Tarantula Boy #1 & #2

by Kyle Hemmings

[The following is decoded for your reading pleasure.]

Tarantula boy & I sit on the curb all day throwing stones at cars.

I like how they go ping or the faces pressed against
windows wishing something else. Almost nobody
stops but this one guy.

Hey it’s a new car, he says.

I thought he was going to hit us.
I thought he would chase us into the lizard-gut of night.
I thought we’d never shake him off in the labyrinth
of alleys that never end the side streets a network
of tapering veins stretched faces like tapirs.

Tarantula boy tells him we R building a cathedral
made of scrap metal which is what I would have
said if I could think fast enough the truth.
It’s a cathedral dedicated to the suicides of
death-wringed poets skink-shit for the bureau-rats
says Tarantula boy whom I once thought of as poison-
writhing & autistic hunger.

It will have catacombs with candles
underneath the pig iron floors & stitches

of naked light for stained glass.

A prayer made of car parts. [This voice could belong to me or the man or a tarantuala growing another tail.]

The stanger blank as sheet metal & the Oreo eyes suddenly burn Gregorian chant chartreuse or maybe were that under the sodium twinge of streetlights. Green snakes green snakes is all I can think of. A sure sign that he is beta-mutant & tarantula-fluent under flannel threads or maybe my own opticmism rebounding.

We sign off in finger drills cannonizing
ourselves as suicide pact trio.

The guy hands us a rock.

——————

Tarantula Boy #2

At the bar a girl is staring at Tarantula boy’s hands deformed like claws.
Excusemeshesays hereditary or something acquired? Are you a doctor
says my friend this boy of ceilings & many walls. It must be hard
holding things: beer glasses    Chinese vases     Lithuanian portraits of flower girls. The head wrapped in “salikas”    Flesh the color of dust. Baltic winters are a hook. & those melancholy smiles. You know.  You know.     Painful but not hard he tells her. My hands are a history of things. They talk in a corner & leave the bar. The next day I ask Tarantula boy about the dust girl. She had sex with just the fingers he says.The rest of me didn’t interest her. Holding out his palm fingers curling, he blows into it. I turn & laugh a stream of tears into my beer.
 

One Response to “Tarantula Boy #1 & #2”

~ This piece was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 and was filed under Writing, Short Story. You can make comments on it below. ~