Ink – Ryan Bry

September 2, 2018

The rain harms the sky with its slanted answers. A non-crucial drop goes to where there’s clouds no more and on the way matches with other water near a crow’s heart and then is flung by gravity’s long con towards the silver hybrid owned by Samantha by the steady cadence of plumage. The windshield felt these words in its shadow place more than human figuring. The water gush was still remembering birdheart until it was gladly bleak with the rest of the tire spritz. Samantha was buzzing with the machine because she had veered into the cautionary etching of the highwayside. The stereo was blaring “When Will I Be Loved” by Linda Ronstadt as if that were the only song it truly recognized. Samantha has always worked as an insurance salesman and has always loved her husband, even when he makes the coffee wrong. Sometimes he puts the wrong planet in it. 
        Right now she’s turning the radio down because divorcing Melissa has called but the music returns with gentle fervor. She wonders what the husband is doing who is mad at the dirt because his team is past squandering momentum. She sees the pastel job from someone’s gross car and wonders for a second but dismisses that for longer. She knows who she wants to call on her long commute.
        “Zoe?”
        Zoe has gladly-kill-you short blonde hair and writes roller coaster reviews. Samantha has beyond animalistic long brown hair and knows of only one way to make tea. 
        “Have you spoke to the nasty mountains about arranging nowhere gold???” Zoe says.
        “Why are you saying that?” Samantha says.
        “Just wanted to be mysterious,” Zoe says: “I feel like nothing is happening. The shadows on my walls went away so I’m replacing them with you.”
        “Do you have anything real to say?”
        “Real? A chicken built a nuclear bomb in Georgia.”
        “God, let me tell you about this conference I went to it was so boring and they had this bougie waterfall in the room which constantly made me need to pee,” Samantha says. “In the middle of it I said ‘Can you turn that waterfall off?’ and nothing happened because of the way that they looked at me.”
        “Water dials your skin as it’s falling ‘when are you coming home? your dinner is squatting on a plate.’ You should see me now with mud blinding all over me me. Little one dirtied in the passenger puddle. Never cried like it. Isn’t it cute? Hahahahah.” Zoe says.
        “For some reason I’m thinking about a song.” Samantha hardly labors.
        “And it is?”
        “Hymn of the Soviet Union sung by Paul Robeson.”
        “Well, we have a long time to figure out our friends.”
        “National anthems are very beautiful and boring,” Samantha says.
        “Why did they make so many countries?” Zoe says.
        “To make it look like you’d never run out of them,” Samantha guesses.
        “Um,” Zoe says.
        “If you never knew what anything was, I doubt you’d start asking for a nationality.”
        “Oh I found her looking into a little world” Zoe cants “the little world is the one that’s just for her.”
        “So should I sell my great big car and forget about going very far?” Samantha yelps.
        “Ah, The Junkyard Angel. Isn’t it good for everyone?”
        “Oh, I know that for sure,” Samantha says. “Oh lemme—
        “Okay I guess it’s time to go.”
        “Bye Zoe.”
        “Uh huh.”
        Samantha walks into a gas station that’s nailed down by neon and subtracted into modern fable. There’s a man saying ghastly things to the cake snacks but this does not bother Samantha’s bubbling interior. For a moment everyone in there seems pulled by horses towards locations that do not matter to the beasts.
        “Just this coffee.”
        “$2.50,” she doesn’t mention that it is iced.
        “Thank you;” he gives his breath a few little words.
        When she opens her grey hybrid her cell phone is making war against the silence. The timing makes her say “What?”
        “Oh nothing my nails are already dry but I wanted to see what you were up to,” divorcing Melissa says.
        “Oh you know, just trying to be born,” Samantha says.
        “Didn’t you already do that like 32 years ago?”
        “I’m not sure I did it the right way. This seems like the wrong world.” The way Samantha said that made her go blanker than she anticipated. There were so many people eating food right now, but they were all as blank as her. Some were even looking into other eyes. So much blank vision of things that didn’t give a damn. The televisions were lit up with dead pixels singing about how much time there was to do nothing. Boyfriends were digging up deep kernels of void to bejewel their lost sequence with character.
        “Sorry, I have to pick up this hitchhiker, it seems like a better plan than talking to you,” Samantha says.
        “But I have all this mud on me.”
        “What am I supposed to do about that?
        “Well, I don’t know,” divorcing Melissa surrendered.
        Samantha plants deep footprints into the bed of water that the grass leafs which are the color of potato sacks were sleeping on. They were felt on the other side of the world in a child’s dream. “Do you know where you are?” she says, holding her phone out to her side like an empty gun.
        “I’m here with you, gimme that,” Barshy says. He grabs the phone and starts punching numbers. “Did you change your password?”
        “Um no, that’s my phone?”
        “No, to your soul. You’re not allowed to change passwords to your soul. I know your phone key, it’s just wet, help me out.”
        “144,000; the number of the saved during the tribulation,” Samantha says.
        “Just press it in. Everyone knows that at this point.” He squints somewhere more universal than earth. She wipes the phone with her relaxed-red sweater sleeve and asks for the number.
        “19844891.”
        “Okay, I’ll call but I don’t know who’s gonna pick up.”
        “My friend Bellysmith, we’ve been at this long time. Long time.”
        Ring ring ring ring. Ring ring ring ring. Ring ring ring.
        “No one’s picking up.”
        “Give me the phone.” 
        She starts to hand him the iPhone when Bellysmith says “Don’t give him the phone,” loudly on the line.
        “Hello, what am I supposed to do?” Samantha flails.
        “Grab the katana and drive it through him. Tell him ‘this is what happens when angels go rogue,’ as his eyes disappear. Don’t fuck this up.”
        “But this isn’t something I’d normally do?”
        A katana comes cycloning out of a minivan’s passenger window. Barshy fury scrambles towards it and grabs the hilt. He brings it over his head with his elbows pointing at both ends of the horizon in a raised akimbo, then adjusts it towards his belly and says “this is what happens when angels go rogue” and disembowels his organs.
        “You were so beautiful,” Samantha says as she closes his eyes and longs at the highway.
        Samantha is alone in her car with the positive silence unburdening itself. But when you are alone in this way you only feel slightly alone as the unmowed grass whispers its single message of natural acquiescence. She sees the billboard for “Inner Bliss,” which she hasn’t seen too many times. It has an octopus squeezing a girl’s right thigh above her stocking and gazing up. The girl’s hands are walking posed and she could be going anywhere.
        “You’ve walked right into Inner Bliss. Are you just looking?” Timber said.
        “Just looking,” Samantha said.
        “It’s a shame you’re just looking because I’ve got something for you to try,” Timber said. Samantha answered with the edges of a glance. “I made this pizza in the oven in the back, I tried something new and I used octopus ink as the sauce base. It’s got mushrooms, goat birria, mozzarella, and banana glaze. I’ve got a movie we can watch in the back. You seem to be in a good place for that.”
        “Sure, I’m down for something like that right now.”
        Timber loads the movie onto his projector. It’s a capture of every single moment he’s ever had in life. “That’s you right there, and coming up soon is when I die. Out of everyone I know I’m the only person who has something like this, isn’t that interesting?”
        Samantha eats a slice. “Yeah, I guess so.”
        “Well, they never saw this coming,” he lumbers up with a groan and selects a standard sized dildo from the wall. He writes his number on it: 555-5555. “Give me a call sometime. We’ll probably have to close down the shop soon. There’s so little interest.”
        “Thank you for the sweetness, I’ve had a strange day.”
        “Aren’t they all.”

***

Last night’s tea getting its hidden request on the nightstand that has forgotten about numbers, Samantha reverse disintegrates into the warmth of her own pile of sunlight. A wooden box for your particles to break down in. Getting bruised by a thrown peach from someone you almost know forever gives her a leg shown to the ceiling. Bathing a lobster chunk in butter with a mini hibiscus mounted like a temple on the bowl’s bask. Emptied wineglasses reflecting the murky light of a restaurant’s plangent stage, submerged in the tone of speech. Dignified pelicans with hearts calloused by generosity unnaming the sky with each brush of feathers. A note written from father to expel the mundanity by inclusion. Baptizing a heap of daffodils before dubbing the knight.
        555-5555. Charming the stems to blossom in the meeting room in the afternoon that refrains from attacking. Surviving a bite under gooey eyes that don’t mean anything. Politely marauding the noiseless grocery store with unboxed trickery.
        555-555. Crushing fish and snakes alike with each stone drop in the dramatic graveyard creek. Feasting on the neutrality of flesh found under the sky that repositions its character according to the wavelength of the hangout. A remark that proudly damages serenity with something more full of angles.
        555-55. An animal stared at me through his eyes, pure as a logistic. Grass crawling all over the planet where I met you and dumped out my water. Noble wrecks parade the mired description of the world that once belonged more to itself.
        555-5. Over a tattoo’s pulse his skin questioned me into surrender. The fans degrading the harmony of the air as words in the mind returned to something softer than the womb. All of the random tasks that brought us together on a page that has never been blank and never will be.
        555. Ghosts traveling to the verbal as earthquakes eat cereal after the fact. The dynamics revealing themselves in a miserable secret by the languid noodle shop. Organic treason synthesizing with each postulating step. More worlds with butterflies pressing charges against the couchant god with nails in his teeth. If you want someone to live buy them a calendar; if you want them to die buy them a crown.
        55. Nodes appearing in the room fresh as a fish’s birth. Townies nursing their bulldozer eyes, craving nothing but experience. Saved by the room’s only defect she listens to her opening.
        5. The ocean does not discard the message. When birds fly out of a bell it is to tell you that what you have been borrowing is now yours. The trees outside of the window bob their branches like nuns ascending a moss cracked staircase.