Thu, 19 May 2005

bell sounds off the shoreline
He expected the room to become immediately cold at the moment the presence entered the room. All the expectations, so deep in kiddom he couldn’t identify the point of origin, had filled him with a notion of a dramatic rending of space, milisecond-precise, when contact and confirmation took place. In this, as with so many things, he was disappointed. Perhaps it had always been there, or perhaps what he thought he heard was just an auditory hallucination, a trick he played on himself to alleviate the boredom of the endless waiting. Even the clearest message the prophet-room gave him was like a fight two houses down, caught on the wind and broken in the branches. Disgusted, embarassed, he called her on the cellphone, overcruel in his mockery of her faith in the corrective nature of the supernatural. “If I can’t hear it, how can I understand it?” he asked, cutting her mawkish fencesitting off at the knees. “I don’t care if it’s the devil, or ancestor-ghosts, or the final visitation of Christ — if it doesn’t have the power to enunciate, how on earth can it have the power to see into the future?” She went on with tired notions as to how it would become clear in time, with contemplation, but that sounded to him like he’d end up doing all the work, which defeated the whole purpose of this two hour drive out to Omaha to break into a house in the closest thing Omaha has to a ghetto and stand around for hours waiting for some otherworldly visitor to tell him what became of their daughter. Eventually he threw the cellphone as hard as he could, penetrating and falling behind the drywall, and as he pulled cheap plasterboard and fiberglass insulation off the studs he thought he heard a voice, and stopped, unwilling to so much as breathe, and tried to hear it again, tried to understand what the voice wanted to tell him, but he couldn’t hear anything but the ring of his cellphone, down beneath the floorboards, like bell sounds off the shoreline.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #