

So maybe they’d die together. He understood. Whatever hurt the most left a severe deficit of information, a hole so deep it had its own gravity, and memory would build into its structure, filling the hole so rapidly as all the bricks and invitations fell toward it.

“It’s nature.”

He caught wider eyes.

He couldn’t do anything about the rust. He stopped talking and thought about what that meant, exhausted all the logical courses of the next few questions, demands, and he saw himself nodding. The last action figure in the drawer, one arm gone.

“Poetic.”

Don’t belittle me, she said. He asked if he could watch out for him next time. They required some money, some numbers, and a name. He stared at the needle in the center of the rug, would it meet his child’s foot, would it hurt or go unnoticed? The batteries were dead. Somehow, he could feel the sun’s color. Maybe he was being taken home.

“It’s about time.”

Years since he so intensely desired one part of her, the skin, the word pussy over and over again, he wanted to whisper it into her hair while she slept, saying it a little louder each time, hoping to finally wake her just enough for her to move her ass back against him.

“You should…”

He didn’t want to craft an exercise. It was important that he met them halfway. She kissed his right wrist. His first shot. No allergies yet.

“Can we talk about it?”

She was dying, though she couldn’t be, following a natural course that however many hundreds of millions had spent before, he smiled at her, she looked at him until they cried, smiling until they couldn’t.

Did she know he was above average height for his age? Something sinister in the construction of distraction. He felt his fingertips, touched them, feeling nothing. New skin, burned asleep.

“I’ve never heard that.”

He ran out. She planned dinner. He heard the bathtub draining. She had to set the slide for him, or whatever it was called. He numbered the colors and set out corresponding crayons. Welts, two running gashes, he heard lacerations. She called him into the house. Murder, she said. A change of light. They laughed.

“You don’t have to try.”

Pleasantries bored them both. A massive explosion would work.

“Goodnight.”

Onto the master list of gratitudes he should feel, he added the absence of land mines. That his god would contain the form and feeling of a joke and fail to build the entirety around the joke, as a guide, he laughed, it was funny. He slept.

“Can you do both?”

He blamed a central murkiness. Her hair was falling out, she showed him. Frost formed on each window, inside. He closed his eyes. She held up a finger. They woke at the same time, both speaking.