Where A Dreamhouse Should Have Been

*

The man paces until he reaches a village, 

his glance following the golden aura of 

household oil wicks that gave the cottages 

their eyes, and as he arrives in front of the 

one with its features more aged than the 

rest, he peers into the window. The man sees 

a nervous, barely-teenage boy, wide awake 

and terrified when the rest of the world does

the same while sleeping. The boy is crying, 

but the man knows that there will be more 

lost. The man is the one left to convince 

manhood to be worth more than what dies. 

The boy looks up, lines his gaze with the man 

on the other side of the window, who is like a 

mirror, but buried under a generation; A man 

around whom the night immediately blackens. 

A man who wraps himself with it and 

runs until he is out of a continent. 

*

The man is home alone in his apartment.

More wrinkles on his forehead like a scribbled 

map. The room is laced with perpetual dust 

and lined with furniture picked from dumpsters 

of shopping mall alleys, thrown into the lended 

Honda in such a manner that would only 

quasi-violate traffic safety guidelines, and rolled 

into the unit’s shared parking space with 

the Carpenters’ Yesterday Once More still 

at its guppy bridge. Neglected on the run-down 

floor of the foyer is a backpack that once 

carried ghosts on his shoulder. He sits at the 

dinner table. A tea kettle with paisley 

brushstrokes and three months worth of 

paychecks tucked into the beak. A radio turned 

on, broadcasting across the frontier from NYC 

with the World Trade Center in shambles and 

civilian terror engorging on the witchhunt against 

terrorism. The man sits and chews with Bush’s 

voice in the background. His Nokia chimes, to 

which he flicks open as he deposits the remaining 

soda crackers from his hand back into the 

cardboard sleeve. He yammers into the phone 

with his mouth half-empty for every sha la la la.

*

A young woman enters who, six months 

later, will be determined a wife, sign a page in 

a red Henley top and flared denim at a counter 

of an air-freshened room, be called married, pack 

back up the film, and clock back in. Share a box 

of Empress chicken with a Carpenter’s boy 

on the Golden Gate Bridge. Charm the court. 

Be restlessly the same but a sharer of a municipal 

drawl that is, after all, the monumental point. 

Carry first the infant, then a green card, and 

gravitate towards the gradual devoid in 

exhibitionist severity. But of course, that is never 

for a wannabe Yankee girl. And, like a narration, 

dinner is set. But the man’s face is twisted tight, 

tugging the collar of a remedial-level U.S. Polo Assn. 

shirt he won’t replace until, oh let’s say, the 

orchestrated final shine of the woah-oh-oh.

He clutches a Tsingtao bottle. He shouts, breaks 

its neck on the dinner table so the shards and booze 

both look like tears. The table pushes. Another bottle 

breaks. Another voice breaks. The fluorescent 

lights buzz melodically above the couple to make 

a tune from injury, decorating the blankness mercied 

by their screams. 

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Pacific Moondust

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On the Other Side of the Yankee Girl Drawl