UNTITLED 2
When you’re staying over at your friend’s house and the walls are thin. It’s winter and very cold, and their mom is stressed somewhere on the other side of the small house. The dad is friendly but drinking, in the living room.
The nighttime outside is total. Grass is dry, field bugs make their way into the bedrooms no matter what is done. The sky and the land never let you stop remembering that they’re omnipresent, enfolding you in a land mass so big that it’s swallowed your families inside it.
A small square television on a repurposed nightstand: cathode ray tubes in a glass envelope, phosphor layer, deflection yoke. Stale smell of a trailer house. Whitewashed walls, flimsy dark wood paneling; a thin twin bed that you both share; a three-tiered shelf packed with thriftstore books, topped with leaves and pebbles found outside.
Once, you and your friend found tree resin and collected it in your Goodwill purse, poked a stick inside it until the morass crackled and swelled open.
