Let Her Have Them

[Continuing] 

The Honda was fun to be back in again, pretty reasonable with this new mechanic Anthony had put him in touch with. Sure it was a blast to drive the Subaru for a few days. High-speed and rustic and versatile. 

Now based on his lived experience, he understood how easily one could fall with one's eyes wide open into the delusion that what they are doing is suddenly legendary because it's happening in a four-wheel-drive, Subaru Forrester. People can put on knobby souls to further increase their purchase on the gritty world with its rugged roads.

He did some painting which felt delicious after all the talking and endlessly talking, Uber customers went on and on most days.

Then he got out the charcoal.

He had the thought that we are carbon-based beings. He would create from carbon as carbon.

He had purchased it at the art supply and it had been sitting there waiting to be used. Twelve 1/2 inch sticks of charcoal, each with a different degree of density. Some were so soft one couldn't help but crumble off a corner even to pick one up and get started. He would always save the little crumb of charcoal and throw it on the paper and crush it in severely with his thumb and rub it about and work from there.

Mist. The lofty atoms. Roiling cloud. 

Gray-light and shadow. 

Quieting dusk. 

He worked on one very large soft white paper which almost could feel like a lamb's ear beneath one's fingertips. It was one large cosmos of canvas filled with many and various spirited beings spoken straight to manufacture through various extended incantations. Settings for presence to manifest as a state of being and witnessing being in one.

Soft awakening, a pillowy shawl strewn out into threads swirling between the wet knuckled fingers of maple root and dead twigs at the shoreline.

A glint of light opens upon the hedges just beyond the dead stump, well dressed in a glistening set of diamond pearls, line and post in perfect symmetry, veiling the dead crooked face of the tree with what is strung as the thread of an ornately beaded webwork.

These were what he made with chalk and paper and his fingers.

Later on it would be grilled cheese. He would take the griddle pan and heat it up on the front burner with a bright flame surging beneath. He would take butter and toss it on the pan and smear it on one of the pieces of bread and then he would lay that bread down and hear the hot sizzle and see it bubbling at the edges. He would take American cheese, probably three slices and lay them on top of the bread and butter the other piece of bread thoroughly and lay it on top with the butter side up. He would watch it crackling and fizzing at the edges and he would enjoy the aroma filling the entire kitchen as the cheese started to melt at the edges. He would take his spatula and quickly slide it beneath the sandwich and give it a flip and then enjoy watching the instantaneous blur of bread and cheese and butter frying up nicely being tossed through the air right there before his eyes.

Moments later he would be on the couch drinking a Miller High Life and watching the Cubs and eating his grilled cheese sandwich that he had cut in half at the diagonal leaving room for ketchup between the two halves. He dipped each bite deeply into the ketchup and enjoyed an abundance thereof which paired so nicely with the cheese, basic Kraft singles. Tonight, indeed, it was three slices.

Zoe heard him belching and watched him go back into the doorway of the art room and lean against it admiring his enchanted world on and off throughout the evening. Art play was the way, he knew that for sure and toasted to Zoe and heard from the announcer in the other room that it was a double and it would score 2.

I'll call her tomorrow. Better than turning it into some kind of who's calling who first nonsense. 

Yup.