An Actual Infinity of Parts

The patterns begin early -- the wanting to stay up all night. Hoping to find someone you know in the tunnels that crisscross beneath the city. They have a name for this ailment, but they rarely utter it out loud. Because if they did, no name would ever again be off-limits.

It's the kind of situation you find yourself in sometimes when you meant merely to ask about the health of a friend. His diet of veal and crustaceans. And you inadvertently offend someone in the next aisle. Someone who, only moments before, was speaking in whispers on the phone as if he were under surveillance and he knew it. He had figured it out without any real assistance from those who make a career of spotting unusual activity at the edges of our lives. Walking sticks with strange ciphers on them. Wheelbarrows suddenly full of foodstuffs and crumpled-up envelopes. Cut orchids turned to powder in the heat of the afternoon sun.

Having Upgraded Their Bridges



The symptoms are secondary. A thirsting after illusions of the sort that don't register with the common thief. You can spot the disconnect with binoculars. But be prepared to defend your position. For even those who've been to the launch center argue that it doesn't exist. That its primary purpose was usurped before the Cold War was over. And the daylilies arrived at just about that time. Coincidence? Not hardly. But then, who would suggest it was? Who would drive all this way from the township where they haven't upgraded their bridges in years? Where the simplest shift from the center to the periphery is apt to send you careening down the sides of the canyon like a dog sled no longer attached to its dogs? And for what? The opportunity to confess to something no one actually did? Something that would shock you inordinately should you hear the details later? We have a sense of the correct much as you might feel someone watching you from across the bar. But your cousin is sitting in the way and you've already made eye contact with someone who is more to your liking. With red hair. Or dimples. Or a wad of cash visible in the fist. And the music swelling to a finale that doesn't seem entirely earned.

Charles Freeland lives in Dayton, Ohio. The recipient of a 2008 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, he is the author of half a dozen e-books and chapbooks of poetry, including Grubb (BlazeVOX books), Furiant, Not Polka (Moria), The Case of the Danish King Halfdene (Mudlark), and Where We Saw Them Last (Lily Press). His website is The Fossil Record and his blog is Spring Cleaning in the Labyrinth of the Continuum.

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