 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Meat
Poems |
|||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||||||||
Disaster Fable |
Meat Pant's girlfriend Gretel hadn't lived in the house very long, less than a week, when the restaurant next door burned down. The house was on the corner of 18th Street and Shotwell, and her bedroom faced a power station that was surrounded by a sturdy iron fence and a dirty, stunted row of trees under which homeless people slept in a ragged and shifting encampment.
Beyond the power plant was a fire station outfitted with a handsome, tall brick building made expressly for the purpose of practicing to put out fires. More than any other building in the city, Meat Pants loved this building, so sturdy and flame retardant and inhospitable. Sometimes, riding by it on her bicycle, Meat Pants observed firefighters aiming a dry hose at the building's implacable façade. Through windows and doorways she glimpsed staircases, concrete landings. Something about the way the building squarely invited and controlled disaster provoked an almost unbearable combination of feelings in her stomach--warm exterior, cold interior, catastrophe, protection. Meat Pants could see the top of the building from Gretel's bedroom window, but she didn't like to look at it too much. Just knowing it was out there imbued the room with a bricky swirl of chaos mixed with ordered warmth. On the night that Gretel moved into the house, Meat Pants had seen what she believed to be an omen of some kind, though she didn't know whether it portended to good luck or to bad. Near midnight, trudging down 18th Street across Valencia, Mission, South Van Ness, she saw Santa Claus riding the Mission 14 bus, southbound. The unwieldy bus lumbered to the corner just as she walked up, and she caught a flash of pulled red velvet and there was Santa, ruddy face and snowy beard, clutching a teeming plastic grocery bag, and then the bus lurched off and she stood, dazed, in a plume of exhaust, wondering what to make of this late August vision. And not a week later Meat Pants was dreaming about Santa, a comical dream featuring pink reindeer which turned sinister when smoke crept from the edge of Santa's beard and his coat burst into flame. It was the middle of the night and her hand was tangled in Gretel's hair, her long, brown hair, and they were sleeping, and they had been fighting. There was a soft, quick suck as Gretel's body pulled away from hers, a small warmth demolished, and for a confused moment Meat Pants thought she's leaving me but then a strangely gentle voice, a roommate's, cascaded through the door calling fire get up there's a fire. Gretel was at her door in a flash, and when she opened it smoke billowed into the room and she screamed come on, baby. Gretel was the first one ever to call Meat Pants "baby" and even now it sent a thrill through the middle of the panic. Gretel grabbed her camera and Meat Pants grabbed her hand and they ran down the narrow stairs and onto the sidewalk and there were firefighters in yellow jackets aiming hoses at Chava's, the Mexican restaurant next door. Yellow and blue plastic tables on the sidewalk listed in the heat and flames flapped like dry paper. The building emitted a roar. Gretel's face looked soft and grave and a little bossy, and it was jarring to see this private, sleepy look thrust onto the sidewalk. Meat Pants felt the leftover fighting swirl between them like a bit of hot ash, and she wondered if it would spark again or go out. She had the sudden urge to gather Gretel's hair into her mouth and swallow it all the way to the roots, and she emitted a little involuntary gag of pleasure at the thought of her long, rough hairs anchoring in her throat. Gretel looked at Meat Pants with an expression that she couldn't read. She wore a thin robe, And Meat Pants worried that she was cold, and still angry, and below this rippled the deeper worry that Gretel was going to leave her because she was too full of compulsion and inexplicable sadness, and mixed in with this was the cold, constant idea that she was meant to be alone anyway, all alone, like Santa on the bus. Gretel moved her camera to her face, and the shutter made the sound of a small, sharp tear. The hose surged, water blasted the roasting edifice of Chava's, the firefighters stumbled backward. Glass broke somewhere. The camera shutter sliced again, and suddenly the smoky heat split open and she fell forward into the rent air. Meat Pants saw Gretel, the firefighters, the flames coming out of the building, the Salvadorian grandmother who lived in the house next door--all blurred and grey, as if through a sheet of smoke, then it seemed as if they were made of smoke, faint and wavering, rubbing away into air, as she drifted backwards into the slit of space. And then she was somewhere cold and dark and silent. Streetlamp light entered the space through little windows and doorways without doors, and Meat Pants caught a flash of brick beyond the window ledge. The shadows in the corner thickened and then breathed, and then she saw him, all ruddy cheeks and scuffed black boots, and he said "We brought you here in order to prepare for the disaster." |
||
 |
 |
 |
|||