Broken Knuckles

I wrote this based on that tail end of dementia, where the person you love seems to unravel.

My body was made of hairline cracks. My movements grated together like porcelain cogs in a brittle machine. I raised my hand to the glowing setting of the sun, it gave my thinning skin a warm halo, giving a vibrancy to my body it had not felt in years. The vibrancy was a lie, a piece of vanity that refused to allow me vitality. I asked myself, lost between the gelatinous worms of my mind;
“Is it not cruel to become old?”
I seemed to decline, as I sat on a bench turned to driftwood by time. My life falling, my cracks growing longer, like vast cruel grins splitting me open.

A man sat next to me, his figure was obscured by the sun’s rays. I think he was a man at least, he spoke gruffly, with a gentle rhythm, seeming to undo the chasms that had etched their way though me. He spoke, the words muffled by my memory. I think I spoke to him a time, he had cradled me, birthed me, spat me out and cared for me. I hated his soothing existence, and I could not remember his face. I knew everything of him, but only in feeling. In my history, he held me. But only in my words, the fragile worm of my words.

Did he pulse? As the sky simmered a boiled shade of passion fruit skin. Or did I? Did I hold my soul, bare-chested and sleepily in my wrinkled palms? Or did he? In his taught youthful pride. The sky simmered and I simmered and the jagged edges of my person reopened, the edges of my scarred person folding in on themselves. Or did I heal myself, finding grass beneath my exposed toes, breathing the deep autumn air, lying heavy in my lungs. Did I hear the bird chirp, or did the bird chirp in my hear? Or my ear?

Holes. I think I liked holes, to dig, dig, dig. Lie in soil, I try to find something. Maybe I liked holes, and to dig, dig, dig.

Tom was the man next door. He had a very pretty hand. It always held pretty birds, with pretty damaged wings. He cared for them. He held their tiny little broken wings, and let them heal. I liked Tom, he was always kind to me and my son. He let my son play with the broken birds, letting him chirp with them, and hold them in his sweet little hands.

The man sat on my bench again, his face obscured by a blur of forgetfulness. Seen by cataract bulbs, unseen by mind. He spoke to me of Tom, I asked him;
“Tom, the man with the baby broken birds? yes. I remember him well”
The bench man seemed to breathe his headless sigh, making the bench the bench man benched on vibrate at a higher frequency of bench than I liked. I asked him to stop. I asked him to make his selfish benching stop, he soothed me with false tarmac, but he was still a bench. My feet touched tarmac but clad in shoe I was separated, and assaulted by bench.

My friend, Mary, she told me the wooden panels were not scary. That like the angel spoke to man, I was to be not afraid. But I was afraid. When I blinked, and Mary hid her tidy self from the wood, it would inhale, the lungs behind the walls never deflating, only coming ever inward to my crib.

My crib was made of wood, and so was my bench. The man who sat on the bench held flowers of lilac and wild gorse. The woman on the bench held a wreath of depravity, hung about her featureless face in drapes of harrow. My wood panels breathed one last time, fitting me, forming me to a crib, like those I had attended in mourning.

My knuckles are broken from fighting, and my lathe turned index heart breathed a sigh of disappointed peace.

I seemed to decline as I sat on a bench. It benched far too loudly, and I was turned to driftwood by time, and by time I became encased in it. Maybe I liked to dig. I hope I did, for now I am below in a hole. One which I don’t think pretty Tom’s birds can fly me from.

Author's Note

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