Crumbs
( Written with H.M. )
“If only none of this were real…” In the very flat, page-like bedroom her voice trails off, purposefully neglecting the end of the sentence; it probably never had one anyway.
He can see her ellipses floating in the air and lies on his back to stop the page-like room from spinning so violently. The open-ended punctuation stirs his thoughts like stew and he takes mental note of what rises to the top. His black glasses frames. Bowie. The sound of the word dune.
He hiccups and then swallows the bit of vodka-flavored vomit that rises into his mouth. “You got your finger on the pulse of life alright, babe. Finger on the—” but in the dizziness, his stew of thought bubbles over and he too rejects the need to complete his sentences. He sings sloppily instead:
“Ain’t it hard, when you discover that, he really wasn’t, where it’s at. Af-ter he took from you ev-ry-thing he could stea-uhllll…”
He then leans off the edge of the very paragraph-looking bed and vomits directly into the mouth of a paper-shredder. It buzzes hungrily with lots of Z’s. BZZZZZZZ
She rolls over and rubs the small of his back saying, “Better out than in, better out than in.” Then he vomits again and she laughs. “Jeez, what are you, sixteen?” Her commas float upwards like little black bubbles.
With a hoarse throat he replies: “that’s the last time I say anything that lunatic writes for me.”
She looks at the empty glass bottle on the coffee table that looks like a keyboard and says, “Okay, let me try,” and then starts up with an old children’s book line, “old… slow… Joe… crow…” but pauses because ‘crumbs’ is not the next word of the rhyme and it’s all that she can think of. She manages to get half of it out, “cru—” but then swallows the “—mbs” back into the endlessly deep whiteness of the page. But the effort is in vain, and the word multiplies and multiplies until her whole world, everything in it, and even her own souls dissolves and breaks apart into crumbs.
Crumbs,
crumbs,
crumbs,
crumbs,
crumbs,
Crumbs,
Crumbs,
Crumbs,
Crumbs,
crumbs,
crumbs.
Her breathing starts up.
This is new and scary.
Her breath too
—when she tries to focus in on it like her therapist tells her to do—
becomes a swirling cloud of crumbs, flowing in and out of her nose, which is also now a nose-shaped crumb.
“Oh shit…” she whimpers and grows nauseous.
Then she pushes him away from the mouth of the paper-shredder in order to position her head above it.
“Wait, wait.
Hold me…
Hold me…”
He’s too BZZZZZZZ fucked up to help though, and now BZZZZZZZZ she’s losing it too.
The BZZZZZZZZ concepts of help and losing it crumble away.
People are vortices. BZZZZZZZZZZ