Spider on My Tongue Read Online Free Page B

way down familiar, narrow paths with my eyes open completely only part of the time. I move quickly, too, so I can avoid the occasional touch or kiss and exhalation of breath.
    Understand this: these things do breathe. It's a habit, I think, or a need (which is a part of habit and a part of hunger). I can hear them breathing in those few moments when my music (at the moment, Moby) changes from one piece to another, and when I need to hear them breathe in order to gauge their numbers, and when I wake in the night and my music has stopped after the power has gone out because the generator has used all its fuel (though, because there is no air in the world in which they exist, their exhalations are far more than stale or fetid, far more than nothing at all—they are as substantial as grief and orgasm). I hear them talking, then, too.
    They talk about themselves, about their lives just passed and their new existence. They speak as slowly as a man waking from a coma, and as quickly as an auctioneer, and with all the dimensions and volume of wind: at times, they're even coherent (for instance, Larry-of-the-smashed head, and Madge, too, from upstate New York, who talked of heaven); often, they aren't: often, they seem to speak in riddles, though I believe that riddle-making is far behind them.
    For instance:
    “I have the bubble of the sky-blue sky. I don't have? I don't have? Going oft; leaving in separate cars, and only the blood to spare, giving coffee away cheap."
    And:
    ‘Entering, now, the sand, the duplicate—disheveled, alert, nose out of whack. Leave me Irene of pipes, that replica, pining at the Gordon, at the level place."
    And:
    “I denounce you. I flow. Billeted in Charbonnes—growing accustomed to my skin in tatters. Memories alone cannot confirm the presence of life."
    And:
    "All the nodding flowers lining up to vote. On Tuesday, empty the last large lips lest Louise loses little. Free the small ones, make the large ones pay, bring home the cheering crowds, the crows, the pestilence of flight.
    And:
    ‘Break the muscle at its deepest place, its widest part, secured at the hip and thighs—two places, pouring through the small spaces, through screens and lips parted as if in dying, leaving the last exhale foaming up, gaining ground on the past circling old wounds, old love and climaxes. Generating joy. Coming apart peacefully, believing in music."
    And, quick and simple:
    “I could go out naked to walk my little dog on the wide sidewalk and no one would grin."
    And:
    “As I grow older, my dreams—the ones I have when I sleep--grow older, too; they're all about loss and regret and pain."
    I don't remember any of this verbatim, of course. It's in the air around me always—I focus on it now and again and come back breathless to write it down. As I've just done.
    "Go and take an outbound train and believe in we who wait and do not deliver, we who open our mouths and fly in groups of threes and fours and always, always, always no one at all."
    ~ * ~
7:54
     
    My very good friend Sam Feary is with me here, in this house. I smell him sometimes, his particular, inoffensive odor—musty, with the hint of sweat and cloves. I had no idea he was dead until I smelled those odors here. I think I sighed, and grinned, and said, "Welcome, Sam." Then I felt his breath on my cheek and I heard him say, in a voice I didn't recognize—it was neither male nor female; it was the voice of air—"And a welcome to you, my friend."
    Sometimes I believe I see him. He's usually standing quietly at a south-facing window in late afternoon, where a break in the pines beyond lets in copious amounts of daylight. At other times, I realize I only wish I could see him. He was my friend. He is my friend. I was closer to no one but Lorraine, and she left me. Sam, for what it's worth, went off on his own after telling me to have a good life, to forget Phyllis Pellaprat and to live, at last, in a universe that recognized and wanted me—"The universe