Dahlia Street
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A hunk of blue soap sits before them, down and out, and air full of cotton suspended in an invisible curtain between the asphalt (them) and the blue slice (that). The slice, with every second, will be more and more not the same, the same way that bed sheets wrinkle in new places at dawn and never in the same way again.
If that is a slice of soap, then they are on a giant fistfull of cardboard, plywood, and tinsel. Pendulums swing out from in front of headrests. To the left, the uncrossing of legs, to the right, the playing with hair. Of ribbons, of east coast straw. One had a pet who died, one never had a pet at all. The sun really does have a face that smiles upon some and scorns upon others on the same days. Today, a crooked nosed light with jaguar teeth. So: the woven threads of a gray sweater grow warm and up like ice plant, invasive and meant to be torn from the ground. And for her: a wet bikini repoussage, a cyanotype across a hip bone—his offerings on her altar stone.
The world at this hour is a film set that smells like bread, framed in delft and mud. If they are looking forward, how can they know if all of the loaves of bread are in the back seat at all? They can’t. The real tragedy: they are stuck on Dahlia Street. Barely a street, not even a road, maybe a driveway, not a dahlia at all. All of these things mean the same fundamentally, that the path before them leads nowhere but soap. For each bubble in the distance, she imagines the gas of a fish carcass expanding until she has a bouquet to carry to the surface. In the steaming lye: baptism, plastic bags (real and deceivingly alive), and if the soap washed far enough, maybe even the bodies of used up WWII girls covered with the sediment of an unkind regime settled quietly at the bottom.
“I thought you liked Liam Gallagher.”
“No, I like Oasis.”
To her, soap looks like blue Gatorade. Like a shimmering parachute from the YMCA. She thought Oasis would sound like a new age soundtrack to Eden’s gardens. It does not. She looks to her left and all she sees is sheets of dewy pastry out in the sun, moulded in God’s image, his face shifting in its bold weight to a permanence of limestone and pearl, carved like coast line from the ledge of a dark brow down to a gentle peninsula. He understands this as what they call “becoming a man.” She sees a mother’s escaped womb to remain forever atop the bones of many a failed Catholic mission. A mother’s womb, formerly in ferment, his understanding of the world settling upon his shoulders. The formative years of their teens float upward and leak through the sun roof with the white trails of a birthday candle. The world ticks forward, catching her gaze off guard as she plummets off Dahlia Street into the sheets of water ahead. She flounders among the mega yachts. He never recommends a band to her again.