Entries Tagged 'sketch' ↓

Grandfather lies in a dreaming state while shadows enter the hospital room and shake him awake. He sees his sons as small children. He will not eat. He speaks in his sleep to ghosts and drops his thin jaw. He is tethered down for his own good. At night they sometimes chain his feet to the bed. He is dreaming and his shut eyes move wildly. He occasionally rises in a state of horror, when his mind surfaces. All the voices he hears are forever in the distance. They are all speaking behind his back, looking towards him sadly. The television becomes a fluttering tedious landmark where consciousness begins and the world ends. The wiring he’s attached to spirals backwards and clashes with his alien gestures and moods. He dreams of fragrant rooms. They pass with iron machines down the hallway. He cannot perceive the final curve, and when it will spin him out, so when he returns from the depths, he whispers to the priest to have everyone there.

More attention should be paid to this man who may soon cease to be. He was gigantically strong once. Now one notices his skull. His recognitions and hearing are perfect inside while outside there is the panic and the heavy smothering air of losing touch. He tries to hold on. It’s so much safer back at home. It’s so much easier to slip away. He has a vision of his wife from fifty years ago. They first met at a swimming pool in Jersey City where he was a lifeguard. He said, “That’s the woman I will marry,” She said, “Who me?” with a marine bathing suit on.

X.F. Pine

Within the freight elevator, the old Mr. Pointe spends a day’s eternity. Through the wire mesh at the bottom of the shaft a maintenance man hovers over a dark wheel. Spinning ratchets and dull greased pulleys. In Mr. Pointe’s cab are the necessary items of faith. There are old Christmas lights tangled and burned beyond repair. A toy mouse with a rusty grin is affixed to a switchbox. The cab’s color is sky blue, lit by a single raw bulb. Outside the cage the subsequent dark shafts appear endless. Mt. Pointe has no teeth. His neck seems to have been broken once. There is a religious calendar with a painting of wise men in a desert. There are certain exact dates circled in red meticulously. A plastic rose is woven through the links of the mesh. A ripped picture of a beautiful young woman by the sea is taped to a small panel. The girl is photogenic but very shy. Long dark hair covers her eyes. A brown newspaper clipping without a headline flips down only secured by a piece of tape at the bottom now. The words are faded and gone. The story was about Mr. Pointe’s friends from long ago who won all that money. Mr. Pointe believes in luck. A buzzer blares from the top of the shaft and Mr. Pointe secures the stretching cab gate and bolts it down. As the ascent begins, Mr. Pointe yells to the floors above. He complains about their lateness. A camera blinks a blue eye from the far corner of the cab. It’s cool lens is docile and thoughtless, as the cab ascends up through the abysmal space.

X. F. Pine

She keeps a collection of pictures of herself with others in her room. Some are of old barely forgotten boyfriends. They are in an envelope under a box on top of a bureau. She’ll shows them to the new boy, editing out the precious ones, and the dangerous skin embarrassing intimate nudity camera play photos. She shows the most model-like ones, and the “glint in her eye pictures”, shuffling past her own provocative image over and over. She flips through the photos quite madly now. Here she’s leaning against a fence with a different hair cut in the summer. Green trees surround her. She holds a white cat in another. An old boyfriend wonders in during a snapshot captured forever. Here her eyes gleam like a devil girl in the shade. It’s a tease, over and over again. A picture of an old bicycle with a special name: “Gertrude”. She stuffs the photographs back in the envelope. Her wash lies unfolded, piled on the mattress below the bureau. A few scattered books. A couple of kooky hats on hooks by the window. A fragile God’s Eye above the doorway. The new boy must leave.

There’s a photo pinned to the wall of her father from the 60’s in a bright white t-shirt, almost smiling. Telephone poles stretch out across a plain. A dustbowl of a town. She loves that one the most. The new boy kisses her on the lips twice and once angelically on her forehead, parting her hair gently. He leaves and his smile fades through the crack in the door. The new boy wonders down the stairs and out into the street at night, thinking of traps, and his own old pictures of traps.

X..F. Pine