I don’t know quite yet

The laying people smell sour. Some of their eyeballs were gone now. A sweet blossom with a dirty scent grows through a laying person’s eye-hole. Their body is faced down but their head is reaching out to the side and they have no nose either. It rained all day yesterday and the laying people looked wet all over. Now the hot bright day makes them shine. I am thinking of water. Mark and I are getting water. I am thirsty. Mark says don’t lick the laying people. I am thirsty and want to lick the laying people because they shine with water on the bowls of their backs. I don’t lick the laying people.

Rich moss grows on some of the laying people and looks like blankets. It is spongy and smells of grime and snail-tail. Sometimes the laying people just look like earth and not people. Most of them are faced down. Most of them have holes in their cloths. The shoes and shirts have their scents more so than their bodies. I recognize some of their smells. Most of them have lost their smell slightly. Their prolonged laying in the outside sun and rain and cold and fog made their smell dusty. It sat idly on their backs and evaporated or sunk away.

Mark is puffing a smoking stick. Mark likes his sticks. He is never without his smoking sticks. They smell like Mark and burnt tree bark. Mark smells like salt and smoking stick and coffee bean and bitterness. Mark’s hair grows long and twisted on his back. The ends smell chalky and like his smoking sticks. Sometimes the long hairs fall to the ground when they are dry. My nose is dry when I lick it. I am thirsty.

Mark goes into the place with the slippery floors. He is humming. I can’t walk well here, and Mark chuckles at me as I slip and fall. I smell the chicken. I smell the salt and the sugar and the cold and the hot. I smell peanut butter and bread and candy and beef. I salivate because I smell all of it at once. We go to the chicken first. Mark opens the door into the cold closet and tears open the chicken boxes. He opens another cold closet and pours water into my water bowl. He sets them both on the ground.

Mark’s stick hangs from his lips, “Say hey Joe, it’s no race.”

Joe. I look up for only a half-second. That’s me. I continue to eat the chicken.

“We got all the time in the world.” Mark breathes deeply. I smell his bitter smokey breath. He sits down and eats some chicken.

II

We leave the place with the slippery floors and Mark has bags of food for us so we won’t have to walk back for awhile. Mark doesn’t like walking next to the laying people. I know because he smells more sour like them he is less confident when outside. They must be bad.

The small ringing bells grabbed my attention. “It’s that damn cat again,” We see lots of cats, but this cat bothers Mark especially. “So damn fat that cat.”

The cat is a considerable distance from us and is looking at us. I do not dare move. I can’t risk movement. I can’t blink, my foot was in their air before I realized of the cat and I still do not move it. The situation is too fragile.

“You’d think it’d be slow cuz it’s so damn fat. Allov the other cats are twigs and come to us for food’s sake. You’d think we could catch the fat one but it’s not needin food it seems. Maybe we’re just slow. Yeah, we’re probably slow. Or un-passionate.” Mark looks at me. He has eyes and the laying people don’t. He is warm and the laying people are only warm in the daytime when the sun makes them hot. Mark is warm throughout the night. “Oh, Joe.” He softens. “I love you.”

I love Mark and we are together always.

III

At home Mark reads and sometimes speaks the stories outloud. He gets excited and jumps around and I play too. It is great fun. Mark is the best. I love Mark. Tonight he reads and I watch him as he reads. I feel my eyelids sliding. I watch him until the last second. “Goddamn fucker murdered Desdemona!” He muttered, “No. That Iago bastard-well, did he? Joe,” I shot awake, “how come it’s so easy to convince a person of doin’ something so horrible?”

Mark feels upset. I walk to him, jump on his lap. He scratches my head with two fingers. “People are just tickin’ time bombs. Every last one-ov-um’. Emotional, impulsive, walkin’ sacks of blood and guts and bones and whatever else is in there. Souls I suppose.” Mark laughs but is not happy. “‘Least that’s what they tol’ me.”

I move closer and Mark has a small stomach and I can feel the inside hardness underneath him. Mark is the smokey smell after it has left for hours and just sits on the skin and soon becomes one with his person. He scratches me on my back now. My eyelids drop and I cannot open them anymore.

“Oh, Joe.” I hear him say.