fragment #33

The infant was at the door. The doorbell was broken. The thing was whimpering. The thing was soft and small. This thing we’d never beheld the likes of before. Now it was all ours. To be had with an urgent gifting, plump and labile. Trying to share something but it was hard to tell. It was alone and replete with geranium kisses. Rootlessly alive. There was this misbehaving nightlight. There were onyx eyes in a mug’s milk. The aftertaste of mood investigators clearing away the rubble of first times made alternatives to a one or a two. Spatially adept, teary, snotty, this infant folded through the origami of our affairs. Ramshackling and punted into the hurl of the atmosphere’s tendencies towards blue we hardlucked it and made it work. Do not give the baby chocolate. Do not warn me against calamity. Jot down my hunches. In the here and now the infant is not smelling so grand. This pyrrhic victory is starting to stink of defeat. Later the lollipops will sour, the potty-trained will lob skyward, the lucky will come down with a bad case of rheumatism. On this brave day we will all be chewing gum. After a letter arrived notifying us of pleasure and doom, we tracked down the infant’s missing rattle and insulated our cares with Saran wrap. Coupled with exercising our freewill over minor moments of panic, we had jobs that left us uninspired and in bad need of charged batteries. The infant sleeps and wakes and screams and sleeps and wakes and screams all of the night. Music comes in handy. Is there a ballistic missile of opportunity headed our way? Time will tell. For now we put peanut butter on our fingertips. Only once-daily doses will do. The infant is on the floor. The carpet’s thick with porridge. No new deal will thresh beyond the husking of what we’ve come to become. Maundering is our lot. Things are curtailed and growing, and things are hard. The cottonwoods, flushed with flowers straining from yellow to orange to blood-red before they flutter to their destiny, are brushed with wind while rushes sprout beneath, antlering their skinny way through the bonds of love and terrible footwear choices. The infant’s eyebrows gush squid ink. A moral is lost. Zeal sweeps away the tenets of love with snoopings and banana-skin pelts of looking-the-other-way. The infant, that thing that arrived at our door so innocently, that thing that is munching on the snackfood of our togetherness, that thing that is believable only in gasps of want in junked-car hysteria, that thing that speaks in louvered chants and knows not how to whisper, well, it seems the infant’s taken a shine to the porcelain of being on the lam. We don’t hold anybody responsible.