PARAPRIMAL
Trent England
WORD OF MAN
At once and at one point this was sensational. From under the bridge he came, musky-celled and bearing grief, to the salt house to deliver the news. The family saw the new coloring under his bear claw trousers. He said of his new legs, “It burns when you touch them.” The immediates sulked and sullied couches. At the window, they looked to the street where atop a grate, a cable-knit dog laid there wagging and wetting himself.
The last of the house-call makers found time to examine the boy lying astride the pullout couch. His parents sighed and panted in tandem. Every history of family weather and breathing and past beatings was treasured, and the doctor’s weekly visit became its own paralympic sport. He pulled out of his white coat a wooden depressor and forced it over the boy’s tongue. With his eyes closed the boy said his body had regressed. The parents looked at him and asked where he had learned the word regressed. In shifts they hassled him about this word. When had he slipped away from their belts and learned the word regressed?
They did a thing in the thing at the place with the objects under the thing and they set the little boy between the two other things, and the doctor walked out and said the boy had developed Wolffian Ducts.
In the winter, when they still called it winter, he was discovered to have more bone mass, and in his body’s helplessness, his gristle had grown and snaked and settled. All around he looked aged and featfully hollow and his parents set aside their torn tickets of luck and rescued him from falls.
WORD OF GOD
I saw it fit to pad him softly and give him the ability to bite and be bitten. I erected a bridge near his house to lift traffic from the old four-part intersection. You may have transgressed near a bridge like this yourself, or at the very least watched and did not walk away. He was conceived, birthed, given a first name and in that order was remanded, renamed, and bound by the third covenant in the year twenty-something, in the year of extending breaks to the sleepless. From somewhere inside their tubbed and rusted house, I worked and I listened to prayers, and there I toiled and labored and soiled the sun. Around their acutenesses I built a moat.
I am the inspiration for the resin collected for the mold of the original plan to construct the graven image itself. I am not the finished product standing and gathering dust by the moon.
I am not, nor ever have been, nor ever will be, nor plan on being, around to arouse and provoke and re-create from nothing the maven of the sea, the sea head. The one of the two wenches supporting the ship and braving the salt, is, and was, and always will be, the warp and woof of your mounting blood-lined history and is essential to the reason we meet today. Do you think you can simply hide behind a leaf, in the bushes, and hide your nakedness? I am not an idea or a subtext that like clay can be made to be something else because I cannot be made to believe.
A register of things recovered from the wreckage: a shoreman’s wick-lighter, three heads of unpronounced minnera, ten uses for a willett, a rank crate of catchy, six tartum of marble cord, a junket of sketches at the hands of a mapmaker, a free pilloit of what could be oil or gas, half a woman’s face, and three-quarters another woman’s face. Both faces were and still remain wooden, busts half-intact.
I can see you in the wave water, swimming. Toes off the slippery edge of the boat, and you’re recording good times versus bad times while your son is at a home for flotsam. In a corner chair overlooking croquet in the courtyard, he is pouring out, almost spilling out, and a nurse in nurse’s wear is at his feet to catch him.