A New Novella by Patrick Crawford Bryant
Blink, blip, bloom
Entering his 30’s, our nameless narrator longs for the time to pursue his passion while struggling to endure the rut of work, eat, sleep on repeat. If he can hold out for just a little longer, he’ll have his debt cleared. Then he can focus on his art.
His dreary routine is broken, however, when his dog attacks a neighbor’s chicken. That’s when things get weird. Things come: a stone with an immeasurable but intermittent weight, a glass shard that’s oddly warm to the touch. Things go: short-term memory, long-term live-in girlfriend, his grip on reality. And things keep coming, and things keep going. Things keep changing. And that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
Blink, Blip, Bloom
Read the First Chapter
I
If you hold it in for so long, you almost forget it. But it will come back around, for certain, announce itself—a pressure in your pubis, sneaking somehow into temples, blooming from deeper consciousness, until it saturates: erupt, release, flow.
Another tremendous piss. In the moonlight.
For a moment, at least, at last—all let go. Head rolled back, taking in the night sky, cut with rivulets of void, oak’s dark limbs. Pulling down the stars and scattering them into the black earth, a righteous, glimmering stream. A luminescence lost in the weeds, vanishing until pooling in the dirt.
Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Before I finish, my dog’s already trying to get a good whiff of my essence. Back to earth with me too, it seems.
“Hey boy! Get outta there! Yer gonna get pissed on, ya sick fuck!”
He doesn’t listen, holds his ground, rooted, as I try to nudge him back with one foot and maintain my balance with the other, still pissing away.
“Come on, pup!”
So it is, each night. Nothing new. Live every moment as if it’s your last? No. Measure it by each moment, as if it would last, forever and eternal.
This is our ritual, and hers too, asleep inside on the couch no doubt, as us boys wrassle it out back here—for the right to piss in peace and the right to intrude, neither of us getting what we hoped for in total. It comes, it goes.
So it does. I wrap things up, tuck and zip, click my headlamp back on (turned off so as to avoid spotlighting my junk, a pageant for which my neighbors have yet to pay any admission) and step away from the puddle that was once me. Finn lunges right in, of course, but trots off after only a few quick whiffs. Impressed, underwhelmed, or afraid? He’ll only ever know.
And again, like every other night, he senses me coming after him. And again, he knows I’m going for his collar to pull him into the house, or guide him, you know, as he knows to come once he’s caught. But he also knows that he has to be caught. That’s the game, of course.
So, as he pretends to head to the house of his own accord, goddammit, I too play at the pursuit. Play, because I know his one and only gambit. He’ll pause, turn at last moment, his normally stoic eyes gone all crazed as he catches my glare and bolts back again to the furthest corner of the yard.
And there he waits, pretending or actually deeply invested in the scents of hidden plants, brush, and critters beyond the chain-link fence. He’s sniffing at the fence at least, for whatever he can inhale of the forest’s secrets into which he can’t stick his nose directly.
Don’t get the wrong idea, though. It’s not really a forest. It’s the best we can do still in the suburbs—a patch of woods defining neutral territory between our street and the next over. There’s a fence on our side, a fence on theirs, trees and briar all within.
“Come on, boy, you ready to go in?”
He hears me, and I know it, because he jams his snout into a fence hole as far as it will go (quite the snout after all—a greyhound), and sniffs even more fiercely, lashing his whiplike tail about jovially. You wouldn’t steal me away from such important work, would ya? Who else will catalog and chart this frontier? We’re making progress, so just topple this fence. We’ll trek into that unknown, harness it in record, make it known (leaving just a hint of mystery, you know), turn that land and ourselves into legend! What d’ya say?
I say let’s get. Spring’s coming on, but the nights are still nippy. “Come on, let’s go!”
I slip my fingers loosely under his collar, compatriot with his fur. And that’s that. He pulls out, we go in. I don’t tug him, and he doesn’t tug me. We walk in harmony, neither of us really happy about it, back on up and into the house.
###
I kick my shoes off at the back door. Mud-not-yet-dust scatters there. It will dry in time, pile up some more with each night’s deposit, and grow for about a week or so before one of us gets around to sweeping it—likely only once it’s started to sprawl, spreading fingers, which left unchecked may just grow into hands and feet and crawl far beyond the nook of the doorway, into kitchen proper, creeping down the hallway to the bedroom where it will murder us in our sleep. Can’t let that happen.
Speaking of sleep, there’s Lucia, zonked out on the couch. As expected. She’s sprawled out on her back with her head on the armrest, almost sitting up. Her legs are bowed, her arms limp at her sides. The tip of her left ear shows pale through her long, black hair, which falls loose, feathering over her breasts softly rising and falling beneath a cotton T-shirt. With her mouth wide open, snoring and drooling, she’s almost pretty.
Can’t blame her. It’s about 11:30, and she got up at 5:30 this morning, like every morning, to take the far-too-chipper pup on a walk. Sure, I wake around that time, too, but I have the leisure of falling back to sleep. For me, the jangling of his collar and clicking of his claws on the hardwood floor is like a familiar wondering through my dreams. For her, it’s an alarm clock.
But that was the deal. She’s an early riser, and I’m a night owl—so why not bow our respective natures to honor our joint responsibilities? Sure, there are some nights I’d rather stay in and piss in the toilet for once, and some morning’s I’m sure she’d rather keep dreaming. That’s the price you pay when you take another life into your own.
Of course, she was just as narcoleptic before Finn joined the pack. You could tell the time I mean by her inevitable collapse into slumber. I say you could, because unfortunately you’d be off by a few minutes on any given night. Her nightly siestas (she naps here on the couch until I wake her up to go to bed—ironic I know—wake up, it’s time to go to sleep!) are not like a light switch—flick on, flick off—but a dimmer. She wanes into sleep mid-conversation. You won’t know she’s gone off into some dreamworld until she’s suddenly but lazily warning you of the bejeweled crabs in the phone booth, when all you wanted to know was what time her folks were coming into town the next day and what associated activities you absolutely had to be involved in.
Her sleeping doesn’t always present itself with such clear absurdities, though. Sometimes, the conversation will continue flowing—
Q: Did you pay the water bill yet?
A: Yeah, don’t worry about it.
Q: Cool, thanks… What do you want to do with your parents this weekend?
A: Get the papers.
Q: What papers?
A: The papers, you know what I’m talking about.
Q: Hm?
A: The papers! What’s your problem? The papers!
Q: Are you asleep?
It’s worse still when in her sleep she denies that she’s sleeping. It can really mess with your head. Am I really missing something here? Or is she talking to another someone who’s me in another world—and if so, do I have the right, or worse yet the obligation, to speak for that impostor? What am I meant to say?
I’m sure it sucks for her too, though, in cases when she really is awake. Imagine someone asking if you’re awake when you’re sitting there having a conversation with each other!
In either case, with that much drool, and the heavy snoring, I think it’s a safe call. She’s flat dead.
###
I’ll leave her to it. To escape, though, I’ll have to tiptoe. If I wake her now, she’ll want to hang out with me, which I’ll have to oblige until she drifts away again. Then I’d have to tiptoe again to my office, crossing my fingers until I can stretch and let them play about the keyboard. While she sleeps, I record her dreams—or mine, or who knows whose. Anyway, while she sleeps, I write. Or, I nurture the hope of wanting to write. Admittedly, I’m returning to this draft after a year of putting it down. But to tell you where I’ve been since I started writing this and how far along I really got before coming back here to add this note would get muddy quickly, so let’s just conflate past and present for now and look toward the future for answers, at least the future as presented from this point on, which of course will remain its own separate world, a present set aside, only coming into existence when read, a cat in a box rolled in ink, gone when the box is opened, its malaise however, left tattooed on the box’s innards—an umbral silhouette, dark remnant of loafed floof.
This patch of night, I mean to say, is my window of time to myself, my shadow where I can rest beneath the world. And maybe it’s selfish of me to want to keep it that way. To be honest, the reality is probably worse. Lately, I’ve been wanting more time here with myself, more time without her, without work (without my 9 to 5 I mean), without the world—anything and everything taking me away from that little hole within, from my real work, where once I saw some glimmer or shadow of something moving, something stirring of certain substance. If only I had more time to keep staring into that void, perhaps I’d finally see that thing down there, deep below, emerge, reveal its form, which I could then record and share with the world. Surely, something so enigmatic and unnamable would have value once named?
Some days, I’d prefer not to see her, or my job, or the outside world at all. But cohabitation is such as it is. You’re there, and you live with it.
That’s the cycle, and you could measure it by the moon, sure—and my pissing beneath it why not:
I wake to my familiar hound’s hot breath on my dream-nape, fall back to sleep, wake fully (admittedly not absolutely, but enough at least) again for my day-job, insert ho-hum office routine here, a drone of lost time serving others, followed by exercise, dinner, choose your own adventure here—argument with her or dreary peaceful routine—pissing in moonlight as my dog runs amok, return inside to write or have the longing to write but shy at last away from it, and finally, in any case, collapse again into sleep.
The moon too opens one eye when nudged from sleep, closes it again—a process of 30 or so days. The days really make no difference. It’s the act, the blink, in which everything lives and dies.
I say a blink, mind you, not a wink. There’s a difference. And words should have meaning, as long as we understand that we are the authors of that meaning—as long as we acknowledge if not strain to understand the void beneath that understanding. And what I mean to say is that I’ve discovered something quite shocking within the waking period before any given blink.
What I discovered, if you’ll believe me, is that the moon is actually one of a pair of eyes. And the other eye is really an ear, which is in fact a mouth.
And that mouth speaks.