The handfeel of the creased envelope is light, inside unmistakably a single watermarked sheet informing me politely that the publisher is looking to head in another direction. A direction away from me. Me and my words. A deep sigh emanates from the sick pressure that weights my stomach.
Will no one hear my poetry, I softly wonder. Mindlessly I unwedge with my tongue moist granules of gristle embedded in the valleys of molars. Sticky pork reminders of my least meal. A wave of dejection crests and curls over my heart and entombs my core in a torpidly throbbing sea of ache.
With a thick fingernail I scratch at a bunched corner of the manuscript. My eyes idly glide over my shining words jet-inked on Ultra Bright White pages.
Yes, my words. They are my words. I know I am good enough. I have a blog.
The way I know I am crying is by the shaking of my shoulders. Seismic vibrations of ultimate sadness. Hot numb tears splash cruelly onto my pages, soaking and obscuring peripheral and temerity. I remembered a story my uncle once told me.
“Did you know that earthquakes are caused by God laughing?” he told me once on a lazy, sticky summer Wednesday. His accent was alfalfa-sweet. Bright and sharp.
When I was so young I was afraid to meet his eyes for his appearance frightened me. I loved to spend time with him to hear his stories about the war, almost tasting the smells of army-rationed beef and sweat and cigar smoke and man-farts in his bunker, but the streaky pale scars etched across his face from a hominy threshing accident made me feel ill at ease. I scanned the ink line of grackles perched across the top of our gnarled and rusted chain link fence.
“But earthquakes cause ever so much death and destruction” was my precocious reply as I dug my naked, callused toes into the dusty Alabaman earth.
He leaned in close and even as I stood by my oaken desk as an adult, 24 years later, I could still sense the thick musk of his wintergreen Skoal and horse-smelling sweat bristling on the golden tips of my nostril hairs. “That’s why He laughs,” he wheezed through dusky lips.
Across the stack of manuscripts my arm jerked like a dumb pendulum, scattering them all over the room. Askew white islands of complex genius winking up from the dark ocean of cherry floorboards. When my sobs took me again I dropped hellward.
I seized a manuscript and flapped it tauntingly to the heavens. I gurgled as loud as I could dare: “How will the wretched human race hear about your adventures now, Professor Tinker F. Beanbags?!”
I hurled it against the bone-colored drywall. What would the Professor say?
Bleep blop, he would intone with his interminable robot logic.
Would the Professor even understand tears? Would he understand what it is like in the human heart when God laughs?
In the ceiling fan’s wind the pages around me flap like bony grackle wings. Flish-swish. Flish-swish. And the grumbling of my stomach as it yearned for more pork rolled across my apartment like sad Southern thunder over my uncle’s grave.
perchance one day, professor...
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