Summer stillness

Today: Luke O'Neil, author of the story collection A Creature Wanting Form and the newsletter Welcome to Hell World.

Issue No. 120

It was sort of a last call deal for us all it turned out
Luke O'Neil

It was sort of a last call deal for us all it turned out

Fiction by Luke O'Neil

How the weather is today

God in Heaven the weather is so perfect today. And the thing is? It always will be.

The vacuum 

I sat out in one of the heavy beach blue beach chairs it took us forever to assemble that one perfect frustrating day when we loved each other and watched the trees not move at all like the TV screen when it freezes for hours of late and waited for their summer browning and deathly still leaves to waver an inch. At least some sign of movement. Putting your ear to an injured person’s chest. No idea in this case how to perform CPR on trees and all of everything. 

Sitting in this very spot this very rough hour two rough summers ago so many different types of insects would have been crawling over and onto and into me that I could have convinced myself I was lost in a bad trip from my youth with ease but then just like that I would have snapped to and remembered what the outside is. Or used to be. The old bug-winded outside. 

It was sort of a last call deal for them it turned out. These bugs. Today my ankles and forearms unbitten. My God you can miss anything when it’s gone. Any fucking thing. You remember this. Beach burned and heat drowsy scraping the unclipped talons of one foot against the red welts on the back of the other in a sweating bed.  

You were inside cooking sausages and onions I couldn’t smell even with the windows open. Not real sausages. Not real onions. For our health you lied to me. For morale. With nothing possible to gain from the effort besides more of us and more of this.

Yesterday you disassembled our ancient vacuum. Piece by piece. To figure out if it was worth saving. Cleaned every plastic purple part of it. I thought of a Marine breaking down his rifle.

There must be dust in its bowels from five apartments ago you said. 

You had never cleaned it this thoroughly before you said. 

Inside of its barrel guts was so much shedded tangled hair that had fallen off of us and the last of the dogs that we had once loved. That had been bred for us to die. Curled and compacted into solid hardened knots like a cancer. We carried all of it from home to home without even knowing it. Everywhere we had to move away from. Smuggled in our baggage like a stowaway.