Ken Baumann - Say, Cut, Map

“Surprise.”

No authority to approve it. Water ran underneath them.

Can’t come fast enough, he typed. He ordered her flowers. He heard fruit being announced. How rarely he saw what he felt anymore. Pain is a negligible universe.

“You’re showing off.”

He knew that unplaceable fear was why he was talking. He could only hear himself in sections through her stare. We have to plug all the sockets.

“You’re the man for the job.”

Something shifted across the world. Of course he could never be sure.

“Too much.”

He felt it so strongly, like having out-of-town guests sleeping in your house, the smell of cousins. He never had problems finishing as a kid. She showed her palm.

He wanted to go through all his inboxes, any space with information, delete everything. She did. He did. Breaking them took twenty-two days.

“Focus.”

He hurt the tendons in his left wrist masturbating. Whoever plotted the first few screams during a public disaster and found the pattern, riches upon riches.

“Take your time.”

He asked for another drink. It was the best and worst advice he gave me. She grabbed his arm. Don’t be a salesmen.

“You weren’t supposed to know.”

After she told him, he tried, all day. How permanent description was, for the most part. Killing eternal essences. Good deeds had to lead to rewards. Assurances of quality. She spoke for them. He asked her if he described what heaven meant right.

“Okay, let go.”

Somedays he looked for style. Forgetting the gaze.

“You are very bad.”

The hot full cup of her panties, wet. First girlfriends and iced tea. He looked around. A thousand centuries of colonial rule.

Thinking about sacrifice, he felt the distance he was placing between him, his ideas about his son, and what he knew he could do, fantasy as a mock trial. It upset his stomach. Sun spiked his eyes. Three ants circling his leg. She said thank you.

“I want sugar.”

She argued for the death penalty. He wanted silence, nothing else. He grabbed his neck. Robins hopped, gorgeously pecked anything near their feet, each other. The bank could hold it until tomorrow. The lock kept its combination.

“This isn’t a puzzle.”

Blood, three men, a market. The audience stood.

He classified chunks of their life according to cost, marked what he thought could go first. A pile of mulch overtaken by a pile of ivy. The look before he drank his juice, how his healthy hands gripped the bottle, they both looked aside and saw each other, saved. Ruined gray faces, coming, terror. She didn’t like malls.

“I don’t know what happens when you’re gone.”

He joked about it, but he had contingency plans. He admitted he was domestic, offered a small apology for his lack of tragedy, asked if that was, if he was, enough. Morphine, thirty milligrams, thirty days.

“Life is what happens to you.”

She wanted more photographs of them. The particular pain of not telling a friend they lack talent, awareness. His son shit on the porch. She’d do it for him. A bat, perched in the closest tree.

“It’s good enough.”

They painted.

Water sounds good. He paced. Her laughing, someone else’s come inside her. He blinked. His hand. Blood filled between a group of knuckles. He wanted to take a picture. She stopped. The lost hand. They lay down on the floor. He felt nonlinear.

“Now that’s how you start something.”

It would be the last year he could justify not voting. Hundreds of voices into that single phrase, repeated, repeated, shouted by some. He offered his credit card. She squeezed his hand. He bit her. Nearing a day in which he’d set down a glass and never remember.

“It’s a game of percentages.”

The bent of small crowds. Her family was coming down. He wished for knowledgable, wild hands. She didn’t eat fish.

“Say please.”

He pulled right, hurled right, head against the ground, dust and matter speckling their heads and the undercarriage, now their little roof. He felt eyes keeping on his back. Sterile environments are urgently needed.

“There’s enough to go around.”

She thinks it must’ve been the third drink but then she wants to lie down and he lets her, fanning the towel out to wrap around the toilet, and once she’s finally asleep he walks out of the room and grabs a pillow and comes back, tucks himself into the bathtub, happy. He recognizes the man in front, the worst of them. They don’t move. She squeezes his hand tighter. They come close.

That the little symbol could be a reminder of how he felt when he felt awake, stuck and luckily shelved in the present. He woke up around midnight. He told her about the dream. Wanting to feel like he could summarize her, her time given to him. The tree broke. Yes, it did.

“He could be doing better.”

The underlying tension of living as they did. Negotiating an abundance of perspective together. She asked her to pray with him. He asked that they wait. Hunger came away. They could go to the ocean.

“I’m burning.”

Now, with him born and becoming able really fast, he wondered how the great big myth of making yourself could ever supersede what they were avoiding now, how that idea ever took hold at all, unless the myth itself was a dumb virus, culture’s big baby, birthing fledgling heroes daily. He flexed his wrist and asked her if he had heroin veins.

“Red.”

A police car breezed out of traffic and stopped behind them. He looked at the scratches on his forearm. The dog had to be smiling. She tasted something familiar. Jupiter is doing something funny this month. Everyone laughed at once. Could it be that easy?

“Are you comfortable?”

He wanted to watch irresponsible spectacle for a few hours. They got naked and waited. Up close, it looked like severed tissue.

“Please don’t touch me.”

He stood, laughing. Feeling suddenly the compressions of all rock.

That everything anyone ever catalogued as unfeeling could actually be a better designed, more sensory being, replete with an embedded life that is unimaginably beautiful.

“I need an answer.”

He shook his hands. Each finger broken with a mallet. She admitted the leather shoes could possibly be the reason a child died somewhere, vaguely supply chained to death. He laughed. He kept drawing circles for mommy and daddy.

They felt impossibly strained. The rightful heir to the controller. If he thought back far enough, he bought himself that experience. I’ll go down on your left side, she said. They guide said they still explode.

“I do.”

He dreamt about formulating up an ideal justice and its system of application, building it by hand with the community, then leaving.

“It’s gone down.”

He could call his brother. She asked about variety. He adjusted the knife handle on the edge of the pan, attempting to balance it there, imagining heating the blade and serving it as their only food, cutting his stomach open in the center of the living room. He bet because he thought about it so infrequently, it was okay. She would look so betrayed. He almost puked. She picked up the garbage.

“Stay here for a minute.”

Your posture’s pretty bad, she said. He agreed to wait. A fourteen-car pileup that bloomed from the far left lane. He undermined his parents in little ways, and some were adorable.

“Softer.”

How deep could he go.

The payment would go toward restitution for the families of the victims. Maybe they could cry about that together.

“Excuse me, sir.”

He parked thirty minutes early and watched the still exterior of the school, thought about evacuation, the children pushed into single file lines and told to think about anything but their parents. He felt sick, stuck in some swamped pornography. He knew they wouldn’t eat. Eradicated. He saw ahead, saw himself leaving grocery stores and gas stations, exiting silently and smoothly, quite calm, no her.