The Hosiery closed on my forty-sixth birthday. My wife and daughter left to share a tattoo artist. The dentist told me that dentures were my only option.
That was last week.
This week I had a fleeting but frightening desire for the boy pumping gas at the corner station. I drove away with half a tank and the hood open. On the way home I stopped for a kraut-dog but couldn't put it to my lips. I didn't sleep for three nights.
I decided to vent this swell of fear, frustration and fantasy through a gaping hole in my skull. Easy access via a large caliber handgun.
I didn't leave a note. I didn't talk to anyone. I just got in my car, dropped my briefcase of assorted stockings off on my brother's (a recently confessed cross dresser) doorstep, and drove into the county. I stopped when the car ran out of gas, parked in a side ditch and walked into the woods until I came to an open pasture, crayon green and empty. My head filled with images of a big breasted farmer's daughter crying out and pulling me close, so close I could smell the yellow milk through her overalls.
I had hopes for escape. A little freedom. A break in the futile monopoly of the day-to-day. But I've been lying in this pasture for three days now, and I've begun to realize my mistake.
I still have my sight, in a fuzzy, clouded sort of way. I landed on my back so all I've seen are clouds and stars. Tedious stuff after so long. I think my pupils have split from exposure; there was a moon and a half in the sky last night. An annoying hum has settled deep in my ears, and there is still that smell, like burned biscuits.
It rained last night, and I wished I had brought an umbrella. My mouth is open and my tongue has swelled, so I've been lying here for hours with a mouth full of rain, unable to do anything about it. At least two weeks have passed, and I'm feeling real blue. I spend a lot of time trying to get out of myself, but all I've managed was a weak, leftover fart three days ago.
Rigor mortis is like a total body erection.
I took my clothes off and knelt before pulling the trigger. I though it would enhance the spiritual, the naturalness of my act. My body wasn't that appealing in its living state. But this, eighteen days dead, and naked!
My dreams of farm girls wither away.
The ringing in my ears has gone, replaced by a distant gurgle. I had thought it was blood seeping out, in search of another home, but that happened weeks ago. Some where I feel a spider light tingle and decide it is the shuffling feet of moss and mold marching slowly along my perimeters. My memory seem fragmented, but sometimes I know there was a small stream at the bottom of this hill on which I lie. This hill that is sucking me inside itself.
Convinced that the stream holds the peace and contentment I've searched for, I try and move myself to it. I rock, back and forth. No luck. I try up and down, violent internal convulsions. Nothing. If I could reach the stream. To feel its cool flow rinse and strip me of my parched prison.
The moon slid full across the sky last night. I lay imagining myself as moon-like, alone in the space of this big black field, until I realized I wasn't alone. Standing on my chin, taking tentative sip of fetid water from my mouth was a baby possum. After satisfying its thirst the animal walked and sniffed my body. I felt a detached pinch as it balanced itself on my legs, tiny claws out and clutching. Losing sight and sense of it, I soon heard the possum eating behind me. Later I felt its pointy nose inside my skull.
The possum ate most of the night, then curled up inside the cool cavity and slept. For a while it gave me a peaceful satisfaction to give of myself in such a way. But the incessant wiggling just below the level of perception became too much. I want the possum to move out of my head.
The animal has gone. Others have come and gone. My hair went with a pair of sparrows. One morning last week I heard the sputter and rumble of a tractor somewhere out in the field. It stopped close enough for me to hear the giddy laughter of a man and woman turn to silence, then to moans and squeals, and back to silence.
Now unencumbered by the living emotions of embarrassment and respect, I screamed through shriveled vocal cords, willing to interrupt their rural romp for the sake of my salvation. It was in vain. The tractor drove away and I'm still lying here.
First I introduce myself, tell Him who I am, where I've been for so long, and why I'm lying here naked and dead. When I feel like He knows me, I thank him for the few good things I can remember about my life: my first motorcycle, a cinnamon red BMW. The time when I was thirteen, me and my neighbor had a spit fight. Her nipples got hard.
I went straight from giving thanks to asking favors. Nothing big or flashy, only to move a little. Just down the hill to the stream.
I prayed through another storm. Through the growth cycle of oyster grey mushrooms sprouting in my armpits. I prayed to every god I could remember. Even made up a few. I prayed myself into a state of delirium.
It is early morning, and the field is still. Reverent. I feel a presence, a powerful force in the air. From the corner of my sunken right eye I see two enormous black wells looming over me, issuing bursts of hot, wet air. Below them a rubbery, pink and black flap lifts and lowers over ranks of mottled green and ivory slabs. I am humbled by His presence.
He snorts and backs away. My eyes fill with patterns of black and white. I feel His cool nose and mechanical teeth pulling the thick sprouts of grass at my crotch. Then He nudges my stiff body. Initially it resists, but with His weight behind me I am soon bouncing down the hill.
The water is brown and murky. Again I am lying on my back, my nose to the belly of a
fat trout. A cluster of toad eggs, piled like teardrops, sits in the back of my throat.
Last month a scaly memory swam to the surface: the firm curves of muscle beneath the tight
black pants of the boy at the gas station. Then a slick snapping turtle pulled off a piece
of flesh and brought me back to my senses.
When prompted for a biography, Steven Sherrill responded, ``I once saw a frog swallow a firefly. The sun was just dropping over the edge, and the toad's belly began to pulse, soft green. Some time after that I wrote something.''
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