ZIMMERMAN
Brian Kubarycz
The horizon would anchor a house, the house would contain a table, the table would hold aloft a cloth, and on this cloth there would be vessels placed. And there would be food in them, waiting. And the other horizontal, the line which became also the shoulders, this would become the man, or it would become the mother who would lay the plates and fill them with what the father had provided. And she would fill the glasses, and the liquids they contained would sparkle there under lights which were twisted into a fixture. And this fixture also was held in its place, dangling from a chain which led up to the ceiling, and this ceiling spread out to the walls, met them at right angles, surrendered its weight to them. And they received it. The walls led down to the floor. The floor radiated in every direction, contacting the legs of the table and the feet of the mother who had baked the bread and laid the table and poured the milk and beer. It was hypnotic all of this. Impossible almost, Zimmerman said to himself, not be charmed by it, not to see it as ordered and right, a thing of nature, a living idea which was calling out softly, softly for a body, for a home. Calling in a mother’s tones, the ones she uses to rouse you in the morning, to make you come down to the table and drink your milk. Calling softly with the voice of the mother, but always with the silence of the father behind it. You will do this, it would say. The voice sometimes was one, but sometimes it was two, the tongue cloven down the middle, becoming two flickering serpents which would draw apart and then wind themselves around one another to form a staff. They mated that way. Together and apart, united and divided, the voices always came that way, drawing you out of your sleep, out of one dream and into another, mastering you. Taking your bedroom away, turning it into the father’s space, making it his, the same space where he slept with the mother, mounting her silently in the night, a goose pillow under her buttocks and a comforter draped over his thighs. Her lips soft like it. Already he was in her, in his bedroom, already she was calling out. Already she was taking deeper breaths, her diaphragm was drawing tight, her lungs were filling, her throat pinching. She was singing. Softly. Softly. Now louder. Now out loud. Come, come, come to breakfast, she said. Come to breakfast this instant. Come right now. Come just once on time. Come just once. Just once, just come.