The dog came on. Yapping. I was terrified. I must have been four years old. Could this be the source of my fear of dogs? If so, what happened to my fear of dogs? I feel as though I had one, once. A fear of dogs. Click.
new memory: I stand at the beach, squelching and re-squelching my toes in the wet sand. The dying rush of another flat wave foams in, muddy colored with brilliant surface bubbles, the reflected sun pushes streaming warm water around my ankles and then - slow, stop, reverse - the tide drags itself back, its suction pulling the foundation from under my heels. I thrill to the sensation of the wet sand and mud disappearing out from under me. My feet are unsettling, making weird pits as the waves wash in and out. Click.
new memory: I stood there, in front of the candy store with my colored fluorescent chalks. Or were they crayons? Pastels? Some sort of colored tacky things they'd given me to draw on their window glass. It was the summer before eighth grade, and they were paying me to draw on their window. I was drawing a clown. I don't recall now if I had been asked to draw a clown, or simply to draw something. I was drawing a clown. Click.
My first sexual experience. I am simultaneously penetrating and being penetrated by myself. But something is wrong. I have only half the necessary genetic material for a human being! Wait, okay, the other half is in wiggly me. That complements and completes the half in round me. The nuclear boundaries are dissolving, releasing two halved double helixes into a shared cell chamber. Drawn to each other, pulling and whirling as if in a dance, the two incomplete sequences combine into one - complete! A new organism! Unique in the history of the world. Straight, white and male. Click.
End memory retrieval sequence.
2 comments:
Of all the things a person can say about this post, I find myself returning to the toes in the sand. Would we say they squelch? I mean, I guess as the definition goes it kinda works, and I really don't have an alternative in my limited vocabulary beyond "make fists with" but really. Squelching?
Well hm. OK I looked it up, and - well, it says: "make a soft sucking sound such as that made by walking heavily through mud" - which, holy whoa! That's considerably more apt than I thought I'd get. I was just running on onomatopoeia.
I can call me out on syntax: arguably I'm not squelching my toes but rather, squelching the sand with my toes. But that's arguable - the word seems to be less about what's squelching vs. being squelched, it seems to be more about the act of making the sound.
I like make fists with though. As applied to toes. It needs a word of its own, that does.
Post a Comment
Your comment is appreciated, however.