This is the Feeling of Love

death swings me by the feet and throws me into a youtube comment defending God, anonymous messages tell me to kill myself and notes on my door ask if my parents know i disappoint them, 2:05am image attached, dick pic currency supply and demand, we are most subdued, energy seeps into the mundane and the profane grabs you by the throat and hurls you into the atmosphere;

“no he didn’t touch me, i swear,” cartoons surround me in a smothered furnace, the micro-carbon spirit chains bind my arms in the echo-chamber as cyber angels with burning wings watch, the 15yr old meth-head finds out im bicurious and threatens to “fuck me up” if i do anything while we’re rooming together at the in-patient program, i forget myself and write out the definition of codepedency 10 times on a piece of paper using a red marker, im cumming in the shower thinking about the girl who tried to light herself on fire, I dry off and try not to look at my other roommate who tried to kill himself by running into a chainsaw (after he attempted to kill himself by creating mustard gas)

Air Quality: 50 – Good
Sunrise: 7:25am
Sunset: 5:01pm
Humidity: 89%
Feels Like: 15F
H: 28F
L: 10F
Pressure: 30.44inHg
Precipitation: 3in
Visibility: 8mi
UV Index: 0
Chance of Snow: 85%

God’s silent service;
angels cry white sticky paste—
heaven’s frozen bliss

visible ice breath
fogs up worldly perception;
clouded happiness

cold woman walking
down roads wet with shiny slush
wearing trash bag shoes

black birds sit on trees,
swallows run to the bushes,
robins hide and sing.

shimmering flakes fall
down from greying clouded skies
of soft destruction

When i look into your SSR-eyes, soulful, simmering, resourceful, I see you climb giant daggers and drag your feet through fields of sobering grains, you told me you didn’t want to kill yourself anymore and now I feel self-conscious about the rope sitting on my coffee table, you’re always steps ahead, I live in the shadow of your inevitability, please don’t move on without me, i’m holed up in the nothingness between my ears sitting in a chair in an empty-network space surrounded by plaster and wood — my splinter-cut gums burn dark red as my teeth are hit by a belt sander, releasing a hard HISS on impact, my tongue licks out for help — this is the feeling of love

Black Water

[Clock In]

3:00pm (clocking in at cocktail lounge)

The ball-gagged nun tattooed on Charles’ shaved head stares at my sunken face. I notice that Charles is in a good mood on this cold Saturday afternoon. Instead of ignoring me (like he usually does), Charles actually looks up at me and says, “how’s it going, fag.”

Next to Charles is Decker. Decker just finished being sober for a month. His eyes look brighter. To celebrate his sobriety, he started drinking again today. Decker looks up from the vegetables he’s cutting and says to me, “what it do bitch, it’s time to rock n’ roll in the pussy hole.”

Charles is the Head Chef. He runs two kitchens: one in the cocktail lounge, the other at a pizzeria. The cocktail lounge serves Southern comfort cuisine along with traditionally inspired cocktails and local beer. The pizzeria serves Neapolitan style pizzas cooked in a wood-fire oven, but the kitchen is very small, so people mostly go there to drink cheap beer and eat simple pies.

Decker is the Chef-de-cuisine under Charles. Decker mainly works the kitchen at the cocktail lounge, but he also delivers produce to the pizzeria. Charles and Decker have been working together for about eight years now. Decker was more open about his life than Charles, so all the young guys looked up to Decker during service.

Line-cooks and bar workers frequently worked at both restaurants because they were both under the same ownership and were only four blocks away from one another. Today I’m going to work an opening bar-back shift at the cocktail lounge and then work a closing line cook shift at the pizzeria. Fuck me.

3:30pm (early service prep)

As I’m cleaning silverware in the kitchen, Decker tells the kitchen staff a story about the time he enlisted himself in the Navy and got sent to a naval base off the east coast. Before going out to sea, one thing led to another and Decker got away from his duties, became homeless, and started smoking meth out in the streets. Decker hated sleeping on the street, so he used to run into the local grocery store, steal 2 six packs of beer, a whole loaf of bread, a bunch of meat,

and some vegetables, and then he’d knock on people’s doors and offer them the beers, some pre-rolled blunts, and a warm cooked meal in exchange for a couch to sleep on. As days passed by while Decker was homeless, high, and couch surfing around town, a court martial was ordered for his unauthorized absences, and he ended up getting charged with desertion. He spent 6 days in the brig out on the sea.

“I could either read the rule book or read the bible,” Decker tells us. “Those were the only safe things you could do.” Apparently, when he wanted to do any kind of physical activity, like scratch his balls, Decker had to approach the gate and ask permission from the guard (without hinting at any possible act of aggression); once he was granted permission, Decker could then (very slowly) scratch his balls. He couldn’t even shit without someone having their finger on their gun holster watching his body twitch and flex. So, Decker sat there alone in the brig at sea and didn’t shit for six days straight; but, he did manage to read the bible front-to-back six times. I asked Decker if he had any thoughts on God and he said: “Well, I sure as fuck hope he’s real.”

One of the line-cooks says to Decker: “Yeah, I was living in New York and got kicked out of the house I was couch surfing at and had to sleep at a train station for a few nights. I had a feeling that it was time to move back home to Tennessee and start over. I became a line cook and got back on my feet that way.”

Decker nodded his head and said, “Yeah man, shit fucking sucks. You know the worst thing about being out on the street? I mean, being high on meth and stealing food was all fun and cool, but not having people’s trust, that was the fucking worst. I had to fight to earn that back. And, ya know, cooking helped with that. I think about the last supper a lot. Imagine cooking the last meal for Jesus Christ. What if you served a person their last meal and didn’t even know it. I get anxious thinking about that. Wouldn’t you want that meal to taste good? Isn’t that the least a person deserves?”

5:00pm (service, doors open)

Decker was the first person who saw my work ethic and talked to the bar manager about giving me a raise. After that, Decker talked to Charles and recommended that I start working shifts for the pizzeria kitchen. Of course, I took the offer. Decker believed in me and knew what it took to inspire me to work harder. He wanted me on the line for the cocktail lounge, and he knew how to make that happen. I remember the first conversation we had about cooking:

‘Decker: “Do you know what makes my food taste good?”
Me: “I have no idea, Decker. What makes your food taste so good?”
Decker: “It’s my cum, dude, my cum makes the food taste better, duh.”’
Me: “Do you cum in all the food?”
Decker: “In this kitchen, we do not believe in absolutes.”’

6:00pm (first ticket)

I think what made Decker’s food taste good was his ironic disdain for human life. As a recovering addict and a father, Decker was always letting us know that life sucks and you should do your fucking job correctly. “If you fuck up, you could kill someone. So, don’t be a fucktard, sharpen your knife, and grab your nuts, because the first ticket just came up.”

7:30pm (dinner rush)

Decker liked to fuck with everybody during service, but he loved fucking with the new guy, Jack. Jack’s only 22. He’s got an engineering degree and he really wants to go to law school, but he’s stuck with us until he can find work at a firm where he can get some decent cash flow and a few months of office experience. Jack has been waiting to find an entry level job. The unfortunate thing is that Jack is really good at being a line-cook, and he doesn’t even know it. Jack eventually did find a law firm where he’d be working as a secretary. He also got accepted to law school. All of us found that out today, when he announced his two-week notice:

“Oh, look at me, my name is Jack and I’m a retard who likes the philosophy of the supreme court, the judicial process, and also penis,” Decker said in a jeering manner, flapping his arms like a chicken (while holding chicken thighs).

“You know what, old man, you’re just jealous that I’m gunna be a rich lawyer someday,” Jack replies with some snark.

“Jack, every moment you are alive, there are starving people in this world, specifically people from Mississippi, who can sense your life-force and are more depressed and probably starving harder because you exist, you’re a terrible person and God hates you” Decker replied without missing a beat.

“I’m gunna miss you Decker, but I think I’m mainly going to miss your micro-penis and the constant sexual harassment you provide,” Jack said trying not to laugh.

“As long as you have a constant erection while you work at the law firm and continue to inflict mental retardation onto the world, I guess I don’t give ten monkey fucks what you do, just don’t make me look like an asshole for hiring you,” Decker said with a smile.

9:00pm (smoke break)

Every shift Decker offered us an impromptu speech to get our passions going. Today during our first smoke break, Decker talked to us about his plan to get a Taylor Swift tattoo on his stomach. Everyone said he wasn’t ever gunna do it, but I believe he will do it. Either that or he’ll get a Glenn Beck tattoo. Oh well, time for the late evening crowd.

9:10pm (late evening crowd)

“Hey, human piece of shit, can you give me a shot of whiskey, whatever you got, also you should google meatotomy when you get a chance,” Decker said to me while he was simultaneously plating Duck Confit and Tenderloin steaks. As I tried to run the food, he stopped me to say, “I think I’m gunna call you Suck ‘Em Silly Shirley. Then again, I could call you Finger Fuckin’ Sally. Maybe Pussy Eatin’ Pamela will fit better. Here, I’m gunna listen to that David Allan Coe song and I’ll see which one fits better. Anyways, go run those orders, and don’t forget my whiskey.”

10:30pm (end of shift prep)

Later on, near the end of my shift, Charles brings in a compressed air duster that he’s going to give to me to take to the pizzeria once I clock out. Something about dusting the flour off the water heater pipes. As soon as he leaves to go smoke outside, Decker eyes up the compressed air duster. Jack turns from the hot line and condescendingly says to Decker, “you won’t.” I look away for one second and sure enough, Decker springs at me like a cat, he quickly grabs the container and huffs it as hard as he can. I’m powerless watching the scene unfold. He grabs me by the shoulder, his red eyes meet mine like clashing laser-swords, and in a low, nitrous oxide fueled voice, he tells me, “white people are responsible for all evil in the world and they must be stopped.”

11:00pm (clock out of cocktail lounge)

As I leave the cocktail lounge to go start my shift at the pizzeria, I remember the first time I fucked up running food at the cocktail lounge. Decker came down on me like a storm. The anger in his voice still trickles down my spine. He respected me after that because I never ran food out early before the ticket was ready. He still flips me off and calls me ‘AIDs patient zero’ when I’m in the kitchen, but I was becoming a better worker because of that.

11:15pm (clock in to pizzeria kitchen)

Shifts at the pizzeria were slow and dull compared to the cocktail lounge. Nobody wanted to work at the pizzeria. I know that my shift will be four hours of prep and ten smoke breaks. I think I’m training a new guy as well. If you worked at the pizzeria, you were always working late, and chances are you’d get burned once or twice being near the wood-fire oven. I was hoping that maybe Decker would show up to drop off some prep materials and make a fisting joke or two. Or three.

1:15am (7th smoke break)

In the pizzeria, the entire recipe book was written by a guy named Dylan. I use the recipe book this shift to make some red sauce, calabrian vinaigrette, and garlic cream. Dylan was the original head chef for the pizzeria. He was a pimp for a long time, got addicted to drugs (I think it was pills), and then he went to jail for a while. After he was released, he started running the pizzeria kitchen menu. His food was really good. He was getting better physically and he had some pride in his abilities to work hard and cook great tasting food. Even though he was doing better, Dylan ended up killing himself in a hotel room. Unintentional overdose. Since then, the food hasn’t been the same. Charles hasn’t managed to get Dylan’s flavor back. I don’t think I’ll be able to get the flavor back either. Maybe Decker’s cum will help.

[Clock Out]

Cheese bags: 9
Tomato cans: 5
Chickpea cans: 4
Artichoke cans: 2
Jalapeno cans: 4
1 red onion
5 yellow onions
3 tubs of mayo
3 sweety drop cans
EVOO: 1 tub, half full
Radish: 1 prep deli cup
Spicy Honey: half of bottle left, take honey, about 32oz, put into Ziploc bag, add handful of fennel, add 2 calabrian peppers, seal up bag, put into simmering pot of water for 15 minutes, strain the honey, then let cool
Fontina Cheese: half of the wheel left downstairs, made 4 qrt prep today

Need: Lunchbox peppers, Figs, Arugula, 300g of red onions, regular garlic

per Decker: “when making stock, you have two essential parts – first, the

mirepoix, which includes a flavor base of chopped carrots, celery, and onions, don’t forget to slather those bitches in oil, salt, and pepper, all of this is put into the oven for some tanning bed time – second, you have your aromatics, which includes bay leaves, cumin, rosemary, and clove: put the mirepoix, tomato paste, and aromatics into a pot, add water, shrimp shells, and put the burner on high, be sure to watch that the bubbles don’t disrupt the stock, the key is to make sure the shrimp shells don’t move that much; Decker says Charles doesn’t like using the nonedible parts for stock, even though the nonedible parts help add more flavor to the stock, just be sure to slice off the nonedible parts”–

and for tenderloin steak: be sure to cut off the silver skin slowly, be sure to separate out the trim, the heel, and the chain, save these parts, put them to the side, the tenderloin cuts should be accurate and precise, we do not serve thin steaks, we are not Communists, the cut will determine the overall shape and form, and thus the taste – be sure to use a sharpened knife — pieces of trim should be stored, and when finished, vacuum seal the meat and store the cuts in the cooler;

one thing that happened today while I was at the pizzeria – this new coworker who just started told me that he used to sell kydex holders to a military base in Texas, after a few months of doing that he got turned onto security work for Blackwater; the deal was essentially worded and contracted to bypass NATO and UN mercenary laws, coworker tells me he’s been on missions in south america and two missions in the philipinnes, he tells me he’s had access to m27 automatic rifles, glock17s, and glock19s — coworker continues to tell me mission stories during the shift, his favorite story is when he raided a red poppy farm in Indonesia, the farm was nestled within beautiful hills decorated by maroon flowers stretching out for miles, unfortunately he was ordered to raze the property, so the entire hillside was burned, the farmhouses were torn down, and explosives were deployed everywhere to destroy hidden underground cartel bases; those bloody plants farmed for heroin burned and bubbled with bright orange and yellow flashes, all of it turned into spiked bones and white dust, instantly transforming the entire area into a graveyard of ash; coworker continues and says he’s epileptic so he couldn’t join the army initially like he’d wanted to, so he was recommended to Blackwater as an alternative, but he did eventually have a seizure while out on a mission, and he got put out of service permanently, now he’s here with me in the kitchen, talking about eliminating targets while i chop onions and dice up bacon, he’s saying things like “you ever hear about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study”, and i say “actually yes, i have, it’s fucked people don’t remember that,” we talk more about things we want to forget, we talk about envy and love, what is real love, he says “did you know that if you stick your hand in a wood-fire oven long enough you start to lose all feeling in your fingernails,”

“sometimes I use the mandoline slicer to cut small burnt strips off the end my finger at the end of my shift,” we talk about a cook we knew a few years ago who went missing and ended up face down in a stream near a highway junction, “kevin was such a good father, he just had a nasty cocaine habit and got into the wrong crowd, I think that’s how it went down, I just hope his kid is okay,” i tell my coworker “i’ve done terrible things, ive taken advantage of so many people, people who cared about me, i dont know how i can live with myself sometimes, I feel like hiding in the kitchen, it’s the only place where I know I’m safe to be a fuck up,” and my coworker looks at me and says “you haven’t killed anybody yet, you’ll be okay, you just have to learn to forget, also, hold your cutting knife like this—,” I was starting to break from the pressure at work, but at least i got through that midnight to 3am pizzeria shift with the new guy, we gave each other a moment to submit without hostility, no judgement or digital eyes, just naked sins and reddened fists;

Don’t forget:

Clean the flour off the pizzeria pipes
Text charles or decker, let them know you need a day off soon
Be sure to google meatotomy

The Frozen Moon

“… And in this staggering disproportion between man and no-man, there is no place for purely human boasts of grandeur, or for forgetting that men build their cultures by huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of an abyss…”

– Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change

Prologue

Snowflakes from dissipating nimbostratus clouds contort the rays from the hidden morning sun into destructive hyper beams; broken ice-crystal shards descend towards the muddy river city’s urban center below. The unevenness in the air obscures the falling path of snowflakes as they spill onto the river front; perhaps these flakes will careen into air conditioning fans sitting on building tops, or maybe they’ll collect on drooping traffic lights; all of this imbalance in temperature produces an intoxicatingly violent chill; commercial barges and tugboats are pushed around in the muddy waters by eastern gales nearby, the smell of garbage kills any collection of white powdery dust; frigid inland winds hand-blown by Boreas shoot over hanging heads, inverting umbrellas, even trees say goodbye to their limbs; the river fills with chunks of hardened mud and the feathers of drowned birds. All-where in this frightful storm was the freezing of flesh, the separation and crystallization of human bodies, and the elimination of bonds, of senses, of direction, of motion.

Part I – February 15, 2021

A bare-footed man stumbles calmly through an unrelenting winter storm, stopping and pivoting every so often to absorb his surroundings; he is dressed only in a cerulean hospital gown and a bright yellow bracelet hanging around his hairy, cut-up wrist. Queerly shaped, the nameless man stands tall and limp over other shivering bodies in their rain-proof plastics passing by quickly. No words come from the man’s bloodied lips; only laughter and small spurts of spit escape his dried-up mouth decorated with deep cuts and partially shaved facial hair, his eyes are beginning to flicker like broken lightbulbs filled with red and blue tungsten filaments. The man coughs hard, hot air and phlegm into his cupped hands; he looks out towards the unknown distance. Ignoring the white ticketing papers and bits of aluminum stuck into the soles of his feet, the man brushes off small lines of black ants climbing onto the creases of his knees and he keeps walking forward, aimlessly.

The gaped mouth of the cold man envelopes gusts carrying flies and broken ice like a

vacuum – he tongues the empty sockets in his mouth while trying to pick off left-over plaque on the teeth he still has left. A bright color in the distance calls out to the cold man. Sure enough, a few yards away is a green lighter nestled in slush on the sidewalk. The man picks it up and uses his thumb to flicker a light, but nothing happens. Blood leaks from the tip of his thumb, and pieces of serrated thumbnail fall onto the man’s gown. Sucking on his thumb as punishment, the man walks away into an alley, defeated.

Barely avoiding exposed pipes nearby, the tired man limps about and rests on hardened garbage bags near a grease trap. Birds hiding from the cold scurry around hungry rats in a nearby gutter. All of a sudden, the noises around him stop. The man pauses for a moment. The wind stops. There’s a jump in his heartbeat. His stomach churns slowly. Sweat collects around his crinkled neck. The mental panic comes in without a warning. “Why am I so warm?”

The man is shocked to hear the sound of his own voice. He can feel his skull scrape against the inside of his head. He looks down at his body and walks over to a metallic traffic pole, grabbing it with his right hand and using his left hand to remove his hospital gown from his body – the gown blows away into the street after a short struggle. The man watches as the gown’s color changes from bright cerulean to a deep purple, the strings and ripped bits play with one another, the blood stains wash away immediately.

Adjusting his naked body back to a stable position, the man quickly tears his hand from the light pole, leaving a dark red and white handprint sprinkled with long fleshy strips. The man barely feels the pressure and pinch of delicate skin tearing off of subcutaneous tissue. Sirens ring and fill all ears as the man looks down at his exposed hand, mouth agape. It’s so cold that blood is starting to freeze to his patterned muscles, white and grey snowflakes continuously crash into pink and smoking purple puss. “Why am I so warm?”

Suddenly, the man looks up – in that clouded landscape, carved out of the smoked-filled sky, is the fainted, ghostly mirage of the moon. The moon stares down at the man’s wide pupils. Waves of white crash down onto his shoulders. The acid in the man’s stomach starts to bubble, and the rhythm of his heartbeat starts to match up with the storm now picking up. Grabbing his mangled hand with teary eyes, the man leans in and tears his teeth through his exposed palm. He stops for a second to get a good taste of the cold blood and raw muscle. His body doesn’t send any signals of foul play. He keeps his eyes open and snatches another bite. Hand-tissue is licked around the man’s mouth, he chews harder when he can’t crunch through tough pieces; he lets his tongue slide around his flexor pulley system, moving his fingers like puppets; the man feels a numbing catharsis when he grinds his teeth on metacarpal bones and inhales the smell of copper; he clicks his canines around moistened arteries, a molar breaks as the man tries to snap off his thumb, but he keeps going; blood spurts onto his knees and chest as he spits out fingernails and cuticles; beard hairs turn red, the man’s eyes are on fire, his legs are weak under the cold pressure; the man can’t help himself as his lips suck on exposed veins hanging out of his arm. The man can taste ligaments and feels dried-up skin being digested in his stomach. Even while falling to the ground in shock and agony, the man continues to slowly chew on his radius and ulna.

The man’s mutilated body reflects and shines like colored broken glass, like a mosaic from a church burning down from the inside – the man’s veins contorting outward shine with moist-red splotches, violet bruises paint the man’s back, you can even see brown bits of mud caked behind his ears and in between his toes. His red and white uncircumcised penis is shriveled and frozen sideways to his greying, loosely clumped pubic hairs; his testicular sack resembles a crushed translucent grocery bag colored blue; the yellowing skin on top of his chest is crinkling, fissures rupture in between broken ribs and surgical slits; maroon-colored arms and legs stiffen like plastic action figure limbs, green bruises start to form on his shoulders and the soles of his feet.

The cold man devoured his own hand outside of a church near the financial district of the river city during a full moon. Many churches in the river city are historical landmarks marked by high white steeples and beautiful bell towers, but this church was faded by algae stains and shadows cast by tall, crippled tree branches. The brutalist architecture of this particular church enshrined the man’s autosarcophagy so that, at the least, it would contain qualities of a sublime death, even if nobody saw what the man did to himself.

The man’s child-like mind desired raw sweetness, it craved the taste of stretchy rubber; his smooth, damaged flesh appeared delightful as such. He rejected himself by consuming himself. Unfortunately, the man was found dead on the sidewalk a few hours after he fell into the snow. Bits and pieces of his fingers and colored arm-band were found in a pile of brown vomit nearby.

A few days later, as only one local news channel reported the incident, a homeless gentleman named Mike sat me down by the river and told me that the freezing man who ate his own hand was named Lewis Huggins. Lewis was the unofficial “Mayor of Main Street,” securing the position of his own accord for well over fourteen years. Lewis was tasked with overseeing local tourism near the trolley tracks by the municipal park. He really did enjoy the company of others.

Before I left Mike, he started to talk about himself. Mike was a security officer and phone-line construction worker who moved to the river city from California to help care for his dying parents in Arkansas back in the mid-2010s. For work, Mike was a security officer for a local dog racing casino across the river. While Mike was in the downtown area of the river city visiting, he was hit by a truck late one night. Mike’s neck was broken in multiple places. He never found the person responsible. Since the suspect was still at large, and a costly surgery was looming, Mike left the hospital early a few years ago and has been homeless ever since. Mike now has a permanent limp. Mike asked me why he survived the hit and run accident. I didn’t have an answer for him.

“Did God save me for a reason? What am I supposed to do now? Why am I so warm?”

Part II – February 14, 2021

My car lurched forward over the iced driveway straight into the backyard parking lot behind my apartment complex. Having just left my friend’s house off Central Avenue, I was exhausted from work and near-blackout drunk. Five inches of snow fell onto Memphis that night. More snow would be coming. I got out of my car slowly and stared off into space for a second. This is the most snow we’ve had in years. I couldn’t believe it. Usual city sounds of screeching tires and ambulance sirens were absent in the palpable silence. The snow storm separated everyone, and here I was, alone, risking my life driving in this shit.

When I refocused my vision, I started to hear something shuffling around me. I looked forward at the fence and saw that behind the metallic diagonal patterns, through swaying branches and dark green bushes, was a tall figure moving about. I look closer and I see some guy stumbling in the dark. I can’t see his face at all, only a silhouette, but the silhouette turns to me and starts to speak.

The silhouette belonged to a man named Charlie Drew Jr. Turns out Charlie was just some older guy looking for food in a dumpster. Past the fence, trees, and shrubs behind my apartment is a small shopping center. The communal dumpster just so happens to align with the plot of my apartment complex parking lot. Grey clouds and balled-up flurries kept the moon’s light hidden, so the only thing illuminating our presence was a bright parking lot security light. The crystallizing whiteness cut-out Charlie like a mysterious penumbra.

Charlie talked about going all over the country. Lucky bastard. I had only been to Arkansas recently to play the slots at the local dog racing casino for my mother’s birthday. I remember Charlie was proud of being mobile, he told me he walked all around Memphis. I was unnervingly jealous. Folks in Memphis usually aren’t very nice and welcoming after a certain hour. Southern hospitality dips alongside morale as the work day grind meets the sunset, not to mention this city has been designed to exclude people. It was also designed to trap people. Charlie kept talking about how he missed the Mississippi girls out in his hometown, Pontotoc I think it was; he also missed watching the yellow Mississippi Export trains chugging along endless and desolate horizons.

All around Charlie and I were shifting layers of snow and ice – but the fence between Charlie and I was caked in smooth, hardened skin; the bushes, shrubs, and trees were all covered in ice-cold coats too; the shapes of the leaves and metal wiring warped slowly as refracting light perplexed any recognizable patterns. The trees between us were armed with hanging liquid spikes; I kept imagining nearby telephone poles falling over and crushing the fence, the impact creating shattered crystal shards, sharp icicles stabbing into the cars in the parking lot and flattening the trash bins, I was constantly distracted by the frozen imagery jumping around from one stiff leaf connected to a frozen branch hanging and flowing next to freezing metal – each pointed icicle nearby shined brightly when I titled my head and oriented my vision around the

security lights; I kept trying to figure out different ways to describe this experience in my head, how I could configure my perception of Charlie through this myriad of crystallized decimations and mental poetic musings. There were moments when chunks of snow and ice fell onto us and we both snapped out of it and laughed; we pretended that we were the last two men on earth, like the bits and pieces of the hidden moon were falling down to earth as a sign of an impending Apocalypse.

FedEx airplanes flew above us in 10 minute intervals – the noise of the plane engines constantly cut out our conversation, but Charlie still tried to talk, and I shouted back wondering what he said. The airplane lights helped brighten up the sky like a momentary flare, but it was still too dark for us to clearly see one another in great detail. But, we saw the snowflakes falling continuously, and our necks bent up to appreciate their arrival to our world.

Apparently, someone took Charlie’s bike and phone when he was in a gas station bathroom, so he literally had to run up to any person he could see walking around to ask for help. When Charlie found me that night, I really couldn’t see him at all, but I’m glad I was there for him in that moment. I think that he was missing teeth, just by the way he spoke; he had a deep southern voice, his words never had ending consonants or vowel sounds, they were just words with chopped off drawls. Charlie coughed a lot during our conversation, it sounded like he had a beat-up man’s body. He didn’t seem like he was that cold. I guess he was trying to stay cool.

I was starting to notice that my fingertips were getting numb. I needed to hurry before I got sick. When I asked Charlie if he needed anything, he scratched his head and told me his buddy was walking around out in the open cold somewhere in the downtown area. He thinks he was admitted to and prematurely released by a hospital somewhere for public intoxication and suicidal ideation. Charlie said if I could drive my car, then he could guide me to where he might be located. I didn’t really want to believe him, because I did believe him. Why would this guy lie to me? I believed Charlie, but I was just too drunk to be helping anybody. I would’ve killed us both if I tried to drive that night. Hell, I knew he was sincere, but the conversation was going to end soon, and we both knew it. There was no option to freeze time. Before he left, Charlie told me that he lived out near an under-pass headed towards the Binghampton area, across from the GED building. I wonder if he’s doing okay over there.

“What am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go?” Charlie asked as the snow picked up.

“I don’t know, man. I don’t know.” I shouted back, as I stumbled into my dark, empty apartment.