Tunnel Vision
It came over her like a stench; it came over her like the underside of an overdriven car.
It came over as if she were a tunnel and it were sky and what she opened to was it and what she closed off was it and what it was was madness.
Faces turned to cheek and talking to teeth and she noticed as she had never noticed that K’s were incisors and S’s that absence on the gum you want to run your tongue over.
There was a turkey made of china–this was not a geographical joke but rather shellacked with wings and inside the turkey folded a flim-flam of napkins that flapped at her whenever she tried to take the S’s out of her mouth, and her aunt took a napkin out of the turkey’s quiver and dabbed her eyes and her mother stared over a blur that was nose and really it was quite a bit better to let the tunnel roof just curve–
And she made a tent inside a flashlight and in its dome she saw a red that translated as translucence and she thought that if she could ever eat light it would be that red. It would not, she knew, taste like jello, which was substantially darker and more lapidated.
And if you say our father all night through the who art in heaven will carry you too,
and if you pull up the blankets, you will not see the cheeks and if you turn on your side right, the teeth will go back in their mouths–
This could not be blamed upon any kind of string theory, but only on a balloon, but only on a bubble, something that grew tight in her, which was not at all like a bubble gum bubble, more like those made of soap that tunnel light even as they burst–
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This is very much of a draft piece for Kerry’s prompt on Real Toads relating to shipwreck. Not sure this quite fits the prompt; it’s not autobiographical.
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