micrometers

heads stacked with knowledge; literally, as the kids say.

_____

I knew Uncle Uncle was dead because the phone rang four times then stopped. Four minutes later it rang four times again then stopped. Four minutes later it rang four times again then stopped. Four minutes later it rang four times again then stopped. That is the code in my family when someone passes on to the other life. Sixteen rings: four sets of four rings every four minutes.

After waiting a bit of time, I called Mother Mother back. When I asked her if it was Uncle Uncle, I could hear her nod over the phone because her chin whiskers chin ground against the receiver: it sounded like the inside of a conch shell, crackling and constant and soothing.

Four hours: I'm there, I said.
Do that please yes, Mother Mother replied.

In my family, when someone passes on to the other life, we exchanged phrases in four word groupings only.

I hung up the phone. The receiver, it had felt warm. I thumbed the hoop of my coffee mug. On my ceiling I had a mobile, a mobile made of paper elephants the neighbor kid down the hall fashioned from coat hangers and construction paper. The neighbor kid down the hall: I could not remember his name. In fact, I don't think he had a name at all. Or a concept of time—he was unable to tell time, he was unable to understand it at all. But the mobile, he made it for me. The mobile: it was brilliant, the elephants were of varying size and color (one was purple—purple!) and most had tusks made from rounded toothpicks. Thank god he had used the rounded ones; I hate squared toothpicks. Like most things, they do not feel right.

Leaning back in my chair, still thinking about the phone conversation, I brought the coffee cup to my mouth and I suddenly smelled Uncle Uncle. Well, his old cabin anyways. Being in his cabin was like being inside an enormous wooden can of Folgers. And, consequently, as the mind always has a habit of doing, I thought about one of my first memories of Uncle Uncle. It was about the day he took me to school, the only day. It was the day we had the field trip to the puzzle factory in Poontonkla City.

_____

the part about my stories was cut.

_____

-forty microfictions-

A.

1.

The cold, hard gusts: entire schools of philosophy manifested in the watering of her eyes and he was her most ardent apologist.

2.

Underneath the checkered flannel throw, her body formed into the comma separating the clauses of his arms.

3.

In the white moonbeam he examined her watermark: she was definitely not a forgery.

4.

On top of the toilet paper roll as I reached to wipe myself: a crumpled Walmart receipt. "Black Dress Socks: $2.85. Shoe Polish: $4.65." Good luck on the job interview. Or safe travels to the wake. Either path: my condolences.

5.

The supernovae of her chestnut eyes: widening explosions in a borderless universe.

6.

Her red smile: a foursquare ball at the maximum PSI inflation. And so firm in one's hands.

7.

"Biographers say that they would exchange love letters written only in musical notation," she whispered to her fellow flautist before the conductor tapped his wand on the music stand, thrice; his equivalent to the throatclear of a middle school English teacher or the gavelpoundings of a judge who, besides his darkdarkdark robes, seemed to reflect only the color gray.

8.

Above their bedroom window, in the eaves, a rusty cocoon appeared three weeks ago but nothing ever emerged. Nature forgot to properly remind her own on the cruelty of her early frosts.

9.

"I always miss that spot, too," their eyes meet in the mirror as she raises the blade to the valley under his nose. He pulls his upper lip taut and watches her eyes, in the reflection, watching her own hand, the razor parting the white foam like the snow plows on the street below their tiny, steamed window. Clearing, exsposing.

10.

The inside of his eyelids looped the pictureshow of that important fleshspace slightly above, and to the left, of her lips; the reel of his index finger exploring that significance there on her inquisitive face ran well into his descent from being awake.

11.

The shallow crater of an inhaling mouth under a thin membrane of latex.

12.

A Frenchman working in a car factory on the outskirts of Paris in the 60s, his friend, an Algerian. Everything absent of color.

13.

George was becoming convinced that the town was peopled only with Betty, and Betty's simulations, and Betty's simulation's simulations.

14.

The pepper swirled in the goo that was quickly solidifying into scrambled eggs: little yellow cumulus puffs dappled with the darkness of a coming storm.

15.

"I guess another way to say it, sweetness," he tugs at his white beard, squints, "would be that I am quickly obtaining fluency in the language of your existence. I will be rolling your R's in no time."

16.

His eyes transfixing on the fluidity of her motions: cleansing herself of his seed with three fingers and the bidet's mechanized geyser (far from Old but indeed Faithful). Their eruptions are clockwork.

17.

Unseen graffiti on a non-existent culvert: "We could live like the falcon or the squid or any other beast in between."

18.

Roger's sinuses whistled and ached in his skull, like he was in the deep end, retrieving pennies from the intake grate ten to twelve feet below the water. At the surface, her wavy form moved in irritation--how long could he stay down here until someone jumped in to retrieve him, a 180 pound chunk of copper?

19.

In the days when she used to color in her fingernails with a black Sharpie in 5th period English, it was in these days, that she discovered her ability to talk to snails.

20.

Five hours from the recording studio, Nigel put the final piece in place, on the M1, in the rain.

B.

1.

Franklin met Melinda on--precisely--the same day that he began to write his lower-case "Y's" in a different way. On both accounts: a shift from a graceful curvature into a rigid descent.

2.

Like the Great Wall before it, Douglas's beard was now the next human-made noun that could be seen from space.

3.

She appears in the rare book room: a seaplane over the Sahara.

4.

The hummingbird moth at the mirror, pirouetting with its own image.

5.

Found on a blue Post-it note in the bathroom of the English office: idea for poem illustrating something about the crane's phallus and the labial clouds.

6.

At 11:15PM on Saturday, March 17, 2012, Helga will awake from falling asleep in her reading chair and will cry as she will be struggling with the recent death of a puppy that she will have named Helmut because she will have enjoyed the way his jowl will have arched over his right canine like the causeway floating above the marsh in the southwestern part of Dusseldorf where she used to catch moths with her father as a young girl.

7.

In the audio books aisle in the Pittsburgh Public Library, Isabella saw the six cassette set "Irish for Actors" and she wondered how long it would take for her to learn the accent, and furthermore, how long she could keep up the charade.

8.

The metal chain net rang like a 1940s telephone from the nun's fadeaway jump shot.

9.

After being pressed inside of the Compact Oxford English Dictionary since 1973, the parchmental maple leaf had been transformed to a thin skeleton: veins and a bell-bottomed stem.

10.

There was something about the quick, familiar, and intimate way in which she grabbed the highlighter from his front shirt pocket during the sales meeting. Its significance just hit him this morning as he served the raquetball: the blue sphere squishes into an egg shape as it bullets towards the glass.

11.

Drawing the black sheer curtains of her bedroom, Meghan suddenly recalled the article she had read about Tom Jones taking out a substantial insurance policy on his chest hair.

12.

He was (approximately) fifteen-thritysevenths of the way through Within a Budding Grove, when he heard her 330i purr below their window, followed, always, by the groanhumsqueekslam of their treated pine garage door. Unlike the Shiraz stained on his tongue, the au gratin potatoes taste better the second day. They always do.

13.

"They feed entirely on detritus."

14.

The forty-three year old Vespa bisected beneath the art museum annex: an asymmetrical flurry of scarfs, gloved hands gripping imperfect haunches. A fissured chin on a pea-coated shoulder.

15.

Open with this: "I am her raissoneur, hence my eruditely lucid misguidedness, the unfailingness of my motivational explanations." Follow with this: a forefinger pushing bi-focals up the nosebridge, sealed eyelids.

16.

Each volume of Shinjuki Kawagawa's projected epic was to be named after a planet in our solar system. But upon hearing of the official negation of Pluto, the author decided to react decisively and name each volume after each star in our galaxy; he whittled the nine lengthy episodes into single phonemes carved onto pieces of sand. Not whittled, formed.

17.

His fatigue fractured further: scales taking on water.

18.

"Come meet me in the bathtub," he said to her huskily, both of them knowing full well that several days ago the main for their water had been cinched off.

19.

Brother Yupakikak used to tell us the most ridiculous things: "the Inuit have their own Babe, except he is a musk ox and his name is Nuka. His qiviut, especially, is just as blue, like our tight glaciers, only able to refract that color because of the extreme pressure. But when the sun finally does come, Nuka's pelt will blind you until next spring unless you are wearing your wooden goggles."

20.

Another gallery photograph: a youngish man in Dockers with a plaid shirt tucked-in, text messaging, waiting in line for confession at St. Augustine's.