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9 volts

tree

 

Lost, and for some time yet believed cursed, and drunk this autumn night beneath several stars and a moon, whispering the praises of Constance and a particuar liquid extract of root; fuels of different burnings but equal in the ways of mobility- that is to say outward casting.

Adrift for some time and without echo in the form of time or remembrance and no clocks plotted in his absence and if this was planned then it could also be said that no mental decay figured beyond his own arrangement and no growth in his bowels or between his toes came aboard without forethought or remained without approbation. He was tightshouldered and brutal in the workings of his own joints whether in dense bracken or pitching hills or empty coastal plain, embodying contaiment, stele birch cold and making a sound upon the movement of the earth, chalk white, calcified, a concert of spent bones caught in the midst of some complicated yet wholly incomplete undertaking.

In Vance Birthplace, North Carolina he bought sausages, tinned, in their own juice; he stole candybars, tobacco, packets of dehydrated juice, steel wool, a ninevolt battery, a package of granulated dye, blue no. 7; he stole a pair of poultry shears, a frightwig, a pair of women’s underware, white, not as lacey as he would have hoped; he stole a tin of sausages in their own juice. As he went from store to store it seemed to him that crows were alighting in odd numbers, ever increasing with his progress, upon the awnings of the stores freshly plundered. As if he were drawing attention to himself in a manner not wholly material. He sat at a busstop and rooted through his pack A woman watched him from a upper window. Above her a black belly of cloud sagged in on the mountain, the hollow. If in design but not execution there were appendages there reaching up to her brainpan and perhaps beyond, lips lapping back upon her own sugars and warmth, a myth transcending limbs allotted her, resolved out of drawing darkness and electrical storm. But he sat watching and eating sausages and remarked only on what he could see.