Untitled #1

The Truck whizzed by me
cuttin' me off,
nearly killed me!

for a flashed second
(in my mind)
I grabbed the back
- a real Christian Slater meets Stretch Arm Strong move!-
to be whisked down the street,
dragged without blood (because there's never blood in my dreams,
or a necessity for grotesque violence or obscene sexuality)

Here there's just me,
the Truck
and John, George and Paul,
singin' sunbeams into my brain
creating
a chill and tingle effect in my cheeks
a tension in my torso, thighs, testicals
and Lake Eerie in my eyes
- A sensation not dissimilar to orgasm or what I imagine it's like to be Christian Slater.

So I ran home,
in a hurry,
before sunset
or miscarriage

"there are some--
four malities"

you didn't say it, you didn't have to.
- you couldn't,
you had misplaced your voice
(and any hope for mine in the future)
and some kind person found it
floating
outside their house in the country
shaking like a helpless,
tired kitten
hiding in a wheel-well
and you wanted me to go get it.

"But can't you see I'm pregnant?!" I begged.
"I'm sorry", you would have said
and I accepted the apology
as a necessary compromise of what it means to be poor,
but unwilling to use discretion,

even tempt fate;

to go looking

the Prodigal Son

" ... there's an innocence to this place, that's why there's no graffiti on the retaining wall, why every change you perceive as positive... "

"It's also why I hate it."

" ... and why it feels like home."

Put The Kettle On

I live by moments
by seconds
one minute it's there
then it isn't
but don't let that stop you from starting,
or ending
the boiling of water
that you forgot about while I was gone
but not forgetting.
because I live by these moments, as do you,
with the constants- dragging you by the hair- that you've been growing out for our wedding--
ever forward

And so you slept in the car
or pretended to, I couldn't tell (and I laughed)
but that time was not lost
though you spent it forgetting,
(like a name you can't remember, or never learned)
and got home to a house
spitting back
acrid black jam
on toast with coffee...
while you had tea, or intended to, elsewhere-
and spent time forgetting
and sewing the lace
to cover your hair at our wedding.

The Giants Are Coming

The airiness of life,
the light, as it were,
fluttered in and hung itself lazily in the trees.
To be described later as a flicker in the kerosene lanterns
then the bumping of heads in a mine shaft
then as the talkie took your notice, curl a come-hither finger, dripping with the true honey that is temptation on the projection screen
even then, as boxes whizzing down the carbon production line,
each one forsaking each one before it, forsaking each one before it, forsaking each one before it-
but this is the beginning of all that.

Then there was the walk to the beach.
climbing gingerly down the face of time and gravity
to see
the kayaks on the shore, two heads bobbing,
then shoulders,
then shirtless, bare breasts
then the mindless stare as i turned to leave
but, not, too fast.

as i looked back-
the monarchs of time stood idly by
while our perpetuality-
{and my understanding of it}-
surrounded me
and stared me down.

Do You Think He's Talking All Intellectual To That Girl?

Faces blurred now
from too much smoke "But
Mark, you're only home twice a year!"
and I forgot to ask for the night off at work in time
sooooo...
that's where we were.
And everyone was smoking,
as always,
the foul stench of cigarettes, like boiled cabbage, is still comforting and
the confused brunette gave me a drunken kiss on the cheek!
but the lights were up now (which she ignored) as she
ignored my disinterest as she
ignored my fiance sitting
five feet away.
who is one of the few people you care to see when you come back
twice a year
(which is still more than I eat boiled cabbage, anyway)

On Adderall in a five-speed

Thought I was encased in bones!--
like some Kafka-esque dream
where I fall in love with my friends
and shed off my limbs
to find a bright, shiny pair of new wings

and they were just a little too big,
but I'll grow into them
just like my shoes when I was 10
(though I'm still stubbin' my big toes)

you were breathin' fire, and you yelled my name;
EH-CAR-US!
I didn't take it as a threat--
I didn't know that story yet
and anyway,
although you weren't quite a woman,
you definitely weren't a son

Before you hopped in your car to drive down to New Orleans
you explained the rattle in my key chain,
the one that opened bottles and got me through winter,
as a place you would show me, if I ever came to visit.

sixteen and a half hours
on Adderall in a five-speed
or
a three hour flight on shiny new wings;
unclipped, if I wanted.

Thinking how I want too many things
and I'll always be let down

in New Orleans,
if i wanted to,
I guess.

Jacob, As Your Are Now

If you haunt this place
you do so with such grace
I do not know.
If you do haunt this place
you are
the flutter of light on the rhododendron
as you are also
the birds lost in the leaves
incessantly skwaking
while I am fast asleep,
receiving everything,
as you are now a part of
yet still lost in.

Happy To Be Embarrassed

America moving slowly
outside my window
twisted, rusted skeletal systems
graveyards strewn about-
me, living
alone for the
first time in years
finally noticing
the dogwoods dotting
the dense, blurred forest
outside my window.

A change in focus brings
an honest reflection;
my face over
everything I see-
A slight smile,
I notice, become embarrassed,
bite my lips.

two seats over
lifting her hand
still in his, to his
lips, smiles, kisses
her fingers and looks
out the same
window as me

Nervous Walking (the Death of God)

Once upon a time--not in the sense of something that has happened, but in the sense of something that will happen--so, once upon that time there were two brothers, alone in a forest. They were sent there by their father, a wise man who knew well how to raise his children. The brothers were sent to the forest to partake in the ritual of manhood, to learn the things they could not learn in school or from their mother or father. They went to the forest to learn what only the world could tell them…
"Satellite
Big and bright
The first one I've seen tonight
I wish I may
I wish I might
Have this wish I wish tonight,” the younger brother said.
The older brother turned to the younger brother and said "that's not how it goes!”
And the younger brother asked "how would you know?!"
And the older brother said "Grandpa taught me that rhyme when I was a kid. It's supposed to go:
Starlight
Star bright
First star I see tonight
Starlight
Star bright
Make everything alright.
It's from an oldies song."
And the younger brother, seeing the error of his ways, replied "oh, I didn't know that."
The younger brother knew then that the world was not the way he had thought it to be. That night, he found that the natural world was a strange, unnatural place, void of God. In this way, he returned home a man.
~
My brother, Travis, is four years older than me. Our age difference doesn’t really matter much now. When we were children, however, it sure did. The four years he had over me didn't allot him any more freedoms, though, even if he felt that it should. I remember now, as I remembered then (although maybe a little more clearly then), the conversation we had had the previous hour. It began when I heard Travis open the squeaky door to his bedroom as quietly as possible--which was silent enough for his purposes, but I've always been a light sleeper.
It was too risky to argue with me while mom was asleep down the hall. All he could do was stare daggers at me while I followed behind him as silently and cautiously as I could. The inconsequential argument that followed has, for some reason, stuck with me my entire life since.
"You're too young and you should be sleeping," he said while he defiantly lit a cigarette. He knew that I knew he smoked, so around me he allowed himself the air of cool confidence and superiority that brought him to smoking in the first place.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"I'm going to Nick's House. You can tag along if you want, but keep your mouth shut and don't tell Mom anything, Okay?"
"Okay!" I whispered back harshly.
It was a balmy summer night. I said nothing while we walked the half mile to Nick's house. Nick was Travis's best friend. They were similar in many ways, but most beneficial to me was how they both tolerated my presence. The humidity in the air made our breathing heavy without effort. The foreign smell of the cigarette completely covered the sweet smell of dewy grass. Passing the Geerling's house, I wiped a thin layer of sweat from my face and searched for Franklin, the drooly old bull dog, but he must have been in for the night. It was then that I noticed how different everything was at night. All the houses were quiet and dark, with dull halos of light around the doors. The sounds at night were different, too. Among the trees blowing in the wind, the katydids and cicadas in the trees, and the metered crackling of the cigarette, was the ever-present hum of air conditioners.
Travis knocked lightly on Nick's bedroom window. The blinds cracked open to a dark room dimly lit by a bright blue computer screen. We walked to the side of the house, to the side door, where Nick met us and let us in.
"Hey," Nick grunted.
"Hey," my brother grunted back.
"Hey, Nick!" I blurted out, a little too loud and way too excited. Travis looked back at me with a look of utter contempt as we took off our shoes.
We followed Nick down the hallway to his bedroom, past old family photos of him and his parents and little sister (who was three years younger than me). When we entered his bedroom, Nick handed Travis a beer. Neither of them acknowledged my presence as I sat quietly on the edge of Nick’s bed.
The small talk that followed didn't interest me much. Or rather, it just seemed like small talk to me because I didn't yet know what a blow job was, and the name Jennifer Steinsma didn’t mean anything to me. While they talked, I surveyed Nick’s bedroom. It was a mess of dirty and clean cloths piled in little mountains. Motocross magazines and metal CDs hung halfway off both the cluttered night-stand and dresser. In the corner was an unfinished painting of a gigantic eye with what was supposed to be a skull in the middle, although it didn't look much like a skull. I was bored and fidgety and they were still talking about Jennifer. I began making a clickity-clack noise with my mouth, hoping it would signal to them that we should do something more than just sit in Nick's room all night. All it did, however, was spark my brother's anger.
"Listen, if you don't want to be here..." he paused. He didn't trust me to sneak back into the house without his supervision and have me not wake Mom, and I knew it.
"What do you want?!" he finally asked.
"I dunno, let's go outside or something." I suggested.
"Is it cool if we hang out, out back?" Travis asked Nick.
"Yeah, sure," Nick replied. "I could use a smoke."
Outside was dark, expansive in every direction and sticky. While my brother and his friend smoked their cigarettes and sat lazily in the patio chairs, I walked off by myself. The backyard was a long rectangle covered in seldom cut, dewy grass. The end of the yard sloped down to a small creek, one of the many Platter Creek tributaries. The oaks that grew around the creek had always been some of our favorites for climbing and tree fort building, and my brother and Nick had built one of the finest examples of kid engineering anyone had every seen. The summer they built it, it was all anyone talked about. I don't think I've ever been more proud of my brother, even now. They built it with stolen supplies from an emerging housing development nearby. Those sorry construction workers must have come back almost daily to missing boxes of nails, 2x4s and plywood. Their endeavors were much more important to them than any punishment the law or their parents could hand down.
The fort was built about 25 feet off the ground. Three foot sections of splintery, hand-sawed 2x4s were nailed as a ladder to the thick bark of the trunk of the tree. The fort itself was huge, big enough to fit at least five or six kids. The roof was a tarp, cut and stapled so that it wove around the individual branches and the trunk itself. Inside the fort there was nothing, which made it exactly what every kid wanted--refuge.
When I got to the top of the ladder and pulled myself up into the fort, I finally felt at peace. Even now, I don't have to try very hard to get back to that place, it was so natural. The fort was far enough away from all the houses that the constant air conditioning couldn't be heard. It was late enough that cars and lawnmowers were packed away for the night and wouldn't be out for an eternity- or a night's sleep, whichever came first. The only thing that could be heard was the persistent hum of thousands of bugs singing rhythms I never knew existed. I could imagine it happening everywhere, even though I knew what I was witnessing was special and just for me. Life as it was meant to be laid out in front of me and she was breathtaking and beautiful. It was then that I noticed a pile of something along one of the walls. As I got closer to the pile, it began to take the shape of five or six magazines piled carelessly with crumpled, bent and torn covers.
I had seen naked women before. The previous school year we began sex ed., and there were always the old National Geographic magazines at the library or in Grandpa's basement. What I saw here was something completely different. The women in these magazines had straight blonde hair and were naked, lying on beds or alongside pools, wearing only high heel shoes. One by one, I paged through the magazines and laid them on the plywood floor of the fort while I kneeled in front of them. I studied the new and foreign images, trying to make sense of them and what they were making me feel. The thin layer of sweat on my face had little to do with the humidity now. I felt flushed and the once-pleasant breeze now caused me to shiver. Five women were laid out in front of me, legs spread. They were breathtaking and utterly disgusting. I didn't look away until my brother yelled my name from across the yard.
“I’m in the fort!” I yelled back in a whisper.
I heard the footsteps of my brother, moving hurriedly across the slick grass. Peaking out between the branches and leaves, I could see a dark figure with no definition moving on what appeared to be a cloud of mist, silencing the crickets and demanding my attention.
“Hey, we gotta get going home,” my brother announced without emotion.
I returned to the five women spread out on the floor. My eyes wouldn’t adjust to the natural darkness, which was fine with me. I had seen enough. One by one, I closed the pages and returned the women to the pile they came from and made my way down the ladder.
We said goodbye to Nick and made our way to the street before my brother said anything to me. Talking was mechanical to me, my mind was flashing through the images of the five women. I didn’t notice the silence of the night, or the difference between night and day, the smell of dewy grass or the crescent moon (something that someone once told me was God’s toenail). The only thing I could think of, the only thing I could see were the five women.
Travis stopped at our driveway. The house was dark and non-descript other than the halo lighting the address.
“I gotta finish this.” He said to me, holding up a half-smoked cigarette.
Looking up at the sky, I noticed how clear it was. There were only a few clouds, very far away and nearly transparent. Only the brightest stars were visible.
“What do you think God dreams about?” I asked, looking up at the moon.
“I dunno,” my brother shrugged, “I’m not even sure there is a God.”
“Of course there’s a God! How do you think all of nature got here!?”
“I dunno, it just grew. Besides, just because you can’t prove something doesn’t mean… What I mean is there’s no proof either way. So why should I believe in a God any more than I should believe in no God?”
He had a point. But just as it was enough to keep him from believing, it wasn’t enough to stop me.
“Well, I think there’s a God.” I stated, matter-of-factly. “How else can you explain where water comes from? Mrs. Wagner (my fifth grade teacher) told me water can’t be created or destroyed. The same water we drink now was drunk by the dinosaurs.”
My brother was in no mood to have this conversation, so I continued without him.
“And the stars we can see are all billions of miles away, and the light we see is actually really, really old, because it took so long to get here, which means the universe is huge!”
While I was telling my brother all this, I was staring at the moon. In my periphery, I saw something moving in the night sky.
“Trav!” I whispered excitedly, “I think I see a shooting star!”
My eyes were fixed on a tiny glowing dot, moving very slowly across the sky, among the twinkling pinholes of light. I pointed up at it, as best I could, to try and show Travis.
“Hmmm,” he breathed out, “I don’t see it.”
“It’s right there.” I stressed. I went on, trying to explain its placement among the different patterns in the sky.
“Wait, is it right next to those two really bright ones?” he asked.
“Yeah! It’s a shooting star! I’m gonna make a wish.” I was in awe.
“Don’t bother; I think it’s just a satellite.” My brother said, flicking the butt of his cigarette into the street. The cherry broke on the road and twinkled bright red on the black asphalt. Gradually, the little fragments died out and soon there was nothing left of them. I tried looking back to the sky to find my shooting star, or satellite, or whatever it was, but it was gone too.
~
Lying in bed that night I was tired, but my mind was racing with everything I had seen and heard. About how the world is so different at night, and how my brother stopped the crickets. How all the water is the same as it always has been and how maybe all the stars are satellites? How five beautiful women can be so disgusting and how I couldn’t stop thinking about them. About how it takes billions of years, or billions of dollars, to put lights in the night sky. And how it doesn’t matter if it was Jiminy Cricket or Madonna who sang it, wishing on a star won’t do a single goddamn thing. That night I stopped believing in God.

Communist Sugar Cube

We are taken and held by the things We love
forced to find Our fingers
stick them into walls
before We are ready
feel
fill
the gifts Our parents gave Us
with piss and vinegar
We drink midwest water and make horrible decisions

We'll drive half-way across anything
feel the communist sugar cube dissolve on Our tongue
stay
up
all
night
piecing the world together
wake
up
shaking
in someone else's bed
dawn is the new dusk
and We have work in the morning
but that is the least of Our concerns,
We have lives.
We hide
Our lives are the only things
We hide

"you cool?" he asked
the question reeking
sniff sniff
burning...
hair
"you cool?"
burning hair...
somewhere
"yeah"

the Spark

“What's the point?" Rebecca sighed, pulling his hand from between her thighs.
"What do you mean, what's the point?"
"I mean, why even get started. We both know exactly where it's going to end up."
"So, what do you expect me to do?"
"I dunno, it's just boring for me; that's all. Same thing every time. Besides, I'm really into this book at the moment."
"Jesus, Becky!" She hated it when he called her that. "I'm sorry that I bore you so much, but..."
Miles stopped talking. He'd learned long ago to choose his battles. Besides, he'd already established how he felt and was aware that she didn't care, and probably pissed her off by calling her Becky. If he stopped talking now and accepted defeat, she might give into a pity fuck. But she didn't, she just went back to her book and Miles rolled over and tried to ignore the buzzing crescendo coming from somewhere.
"What the fuck is that noise?" he yelled through his teeth.
"It's probably your heart."
"What!?"
"It's probably your heart," she repeated flatly.
And for some reason Rebecca's answer angered him more than it reasonably should have.
Miles's mouth ached and the buzz kept growing, but it didn't bother him nearly as much as what Rebecca said about his heart.
What the hell does that even mean, he thought to himself, as confusion gave way to the clarity of consciousness. Miles rolled over and reached for the alarm clock and hit the snooze.
~
Miles still set an alarm. Not that he had anywhere to be, he just didn't want to waste the day sleeping. And he didn't sleep well, yet. His bed was nothing more than a mattress on the ground and a few blankets. The curtains he had bought upon arriving in ____ were still wrapped in cellophane, so there was nothing to stop the blinding white sun from waking him. But the sun wasn't up just yet.
Yesterday, for a reason he couldn't seem to justify to anyone but himself, Miles moved to ____. He and Rebecca were on an indefinite break, but it wasn't because of that alone that he left. Something was missing and he felt that his life had become stagnant. The job he had was nothing special, or at least nothing to stick around for. Most of his friends had moved away, or moved on from the lives they once shared with him.
And although he couldn't be sure of the causes, the symptoms were clear. There was something missing. The spark he could remember feeling for life was gone, and had been gone for some time now. He couldn't pinpoint the precise moment it happened. It was as if it were a black mold growing under the surface of his life. It was the breakup with Rebecca that caused him to see it, but it wasn't her fault. It wasn't anyone's fault, he thought.
He could remember a time before the spark left him, before his life had dulled. Back when he was 19 or 20, and his friends still lived in town. None of them had steady jobs, and yet, somehow, they always had access to money and a car. They would take long drives at night out to the deserted country roads and drink MD2020. They would crash house parties and steal booze and cigarettes when no one was looking. They would go out on dates with girls they hardly knew, laugh and drink and pass out in rented rooms. There was a spark then. But college funds and student loans dry up, parents cut you off from cars, bank accounts and cell phone plans. But even then, there was a spark. In the daily ritual of twisting out the stale remnants of ancient cigarette butts, there was still a spark. So Miles knew it wasn't the money or the comfort that his middle class upbringing afforded him that had made him happy. No, it was something else. Then, somewhere between 20 and 25, it left him.
So one night, while lying in bed, he decided to go looking for it. He thought for a moment of moving to Chicago with his best friend Jim, but things were different for both of them now. Miles didn't wish to relive the experiences he had had with Jim and he knew Jim wasn't interested either. Staying out all night drinking coffee or liquor, or both, until sunrise, running from cops or security guards--no, neither of them were interested in that any more. Besides, Jim had really gotten his shit together since moving away. Middle management in a factory, 35 grand a year salary, holiday pay, full health benefits, an office and business cards with his name and title printed on them. They were still great friends, but both of them knew there was no going back to what they had had. And Miles was OK with that, he thought that night while he lay in bed and decided to start over. He wasn't interested in those things any more; it seemed as if he wasn't interested in anything any more.
As he lay in bed that night, Miles thought hard about the last time he was interested and the last place he found interesting. He and Jim had been up all night again, driving without destination, when they found it. And something about the place told him 'someday'.
~
Miles turned the alarm off. He was scatter-brained, as he always was early in the morning when he had the luxury of lying in bed for a moment. He was also upset over what Rebecca had said about his heart, not yet realizing it was a dream. One by one his senses slipped into place. Blurry vision cleared up, the white noise that hung in the room became unnoticeable, his mouth suddenly tasted stale and dry, and he felt heavy and his back ached. Miles breathed deeply, smelled nothing but didn't notice, and let his mind wander.
I hardly even remember the move.
Arg, my fucking jaw!
The Violent Femmes were wrong, breaking up isn't easy at all.
It was a lot harder than the move, at least.
I don't even remember it, really, but here I am.
I already miss the sex. It wasn't even that good.
Maybe it has something to do with intimacy, not orgasms.
I wonder how she's doing.
I really should put up some curtains.
Ow, my fucking jaw!
His anger was subsiding as he realized he had done it again and Miles laughed to himself. Recently, over the past few months, he'd been having dreams in which he felt a very strong emotion during the dream that carried over into when he woke up. Miles found this very amusing. He was laughing hysterically now, stretching his jaw at the same time. When the dreams were happy, Miles would wake himself up by laughing and his face would be sore from smiling all night. When the dreams were angry, he woke up with a locked jaw and clenched fists. And then there were the dreams from which he woke curled around the pillow, shaking. Those dreams left him feeling embarrassed, but he still found the absurdity of it hilarious.
Miles rolled off the bed and onto the floor and immediately felt something wet under him. Pushing himself up onto his hands and knees, Miles looked down at the blue plastic cup lying on its side where he had just rolled. Miles chuckled to himself. He and Rebecca had had a cat who liked to knock over all their cups, and since he moved, and she kept the cat, he thought he didn't have to worry about keeping full glasses of water sitting around any more.
The apartment was weird, he thought, as he walked into the living room to survey it in the dim twilight of not quite morning. It didn't have a smell, which he also thought was strange. Miles thought instantly about how when he was a child, he noticed how all his friend's houses smelled very distinctly different. And when he was away at summer camp for a week each summer, he would come home and notice the distinct smell of his own home. Now this was his home, he told himself, and it didn't smell like anything. That kind of bothered him.
"I should get some candles or incense," Miles said to the empty room.
It was then that Miles noticed a beep coming from his cell phone. Reaching into his pocket, Miles already knew who it was from. He and Jim couldn't help but play phone tag. It stemmed from the fact that Miles was a second-shifter while Jim was a first-shifter. They would argue about the finer points of each camp, as if there was something to be won. And just as brutally, and verbally violent, they would both defend themselves and mock the other for the life choices he had made. Miles's confidence in his ideals was waning now, as he had seemingly given up everything he had fought for and was now looking for something new to protect. But they were best friends, so when he listened to the voicemail Jim left him about "finally seeing what I was talking about," and cleverly put "I told you so"s, Miles was not offended. Maybe Jim was right.
Stepping down the stairs of his front porch, Miles couldn't think of anything else. Maybe Jim was right. He walked to the side of the large 2-story green house and unlocked his bike from the metal electrical pipe that ran to the upstairs apartments. It was a beautiful fall day. It was the kind of weather that deserves a jacket but only receives a sweater because the residual heat of summer has still not left the body.
"A perfect day," Miles commented to his bike, although he noted how the usual smell that accompanies autumn mornings like these was missing. Maybe it's just not ready yet, he thought to himself. And partially because of the perfection of the day, Miles took a positive position concerning the issue at hand; what now?
"What to do with my life now?" Miles said as he rode out of his driveway and down the street, towards south-sloping northern hill that lent itself to his neighborhood's namesake. Climbing the hill was work, but he didn't notice. He was too busy thinking. He tried to think towards the future, but he couldn't help letting his mind wander back to his previous life with Rebecca. What had gone wrong? It happened so slowly. And what about his job, and his ambition to better himself? He quit his job because he wasn't happy there, but that action didn't really make him happy either. And with a twisting train of thought that meandered parallel to his bike riding, he found himself both in a neighborhood he didn't recognize as well as at a conclusion. Miles stopped. The word rested on his lips and he spat it out with his tongue.
"Commitment."
In a flash of a second, it all made sense. Rebecca, his job, his lack of new friends, the desperate need to find the spark--they were all caused by his inability to commit to anything new. Even though pretty much every aspect of his life had changed, Miles still held fast to the commitments he made five years prior. It occurred to him that he was always waiting for things to break down and go back to the way they were before, or at least break down into something that resembled what his life used to be. And even though he was no longer that person, he refused to acknowledge it.
Now he could see it. And even though it didn't help him figure out how to change it, it was the moment of realization he needed. It was that moment of realization that almost killed him. From around the blind corner, Miles had no way of seeing the car and the car had no way of seeing him. And while he stood in the street and pondered the word and all its implications, the car pulled around the corner and directly into Miles. He wouldn't later remember the thought of confusion and anger that never formed into a word as he was thrown to the ground. Nor would he remember the yelp that escaped his lips when his head met with the concrete, knocking him unconscious.
~
In fact, he couldn't remember much of anything concerning the morning's events when he woke up in the warm bed in a sterile room. Before his eyes even opened, he noticed the smell. He was in a hospital. There were soft beeps and squeaking steps in the distance, and always that smell. The room was whiter than any room in which he'd ever been. He was light-headed and even more scatter-brained than usual.
"I think he's awake."
Miles recognized the voice immediately. It was Rebecca.
"How are you feeling, sweetie?"
There was a different voice now, his mother's. He couldn't see them; his head was held in place by something. Very aware of his breathing, Miles's mind strained to figure out his new surroundings and his eyes wandered the room. Through a cloud of drugs in his brain, the question came to him.
"What happened?" Miles spoke softly.
"Honey, you were hit by a car early this morning. The police said you were standing in the road and a car came around a corner and hit you. We're so glad you're alive!" his mother, on the verge of tears, told him. She was holding his hand tightly now.
"Where am I?" Miles asked.
"The hospital, honey," his mother answered.
And yet it still didn't make any sense. How did he get from ____ and back home so quickly? And then, in the pain-killer-induced haze, he asked himself where exactly he had moved to, but he couldn't remember.
"Mom, didn't I move yesterday?"
"What?"
"Didn't I move yesterday? Like to another city?"
Miles's mind was black. Memories blinked in and out like a string of Christmas lights, but they didn't add up to anything. Where had he moved to? He couldn't remember the name of the town, or the move at all. The last thing he could remember was the fight he and Rebecca had gotten into before they broke up.
"We had a fight and broke up and I moved away to--to somewhere I can't remember now, but I was alone and... and I don't remember anything else," Miles slurred.
"Miles, what are you talking about? We went to bed together last night, and when I woke up you were gone," Rebecca stated in a confused tone.
Miles furrowed his brow and squinted his eyes, trying to make sense of everything. He heard someone push the door open and enter the room. He felt coolness in his left arm and heard a whir coming from a machine on his left, near his head. The coolness spread up his arm and Miles felt very calm and his mouth tasted metallic. Suddenly, his confusion didn't bother him. Actually, it was kind of funny, he thought as he laughed.
"Well, I see he's awake," a man's voice said, as he cleared his throat. "That's good; the injuries didn't seem too severe, luckily. He should be just fine in a couple of days. But I wanted to talk to you, Mrs. Burke, about something I noticed on his records. Um, I noticed your son has a history of somnambulism, but he hasn't had an episode for some time now."
"Yes, well when he was about 9 he had a couple incidents, but that was so long ago now." his mother replied, cutting the doctor off.
"Miles, do you..."
The doctor stopped talking. Miles's eyes were softly closed and a slight, almost holy, smile began to form on his face. In his last few moments of consciousness Miles breathed calmly and thought about the only thing he could remember from the whole ordeal. He had come to a conclusion, he found an answer, and he was content with that. Now was time to sleep.