In these worlds of the page, all the eyes are clear and bright like marbles smooth off an assembly line. There are set in the skull of embodied bodies that have no ill-fitting clothes, no textures, no muscle-cell-blood magic. Only body-type forms with eyes piercing, locked, glued, rolling. And, of course, with tears. All loss is measured by the drowning of tears in these stories. And stormy skies. People are swelling from psychological fevers. They feel all the time and in giant gulps. Sadness. Happiness. Jealousy. Anger. They are anxious. They anxiously do. With anxiousness they do. In an anxious way. With anxious, darting (always darting) eyes. Dark-dark or light-light, the eyes do all the work of the self. They say all the things. They read the giant signs the storm clouds tout about. This Is Hopelessness. This is Misfit-ness. This is the type of Sad that is Very, Very Sad. There are no cocktails. No medley. No blurring. And there is no such thing as dust or lint—not the kind along the floorboards and under one’s nails. Only dust that is caked. Dust that says Look how OLD this place is! Old things are always shaped by layers of dust. Everyday things do not have a hint of dust that is made up of every little bit of left-over body and material and earth matter. There is no lint-like emotion, but only thought-emotions. They think Sad. They think Happy. When they act supportive, they think and wear it—instead of digging through years of Mother says so and Bible School and hours of “Sesame Street” to find that glint of what it must feel like to be a good person in such a bad situation. There are no brief, brilliant points of light. They are all just good people in bad situations. The bad people are in bad situations. They sit on or at or in bad situation places that have no floors or walls and never did.
All around the good and bad people there is Cancer, Rape, and Death. One Cancer breeds another and lends itself to Rapes on Rapes and a Double-Death. He died a Double-Death; it weighed that much more than regular death. She had Cancer of the Cancer. She was Raped in the story and Raped in line and in spaces between. We had to Rape her good, so you’d know how Very, Very Sad it was. Cancer means awfulness and loss of the only important thing called Life. Rape is The Worst and don’t-you-feel-sorry-for-her-now. Death is always the heavy blanket the figures must move about under. The Death worlds contain people-shaped mounds scrambling under wool blankets. If these bodies had skin, they’d feel the itch of the blanket. If they’d a throat, they’d choke. But they are skinless and throatless. They leak a sound-progression: a manual for the rest of the world-sequence.
And the storm clouds follow this sound-equation. Oh, and the tears. And eyes flooding tears, so much so—the eyeballs begin to spin from the rush of water spilling from sockets. These spheres, these orbs, these all seeing/feeling/thinking eyeballs were never anchored in the head to begin with and instead they hope to keep atop the flowing waterworks by rotating faster and now faster; they want to spin so quickly that they look still, fixed and fated, but soon these round casings dizzy with self-telling make one last pitch to stay in the socket, before falling out and landing in nothing waters that gush into gutters. These gutters blast out the same river of tears-made-of-tears into faucets and glasses just so with clinking ice and they soak into the stormy storm clouds. Which are ominous stormy storm clouds and different than grey masses of drops of H2o in the sky. Everything else in these worlds, everything not a tear-within-tear of this world is but a cardboard dam.