J. A. Taylor
How It Is That Jimmy, He Goes, When Everyone Is Sleeping

The crush of rocks was on Jimmy's mind, and the wind was blowing. This was a summer hotter than any other summers, and Jimmy, he didn't know if this was because it was a summer hotter than all the other summers or if it was because this was the summer where Jimmy, he was finally paying some attention.

His father, Jimmy's, he was stiff in the grass tonight, connecting the stars. Jimmy's father, not breathing. Jimmy's father on top of the space where his wife, Jimmy's mother, she is buried, underneath the worms and the soil.

The rest of weight on shoulders. The wrestling down of how it all feels.

The night is cool, the wind drifting ships in the wombs of Jimmy's imagination. He is looking for a kind of peace to wash over him, to run in him, cold water and sinking. Jimmy smells rain but it is his hair. And Jimmy, he feels shivers, they tackle the length of him, but the waves are in his head and the rip of the shore, it is his own breath.

The lawn soaked in thoughts. The house quiet.

Jimmy and his father, they have stilled the world, they have paused it all, and his father especially, he is at a moment that will go on and on, a death, the rigor of limbs growing. And Jimmy, smiling there at his father's open hands, both ready to hold on to something.

Breaking open the ground Jimmy digs and the hole that he makes becomes a canyon he is looking down into and his father, laying next to him, eyes closed to the sky, Jimmy connects his stars. The yawn of darkness is without clouds tonight and the air is calm. Jimmy is calm. He shovels, the nose of the blade digging through it all. The dirt that lifts, it rakes the words from his head, leaves him empty for a time, blankets his synapses in black sky and dwindling worry.

The rocks that come out, he makes a pile. All the rocks from out of their ground, from out of their mouths, the heaviness of speaking foreign languages to each other when there is no one to translate. Their hands their communication. These rocks all the splashing condescension, all the missed opportunity, all the stepping away from one another.

His father doesn't say any more words and Jimmy remembers the last, when his father's chest exploded and his hands quietly opened. And Jimmy would swear to anyone that his father, he was holding pieces of her, his wife, Jimmy's mother, and that was the smiling face that he died with.

But Jimmy didn't tell anyone, Jimmy has kept this all to himself. Jimmy is full of secrets.

There are no good words Jimmy knows to tell someone that someone else has died. There are only stories. And Jimmy's favorite, the one he tells to himself, is that he once caught a fish that was his mother. That is a story that Jimmy, he never gets tired of telling. He can picture her eyes, his mother's, looking from out of a fish head, reflecting the water, fins like arms in the posture of a hug. Fish kisses that Jimmy, he never bores of telling to himself.

The rocks make an unexpected stack, bigger than he had envisioned, warm still from the day's sun, and the depth of the hole is perfect. Jimmy can see the side of her box, his mother's, and though he doesn't want to open it, he will, and an ocean will come slipping out.

There are no birds at night and Jimmy, he thinks he hears a bat swoop dive punch, but it might just be Jimmy and his ears going out again, replaced with a river static, a rush, and Jimmy finishes his digging.

Jimmy's father has the house keys in his pockets, his wallet and all their money in his back pocket. Jimmy's father has the ring on his pinky. And Jimmy's father, he has the imagining of a heavenly kite in his head, because Jimmy put it there, when he was resting his boy head against his father's cooling one, and thinking all of the good thoughts he could, crying, a sea pouring out of him.

There is so much water tonight for this dry town, Jimmy's town, the place where until today, until tonight, Jimmy he lived.

There are no words for the world. There are no sentences he can build, Jimmy, to save himself from how this, it all works. He dammed his future with a song that no one had ever heard, and the dam, it broke open, came tumbling out.

Jimmy pries open the box, groping with blind eyes, shutting them tight against everything, and he smells in the air what it must smell like when dreams, they are dead. But this darkness in the box and the scent of his mother, not like how his mother should smell, not like rain and cotton candy but like hope vanishing, that is not how his mother should smell. But it is enough for Jimmy, knowing they can embrace, to make him turn his back on their time. To make him fill it all in. To make him go on.

His father down in the hole, lowered with hands that are Jimmy's, with hands that are the size of a man's palms, a man's fingers, the dovetail of manly knuckles and ragged nails, visible prints worn to the skin, down beneath the easy surface of usual living.

Jimmy puts his father by his mother, and Jimmy sees on their imagined faces, his eyes closed again, the look of smiling.

If the sun sank to the lake it would make a sizzle, going out, like a candle extinguished.

Jimmy he stands in the dark and holds his man hands on his boy hips, half in and half out of himself. Jimmy nodding up at the sky, crying more rain than he knew was in him, howling but only in his head, where no one can get to the secret of rocks or his gone father, so that no one has to feel what Jimmy he has felt since the last winter came and took the floor out from under him.

Rocks of all sizes, weights, the feel of the world on Jimmy's shoulders lessening as the stars, they shine, a sun sometime soon coming up.

Shovelfuls of dirt and his father's face is camouflaged to the earth, to the ground, his rigid open hand stuffed into the open side of a box, where Jimmy knows there will be the only kind of solace that exists for them, for his mother and his father, both now more dead than alive. His mother and his father, both now separate from how it is that he, that Jimmy, still continues to lives.

Open caskets, open hands, Jimmy and a shovel burying the world.

Crickets turn on and off and Jimmy, he hears them, even with his deaf ears, listens to them running the music of their bodies through his, until his knees he feels them shaking and has to go on. Another shovelful. Another shovelful. Another shovelful. Jimmy, he thinks that he should be drunk, like his mother was when the end came for her, barreling down tracks. But Jimmy, he doesn't drink.

His head whines but he doesn't open his throat.

Jimmy sings.

And tonight, Jimmy, he sings out loud and the neighbors will think it is just a tree of locusts, because the sound that Jimmy makes, it is not a song but static crying, a vibrating hum, a decay. Jimmy's song is a nail going into a box, a mother with numbing insides, a father reaching into the darkness for her, the heart in his chest first broken and then deflated.

Jimmy puts the rocks in his pockets. Jimmy puts the shovel in the shed. Jimmy puts the stars back in the sky.

A river runs beneath them, his mother and his father, well-sprung for the drying death, down together now like they want, Jimmy on his own, to do his own, his mother's voice in his head saying not the water Jimmy, not the shore. And Jimmy, his father too now, the sad thrust of his voice, the screamed words before his ribs went in and couldn't reach back out, before he went looking into the silence and the pitch black. Before he scrambled down an indefinable ridge, down in to the waters below.

Jimmy with all the rocks in his pockets and Jimmy with one star in each eye, a constellation of finish, a groping towards the end.

Jimmy walks. Jimmy goes. Jimmy will watch the sun rise one more time, and then Jimmy he will find out a new song, a new pitch, and will move from being how he is now to being something else entirely.

Jimmy, rocks his only weight, he turns his back on the ground that was his mother and father but is now only dirt and struggling lawn, the uprising roots of a tree, and the black dissolve into purple voices, the sun bringing back the summer one more time.

<< Back to Issue 14, 2010