LIFE-SIZE
Adam’s sperm like a puddle of pureed maggots floats on the hardwood floor like a pool built into the deck of a cruise ship.
He’s a lot older now.
Adam gets up off his knees, pulls his pants up and goes to the freezer, cracks two cubes from the ice tray.
One slips from his fingers, lands near the sperm he forgot to wipe up.
Watch out, he yells, hoping the ship doesn’t crash into the miniature iceberg.
Everyone in the pool is already dead, floating facedown on the surface.
Adam remembers this.
It’s not memory he remembers, it’s what happened, and memories flock like vultures to all his open wounds, picks them clean.
Adam goes outside — memories fucking in the trees, branches bare, and they're building nests, laying snowballs for eggs, sitting on them, keeping them warm.
He goes outside, makes snow angels in wet cement, falls asleep.
The cement dries, and he’s built in to the sidewalk.
A man smoking a cigarette, blowing smoke rings like life preservers to save breath, he stops and looks down at Adam lying there.
Adam just quit smoking.
The man pulls out a cellphone, says things to someone, the cellphone display glowing green like moonlight on his cheek.
Construction workers come with jackhammers.
They jackhammer Adam out, giving the sidewalk a life-size tattoo of his silhouette.
He comes loose, floats away, their hardhat flashlights blinking on and off as they wave them goodbye in the air.
Adam gets up too fast, feels taller than he is.
He stands there, dizzy, lightheaded.
He puts his arms out to balance.
A slight breeze.
His legs, his knees feel weak, his lips quivering.
He bites his lip to steady himself.
He stands there, feels like he's floating.
He isn’t floating.
His legs go all the way down to the floor.
Tightroping his own flatline.
He's afraid of heights.
Adam comes back down.
He stands waiting on the curb like a parking meter, a vending machine.
People insert coins into his mouth as if the punctured condoms he might dispense would protect them from everything around the holes they’ll eventually fall through.
Adam's not built in.
Adam can walk away.
Adam walks away.
The tectonic plates of Adam’s skull quake and shift.
He remembers remembering.
Exact change spilling from his mouth.
Smoke rings, life preservers.
Waiting for rescue.
He’s saving himself.
He just quit smoking.
Adam injects his sperm into a snowball.
Waiting for what.
He remembers.
He’s not sure what time it is.
Youth is a phantom limb.
All this time to waste on thinking of what little time’s left.
Most of the time, life makes Adam miserable, and he ends up hating himself because he doesn’t want to think that way, the way he thinks about it, and that at least makes him happy to know he doesn’t want to end up miserable.
He’s a lot bigger now.
Adam goes inside — he thinks about life, pointless as the cone of a blue lampshade, infuriating as an amputee’s masturbatory fantasy.
Still, it gets dark, he turns the lamp on, unzips his jeans…
The pool’s too small for Adam to swim in anymore.
(Eric Beeny is the author of The Dying Bloom (Pangur Ban Party, 2009), Snowing Fireflies (Folded Word Press, 2010) and Of Creatures (Gold Wake Press, 2011). His blog is Dead End on Progressive Ave. http://ericbeeny.blogspot.com.)