by J. A. Tyler
In this episode the children in the classroom will all wear boxes over their heads and will search the room with their hands. Their hands will be hands that have been reconnected. Their hands will wear seams as sleeves and curse in red. The hands that they use to search the room will be calling out Where is this the happiness?
It is raining outside. There are holes in this classroom. It is raining inside.
On the boxes on the children's heads there is sometimes too this same rain in the classroom through the holes in the ceiling from the outside where the clouds are dropping the idea of rain down into them.
The nails that rain down in this episode go through the box hats and to the children's heads. They cry Love. They cry This the moment. They cry and the cries are scabs made liquid.
What makes the children make themselves is called psychoanalysis. The makes the children stand up straight is called projection. What makes the children sound-off for one another and chop the arms off of a neighboring child with sharp words or phrases or axes is called psychology. Psychoanalysis is a method to weep. Projection is making a mirror of oneself while eating crumbs from a dumpster soaked in metal rain. Psychology is a way to understand how understanding works when we understand something.
The children wear their boxes over their heads and none of them cut holes where the eyes should go. The children wear boxes over their heads and none of them cut holes where their mouths would speak.
The boxes are printed with words that don't mean language exists. The boxes are a history of what was. The boxes are leftovers of a heaven that is soiled and rotting on the heads of children. The boxes are headdresses for children wanting to play broken down dead and gone cowboys and Indians. The boxes are skeletal and moribund umbrellas. The boxes are ill-wrought foundations being taken down.
It is raining. In the rain are words.
This is an episode where I love you means wear this box. This is an episode where the children wearing the boxes means we have ended.
We have ended.
All that is left is this the rain.
All rights reserved.
This is a previously unpublished excerpt of the novel WATER, forthcoming from Civil Coping Mechanisms in 2012.