Dale types text to overlay the photo: You are about to receive ten thousand dollars! Type yes if you believe! He clicks save, names it, using a naming format he’s adopted to keep track of his thousands of affirmations, then pulls up the next photo, a generic sunrise. He switches screens to his running list of affirmations. Closing his eyes, he calls upon his intuition to make his gaze alight on the right phrase. He looks at the screen. His eyes land on All that you have experienced was only preparation for this moment. Type yes if you believe!  He repeats it in his mind three times to give it intent, then switches screens to the meme-making app and types in the text to overlay an image, saves it, names it.

            Dale posts the affirmations on Instagram and Twitter. Timing is everything. With half the world’s population engaging in social media an average of 2.5 hours per day, the odds of reaching just the right person at just the right time might seem low, but not if you factor in the divine algorithm that organizes everything. The Internet, Dale thinks, is an avatar of Universal Mind, the elephant-headed Ganesh manifesting through microchips.

            Dale feels guided to do one about love. He checks his running list, but nothing feels right. He turns to the hole in his own heart that yearns for a twin flame to burn beside him and waits for angels to put the words together. He feels it coming and begins typing before he even knows what the words will be. You will meet your twin flame today. Love is coming to you. Type yes if you believe!  He finds a stock image of two lovers holding hands, but instead of overlaying these words on that image, he decides to keep this affirmation for himself.   

            Dale intuits he’s posted enough for now. As if on cue – isn’t everything? – the ring-tone on his phone sounds, a Zen meditation gong struck to signal it’s time to rise from the cushion. But when Dale looks at the caller’s number, he takes a deep breath, mentally crosses himself, and swipes.

            “Hi Mom.”

            “I’m just calling because you haven’t called me. I wanted to make sure you were still alive.”

            “We spoke a few days ago, Mom.”

            “How’s work?”

            “Fine.” There’s not a lot to report if your job is handling packages at an Amazon fulfillment center.

            “Are you happy, Dale?” This is, at best, a rhetorical question, and at worst an indictment. If he says anything other than an unqualified yes, she’ll drop any pretense of boundaries and expropriate his entire life.

“Sure, Mom. Anything new with you?”   

“What could be new with me? I’m in constant pain with my arthritis, but I don’t talk about it. I don’t want to burden you. I’m thinking about replacing the couch in the den. It’s been broken for years from where you used to jump on it when I told you not to. Your father’s having problems with gas. It’s a good thing I don’t smoke, or this house would go boom like the Fourth of July ”

“A new couch sounds like a great idea, Mom. Well, I have someplace I have to go, so I’ll hang up now.”

“Is it a girl? Do you have a girlfriend? You didn’t introduced us to the last one.”

“No, Mom, not a girlfriend.”

Silence.

“That’s fine, no need to tell me, I don’t want to pry, so long as it’s not drugs.”

It’s not anything. It’s just an excuse Dale made up to end the call.

“No drugs, Mom. Say hi to Dad for me.”

“Love you.”

“Love you, Mom.”

“Call me.”

Dale ends the call. He’s all jangled inside. And he still has more affirmations to prepare for posting. Maybe he’ll call it a day on the affirmations. Maybe he’ll go for a walk in the park. Yes, that’s what Intuition is telling him to do. Eureka! Dale pulls up the screen of his running list of affirmations and types “Intuition is the only authority. Type yes if believe!”.

                                                            #

Megan can’t believe Tony is dumping her via text.

You’re a wonderful person, and it’s been wonderful to be with you, but I think I need time to figure out who I am and I can’t do that and hold up my end of a relationship at the same time..

Megan doesn’t believe it for a second. Tony’s just tired of fucking her and wants to fuck somebody else.

I know you’ll find someone better able to meet your needs.

It’s a reversible-jacket kind of sentence. It could mean he’s admitting he’s an emotional cripple or he’s saying she’s too needy.

 You deserve someone who can hold up his end of the relationship.

There’s that phrase again – hold up the relationship, as if they’re carrying a piano up the fire escape and he has a bad back.

Maybe in six months or so, I’ll give you a call and we’ll catch up.

Translation: don’t text, phone, or stalk me. As if.

May all good things come to you, because you deserve them. Yada-yada. Megan resists the urge to type a sarcastic reply. She types what she knows she should type – I understand. Good luck in your journey. Take care – and clicks off her phone. Megan isn’t brokenhearted. She’s pissed because he was the one to break it off instead of her.

What a way to start the day. Fortunately, it’s Saturday. She has the weekend to get the taste of Tony out of her mouth. It’s only 8:30, but the sun is blasting through the window of her apartment. It’s a good day to go to the park. Besides, she doesn’t want to be in this apartment that still reeks of Tony’s vibe. His vibe is a fingerprint at the scene of a crime, the crime of bad judgment in men. She sticks her apartment key in her pants pocket, grabs a book she’s been reading, and heads for the door.

                                                            #

Dale shades his eyes with his hand. Sunshine angles through open spaces between the summer-green trees, already powerful though it’s only 9 a.m. Dale doesn’t mind he has to shade his eyes because the heat feels good against his body. Dale has an affinity with Ra, the Egyptian sun god, probably because Dale might have been a temple priest back in the day. As Ra rises above the tree line and people and plants alike begin to groan under the August heat, Dale will just smile the way all-seeing Ra smiles.

Dale’s mind is filled with affirmations floating randomly in and out of his consciousness like balloons. It reminds him of pigeons at the beach that pester people on blankets for a scrap of sandwich or a potato chip, a flock of would-a, could-a, should-a. Dale wants to get away from them, get away from his mother, just let life unroll however it’s going to unroll without the burden of “doing” something.

Dale spots a couple of benches under trees. One is occupied by a woman in pink shorts with her nose in a book, but another bench ten yards beyond her is empty, as if it’s meant for him. He strides over and sits down. He un-focuses his eyes and takes a deep breath, focuses on breathing in and out, slowing it, deepening it, until everything is a little fuzzy. It’s like opening a window and letting in fresh air, except the air is also light. Dale may not be good at life, but he’s fair to middling at meditation.

After a few minutes, his attention returns to his senses. He looks at the ribbon of asphalt winding through the trees. The walking paths are empty at the moment but that will change. Sure enough, he sees someone emerge from the shade around the bend, a man with a clutch of balloons.

                                                            #

Megan lifts her eyes from the book. There’s a man standing in the grass beyond the walking path. He wears a baseball cap that has no team logo. He’s holding a dozen balloons on strings. She wonders whether there’s a fair in the park or if he’s advertising something.

She returns to reading. Her book is about synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence. Synchronicity evidently is something somebody named Jung came up with, though the author says Eastern religions believe in it, too. The idea is events that have no apparent causal connection are actually connected in some other dimension of experience, which sounds pretty woo-woo. If it’s in another dimension, how could we even know? But Jung says there are no meaningless coincidences.

   Megan thinks the quest for the meaning of life is a fool’s errand. If there were an answer, somebody would have figured it out by now. Megan has her own answer: sometimes you’re happy, sometimes you’re sad, good things happen, bad things happen. Bad things like Tony dumping her. But is that a bad thing? Maybe it’s a good thing. She’s surprised how easy it is to let Tony float out of her life. She feels like she just lost ten pounds.

  “What do you say?”

It’s a mom on the walking path speaking to her small daughter. The man in the baseball cap is handing the little girl a balloon. It’s bright yellow.

“Thank you!”

The girl walks ahead of her mom, gazing raptly at her new balloon as if she has the whole world on a string. They pass a little boy wearing a blue Paw Patrol T-shirt. He lets go his mom’s hand and points greedily at the little girl’s balloon. Then he laughs – the balloon man is walking toward him, extending a blue balloon in his right hand. The boy takes it, delighted.

Megan goes back to her book, reads a few pages, but every few minutes nearby movement or the sound of “Thank you!” pulls her vision back to the balloon man. This pattern repeats over a period of half an hour, and now the balloon man has given away almost all of his balloons. He says nothing, asks for nothing, no money changes hands. He’s just giving away balloons. She notices again that the balloon man has no logo on his ball cap. For some reason it strikes her as subversive to not be for one team or the other.

                                                            #

 Though Dale’s bench is in the sun, a nice breeze cools him from behind, stirring the leaves in trees across the walkway, a pattern of whispering. He thinks of Findhorn, a spiritual community in Scotland that communicates with the intelligence of plants and the angels, divas, and fairies of nature. Working cooperatively with them all, Findhorn miraculously can grow amazing plants and herbs in barren sand. The inexplicable fecundity of Findhorn mutes naysayers who think angels and fairies are woo-woo. Who can deny the empirical evidence of a forty-pound cabbage? Dale studies the movement and sound of the branches to discern if there’s something alive in there. Suddenly his view is blocked by a figure in front of his bench. A man is bowing to Dale. His arm extends and he hands Dale the string of a balloon. Dale takes it. He looks up at the balloon. It’s pink.

When Dale looks down, the balloon man is walking away from him. Dale watches the man disappear down the walking trail and into the shade. A sweet smell hangs in the air around Dale’s bench. Pipe smoke? Pot? Sage? He can’t tell. And now he’s holding a pink balloon that’s bobbing and dipping in a sudden breeze. Dale grips the string tighter to control it as it blows to his right, in the direction of the woman on the bench, the one with the book. She’s watching him. She’s pretty. She’s wearing pink shorts, a shocking pink that lassoes the eye.

Another gust of wind makes the trees noisy. For a moment, it seems the trees have a throat and tongue speaking to him. But what are they saying? Something that feels like a powerful magnet pulls his eyes back to the woman on the bench. She’s still watching him. Again, he notices those pink shorts, bright as a flare in deep shade.

Dale stands. His feet have a life of their own and carry him over to the woman. She holds his gaze. A welcome sign hangs in her eyes. When he reaches her, he stops and extends his arm holding the balloon.

“It matches your shorts.”

“What a coincidence.” A corner of her mouth curls up.  

“There are no coincidences,” he replies. Her jaw drops.

“Damn!”

He waits for her to explain. She shows him the book she’s been reading. Dale recognizes Carl Jung’s picture on the cover. Dale grins.

“Damn,” she says again, shaking her head. The features of her face soften. Dale extends his arm again and she takes the balloon. She smiles.

                                                            #

The August sun is disappearing into dusk, the crack between worlds.

I close my eyes. I see that it will be in winter, at a third-generation hippie restaurant, when they are celebrating their sixth-month anniversary of being together. Her suspicions will have dwindled to a speck of dust because he’s a puppy that just keeps licking her face. She will wear the Ra T-shirt he bought for her. She wears it not because she’s into Ra, but because it’s a cool picture of an eye. He will be reading Jung’s Man and His Symbols and will wear glasses instead of contacts to look intellectual for her. She will have a Greek salad. He will have a tofu and vegetable dish served over rice. They will drink too much. And, for the Nth time, they will reminisce about the day they met at the park. He will talk about the twin flame affirmation he composed that morning, how he saved it for himself, and about fairies in the whispering trees. She will talk about synchronicity, and they will have to admit, yes, the pink balloon matched her pink shorts. They won’t say much about the man with the balloons. They won’t remember his face, only the baseball cap.

That’s okay. I wasn’t selling anything. I wasn’t asking for anything. I was just giving away balloons.

“Graduation,” The Curator Magazine, September, 2022

Read Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic, political poetry for a post-truth world, available at https://cutt.ly/MikeWilsonTitanicRabbitHousePress

Haiku by Mike Wilson, photo by Constantine Stamatis

These poems appeared in Mockingheart Review, Fall 2021

                                                        The Tao 

When Marvin woke in the morning, he always felt emptied, like a catharsis had happened in his sleep in dreams he couldn’t remember, clearing away clutter, as if he’d cleaned up the garage and now each tool was hanging in its proper place. When he pressed the button on the coffeemaker and the blue light lit up like a hello, he felt comforted, and even more so when the gentle gurgle and drip sound decorated the silence. Today would be a trouble-free expanse of happiness stretching like canvas that the Tao would paint according to its own rules and regulations. So much to look forward to. And it was still hours before dawn.

He poured his first cup of coffee and sat on the couch where he always sat. He picked up a book, but didn’t open it because reading sucked you into the minds of other people. Was it Sartre who said hell is other people? It was why Thoreau had lived alone at Walden Pond, but Sartre was the one who had articulated the inner truth. Marvin lived alone in this apartment south of the university. He’d once lived with his mother in the burbs in a house with a garage, but that was another story. The cop working the cold case had thought it odd that Marvin hadn’t kept any pictures of his mother, but having pictures would be like living with her again. Instead of the gurgle of the coffeemaker, he would hear his mother’s voice. Make yourself useful, clean up the garage. Annoying comments that always meant something entirely different than what she was saying.

            A fly buzzed by his face and Marvin’s eyes followed its flight. It landed on the coffee table. Marvin slowly raised the book over the table, then slammed down hard. The fly was too quick and it escaped. That was the Tao for you.

            Blue lights were flashing through the window, so Marvin got up to look. He watched the lights trail into the darkness. Most crime happened at night, but Marvin didn’t think it was because darkness made it hard for the victim to see what was coming. It was because the day’s clutter builds up, and clutter is stultifying and noisy, so by nightfall it has to be cleaned out. Cops always looked for motives. Every motive was only one motive – getting rid of the clutter. People always make things more complicated than they really are.

Marvin didn’t bother with motives. He looked for signs. The Tao unfolds in a series of signs that foreshadow everything, tiny mustard seeds growing into great trees, yin becoming yang and yang becoming yin. The blue lights were a sign. They were part of the Tao unfolding.

                                                                        #

            Marvin opened his eyes when the gong sounded ending the meditation session. It was time for the group’s break. The people around him stood, stretching stiff legs, and he did, too. No one said anything so as not to soil the tranquility they’d spent the past couple hours cultivating by emptying their minds, just watching thoughts bubbling up, letting them go like balloons released into the sky, floating away, eventually descending where birds, turtles, and fish would swallow them and die. Marvin had asked the meditation director where he thought the thoughts went when you let them go, and the director had said they just disappear. This, of course, is a lie. Nothing disappears. Thoughts just float to some street corner where they wait for a victim. Nothing is ever wasted by the Tao.

            Gradually, the meditators migrated to a room where a table was laid out with herbal tea and snacks. There would be talking, now, and Marvin felt anxiety build in his chest like a tea kettle boiling but you couldn’t hear the whistle. Someone would speak to him and he would have to talk back. He would have to justify his existence to this person and this person would dislike Marvin or would like him, which was worse, because being liked meant being imprisoned in a cage constructed by the mind of the other person, like a lightning bug some kid caught and put in a jar because he ‘liked’ it. This disliking or liking would stick in Marvin’s mind like flies stick to flypaper, all these noisy annoying flies making the tea kettle boil hotter. It made Marvin sick to his stomach to think about it.

            “Is this your first time at a meditation weekend?”

            A woman was talking to him. Her name was Charlene. She was nice. But that’s how trouble started, thinking everything is okay, treating that gut feeling as something wrong with you instead of the flashing yellow light it really is.

“No,” Marvin said. “Is it your first time?”

The logistics of talking are easy. Be a mirror. If they say hello, say hello back. If they say what do you do, recite your job description and ask for theirs. But all the while, flies fill your brain like it’s a rotting carcass, the noisy clutter ringing in your ears until you can’t hear anything else.

Charlene continued talking but Marvin was having trouble listening. She stopped, waiting for him to say something. Marvin felt like he’d been herded into a cattle chute that led to the slaughterhouse and he and this woman were going there together.

“Want to walk outside?” he asked. She looked at him as if assessing his intentions.

“In the meditation garden, I mean,” he said, and that seemed to assuage her concerns. They slithered between folks congregating in the kitchen and slipped out the back door where a gravel path meandered between shrubs and under trees. They entered that path as if going somewhere together. The garden was tiny, not much bigger than Marvin’s apartment, but it was carefully designed to create distinct spaces, only a few feet apart, that cohered like little self-contained bonsai parks. They moseyed from spot to spot like visitors in an art gallery, but the flies buzzing in Marvin’s head were getting louder. And then, as they rounded a corner, he heard them with his ears, too.

“Oh,” Charlene said, stopping. On the ground in front of them was a dead robin covered with angry flies. The angry buzz of the flies grew louder as if the flies feared there wouldn’t be enough dead bird to go around. The flies were like prisoners with an arm around their plates and eating as fast as they could. The buzzing in Marvin’s head grew louder, too. The dead robin and her entourage of flies was a sign, a correspondence between the inner world and the outer world. It was the Tao. Charlene pointed at the little bird corpse.  

“We should be mindful of death. Then we won’t put off meditating because we never know when death will take us.”

  Marvin started to take issue with her assertion that we never know when death will take us, but checked himself. Suddenly, he felt like Charlene was annoying him. Suddenly, the weight of her annoyance was so great it almost made him tip over. Suddenly, the breadth of her chest, her low hips, and her short legs reminded him of a robin. Her robin-ness felt like an insult or a provocation.

“We should get back inside,” Charlene chirped. “The next session will start up soon.”

They re-entered the building and slithered through the kitchen again back to the meditation room. Other people were assuming the lotus position on their cushions. The din of noisy flies was deafening. Marvin had trouble catching his breath as he sat on his cushion and tried to look like everyone else.

                                                            #

It was 5:30 and the Saturday session was over. The group would return tomorrow morning for the Sunday session. Sitting on the meditation cushion for a few hours had quieted the flies. They still filled Marvin’s brain, but they were asleep. He walked gently so he wouldn’t wake them. Charlene was checking her phone when Marvin approached.

“Want to meet for dinner?”

She hesitated as if surprised, but quickly said yes, a smile on her robin face. They picked a time, 7:30, and a place, the Italian restaurant in the old neighborhood south of the university, not far from Marvin’s apartment. It also was near where she lived, she said.

“It is? Where do you live?” he asked. She gave him the address, adding, “It’s within walking distance of the restaurant.”

Marvin felt the tea kettle in his chest simmer.

“See you then.”  

As he left the building and went to his car, the flies were stirring, but he shushed them by singing a little melody in his mind. When the red red robin comes bob bob bobbin along.

                                                            #

 Marvin was pacing back and forth outside and looking at his watch. At 7:15, Charlene came out the front door of her tiny brick house that probably was considered nice when it was built back in the 1930s. Nostalgia gave the university neighborhood character otherwise denied low-income housing, as if the people living in these old houses were a better class of victim than someone in a housing project.

“Hi,” he said. “I came early so I could walk you to the restaurant.”

Charlene smiled. The flies exerted pressure in Marvin’s head, but their wings were still. Charlene was wearing lipstick. She liked Marvin. It occurred to Marvin that this might be a nice dinner date. It could be a pleasant evening. Perhaps that’s what the Tao had in mind. It was nothing to Marvin either way – he would simply follow the Tao as it unfolded.

Charlene launched into a blow-by-blow description of the mundane events of her week, the way people do when they think you care, a monologue requiring no response from Marvin. It reminded him of his mother. He didn’t like that. Charlene had been better when she was quiet. All her talking was like someone splashing water in your face when all you want to do is float in the ocean. Then she said, “I’m actually glad you came to walk with me. I was thinking maybe I should drive to the restaurant instead of walking. There was another murder last night. Did you read about it?”

“No.” Marvin’s answer was literally true. He never read news. News was just clutter, the hell of other people. Marvin felt the tea kettle start to boil. The flies were waking up, rubbing their eyes, compound eyes, each of which consist of 3,000 to 6,000 simple eyes. Thousands of flies, tens of millions of eyes looking and looking and looking.

When they passed an alleyway that cut between this block and the next one over, Marvin took Charlene’s hand. He nodded.

“This is a shortcut.”

Charlene wasn’t looking at the alley. She was looking at Marvin, forming an opinion about Marvin holding her hand. This kind of behavior was typical of most people, wasting time imagining motives instead of looking for signs. People typically insist on being clueless, even when surrounded by clues.

 Charlene followed the gentle tug of Marvin’s hand like a horse bridled as they slithered down the alley together between empty boxes and garbage cans. There was a broom leaning against the wall, as if someone had started to clean up the clutter and then abandoned the task. At the end of the alley, next to a child’s bicycle, was a dead rat, coated with a mass of flies walking back and forth unhurriedly across their booty, sated from a round of feeding, waiting until they became hungry enough to do it again.

“Oh,” Charlene said, squeezing his hand. She was reacting to the smell. Marvin saw that she had no appreciation of the beautiful intimacy of the flies crawling over the dead rat. Charlene was a stupid robin. The lipstick made it worse. Marvin pulled her through to the end of the alley. Across the street was a run-down public park with an empty playground where a flock of starlings strutted about, pecking at the ground. Beyond the playground were the woods. 

“If we cut through the park,” he said. “We’ll be there in sixty seconds.”

He pulled her with him and she followed without resistance as if they were dancing and he was leading. As they approached the playground, the starlings rose in mass like dark rain returning to the sky. Barely a beat later, the flies in Marvin’s head released and rose with the starlings, and Marvin felt his eyes roll back in his head as he felt himself disappearing into uncluttered emptiness.

                                                            #

   Marvin got out of bed and made coffee. Some kind catharsis had happened in his sleep, a dream he couldn’t remember, as if he’d cleaned out the garage and each tool now was hanging in its proper place. Henceforth, there would be nothing but order and contentment. That always was his thinking when he drank coffee in the morning. Today would be trouble-free, an expanse of happiness stretching like canvas the Tao would paint. And it wasn’t even dawn yet.  He sat on the couch where he always sat and began humming a tune, and words came to mind to go with it. When the red red robin comes bob bob bobbin along. It’s funny how songs stick in your head for no reason at all.

Marvin heard sirens in the distance, coming closer, now coming down his street. He went to the window to look and watched blue lights flash as they passed and then trail into darkness. It was a sign, a mustard seed that no doubt would grow into a great tree. Marvin heard the voice of his mother – make yourself useful, clean up the garage – bounce around in his brain. He willed it away, like releasing a balloon into the air, a balloon that eventually would land on some street corner to wait for a victim. Marvin remained at the window, sipping his coffee. After a few minutes, he saw a glimmer of light in the east, and then a sliver of orange peeking over the horizon, the Tao replacing night with day, yin becoming yang and yang becoming yin.

A fly buzzed past his face. Marvin’s eyes followed its flight to the window sill where it landed. He slapped at it, but the fly was too quick and escaped. That was the Tao for you.

This story appeared in Omens: An Anthology, published by Antimony and Elder Lace, 2021

A Children’s Bible is the latest novel by Pulitzer finalist Lydia Millet, is an apocalyptic story satirizing the feckless, self-indulgent, well-off, and educated adults for letting the future go to hell to the detriment of the next generation. The story is narrated by Eve, a teen among a group of teens who, with their parents, are vacationing at a lakeside mansion when a destructive storm hits and the world begins to fall apart. Abandoning their worthless parents, the kids strike out on their own with mixed results. Here’s what Kirkus Reviews says:

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/lydia-millet/a-childrens-bible/

Chloe’s Knot

Mike Wilson

David sorted through his theory as he drove them to the restaurant. The theory concerned gender difference. Inspired by a little weed and armed with his otherwise useless philosophy degree, David had concluded that men cognize women as possessing a discernable indiscernibility. This wasn’t a Zen koan, like the sound of two hands clapping, it was a literal description of a cognitive experience akin to seeing a figure through an opaque shower door. To the objection that his theory was a sexist social construct, David’s response was that it was not an ontological axiom – he wasn’t postulating that women actually were in some way indiscernible. And David had even come up with an explanation for this phenomenon. As in physics, where either momentum or location of a subatomic particle can be measured, but not both simultaneously, David hypothesized that the measuring instrument – in this case, the human sensorium – was responsible. He had no idea how the sensorium was responsible, or whether a sensorium in female-gendered bodies similarly perceived a discernable indiscernibility in men. But what else could it be?

“Watch out!” ​

David’s slammed on the breaks, barely avoiding a rear-end collision.

“Sorry about that,” he said to Chloe. She put a smile on it, like a good date would, but looked shaken.

David pulled into the other lane and resumed driving as if nothing had happened. Soon the unsettledness of the near-accident dissipated like fog burning off. Prompted by his nose, his eyes turned to Chloe. She was wearing more perfume tonight than before. He felt like a dizzy bee in a bouquet of flowers. She noticed him looking and responded as if it were a cue to make conversation.​

“I hear the restaurant has vegan on the menu.”​

The first two times they’d gotten together had been on the cheap – coffee during the day, a drink at a bar early one evening when she couldn’t make a night of it because she had book club. He’d felt slighted, but she’d said she liked being with him and touched his arm in a way that encouraged, so on the spot he’d asked her to dinner and she’d said yes. He was even wearing a tie tonight.​

“Are you vegan?” he asked as he switched lanes.​

“Not strict,” she said, smiling as if he’d said something brilliant and penetrating. “I eat cheese.”​

She was seated in his Audi like she wanted to be there, dressed to kill in a short skirt and silky beige blouse. He took a deep breath and resolved to turn off his brain, enjoy her company, and, hopefully, get laid like normal people did. He turned the steering wheel hand-over-hand. The parking lot was full.

“It’s crowded,” she said, as if danger lurked. ​

“I made reservations,” he replied, swooping in to rescue her.

She was acting girly, making it easy for him to feel manly, helping get him out of his own head. He appreciated the assist. They’d shared information during the earlier dates, but he hadn’t mentioned the so-called anxiety disorder because he’d never agreed with the diagnosis, though he took the medication prescribed by the doctor.​

A parking spot was empty near the front door of the restaurant like the gap in a child’s smile after losing a tooth. David maneuvered over and eased his car in, observing that the process seemed sexualized. Was this the mind seizing the reins of the sensorium or the sensorium seizing the reins of the mind? He didn’t know whether his head or his body was in charge. The head-body dichotomy. There’s no away around it, if you’re honest. He glanced at Chloe to see if she had an inkling that random thoughts were running amok in his brain. Under parking lot lights shining through the windshield, Chloe looked like a man wearing lipstick, an image she dispelled when she turned and smiled at him, like she understood. That made David nervous, too, because he didn’t know what she understood. His necktie felt tight, so he stuck his finger inside the knot and pulled it away from his throat. He turned off the ignition and they got out and went inside.​

The hostess found David’s reservation in the computer and they followed a different girl carrying menus to a booth. The menu girl began a song-and-dance identifying their team of servers – one person to bring the water and bread, another to take their order – as if the meal were a gustatory vehicle with its own pit crew.​

“Could you bring us a wine list?” Chloe asked. Her voice was commanding, like the sound of a Winchester rifle being cocked. The menu girl left to get the wine list. Chloe’s face softened, a flower opening to the sun. David wondered whether he’d taken too much medication before the date. He’d thought he would need it.

“Do you have to work tomorrow?” she asked.​

“No.”​

“Good,” she said, as if she’d just written his name on the tag of a Christmas present. The menu girl was back with wine lists, which they studied while waiting for her to finish the “specials tonight” rap.​

“Can I start you off with a glass of wine?” the girl asked.​

Chloe ordered white, he ordered red. When the wine came, along with a basket of bread, he toasted to the evening they were about to have and took a sip. It tasted good, so he took another, feeling encouraged, the way he sometimes felt when reading Hegel and suddenly getting a real feel for the dialectical method.

Then he looked at Chloe and saw a pellucent bow around her throat, shimmering like a hologram. A question he couldn’t articulate flashed in his mind like a neon sign. His entire nervous system itched as if he’d taken poison. She noticed him staring at her neck.

“You can see it, huh?” she whispered, lifting her chin and tilting her goblet. He watched her swallow, the wine pulsing down her throat like the gyrations of a belly dancer. The bow disappeared.​

“It’s gone,” he said.​

“What’s gone?” she asked.​

Her voice was different, now, rounder than the rustling whisper that had said you can see it, huh? Had he imagined that whisper, imagined the bow? Clearly, there was only skin at the hollow of her neck.​

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He nodded, wondering if his medication was interacting with the alcohol.

“I thought I saw a bow around your neck,” he said. He cringed at how stupid his words sounded.

“Really?” she said. Her eyes widened. “We just read a story in my writing class about a woman who had a red bow around her neck. This is so . . . Jungian.”​

David assumed by Jungian she meant coincidental, like Carl Jung’s ideas about synchronicity. That was something he liked about Chloe, how she effortlessly went back and forth between girly and intellectual. He wondered whether she was familiar with Hegel.​

“You take a writing class?” ​

He took another sip of wine, adopting the proposition that alcohol would make him better rather than worse. He half-listened as she talked about her writing – it sounded aspirational rather than something she really did – and then she started telling him the story about the bow on the woman’s neck.​

“The husband wants to remove it, but she won’t let him. They marry, have a child, but she never takes off the red bow.”​

“Why?” he asked.​

“The bow represents something important about her that she keeps to herself.”

She stopped as if that should be a sufficient explanation. But seeing that it wasn’t

sufficient to him, she added, “It’s something unknowable to the husband.”​

A discernible indiscernibility. Was this evidence for his theory?

“Sounds archetypal,” he said, demonstrating his knowledge of Jung, “like a fairy tale.”​

“Actually, it is. A fairy tale, I mean.”​

He reached for a roll and put it on his bread plate. It occurred to him that their table was an altar, the bread and wine sacraments. his wine glass a chalice in an occult ceremony. Suddenly everything was Jungian.

“How does the story end?”

“She lets him undo her bow and her head falls off.”​

He choked on his wine, then wiped his mouth with his napkin and asked, “Why does her head fall off, for Christ’s sake?”​

“People say the bow may be a reference to women who wore red ribbons around their necks during the French Revolution to show solidarity with victims of the guillotine.”​

He didn’t know what to say. Chloe reached into the basket and took out a roll. He watched her pull it apart, releasing a warm, yeasty aroma that reminded him of other warm, yeasty things. His sensorium definitely had seized the reins. Or was it his mind?​

“But actually,” she said, smearing butter on her roll in an erotic, if not obscene, way, “women have worn chokers for thousands of years.”​

The tone of her voice was one he hadn’t heard before, not girly or intellectual or the Winchester rifle being cocked or the whisper he thought he’d heard. It was witchy, like she was leading him into darkness. It was his turn to speak.​

“Was that to make themselves attractive to men?”​

Chloe’s facial expression told him he’d made a faux pas. She bit into her roll and chewed. He watched a tiny lump slide down the line of the throat as she swallowed, hypnotic, like a pocket watch swinging in front of his eyes. Then she smiled again. She was giving him a pass – he’d been judged, but his violation excused because he was a juvenile she could redeem.​

“Sumerian and Egyptian women wore jewelry around vulnerable parts of the body, like the throat,” she said, “because it gave them special powers and protected them.”​

“Protected them from what?”​

“I don’t know.” But the accusation in her eyes said she did. David sensed the collective guilt of patriarchy falling toward his shoulders and slipped aside before it landed.

During the salad course, Chloe described chokers and neckwear worn by women through the ages, taking it through the Renaissance up to modern pornography with bondage overtones, a topic she seemed remarkably well-informed about. While they ate their entrees, Chloe summarized the history of men’s neckwear, starting with ancient Pharaohs and the Knots of Isis around the necks of mummies and finishing with the neckties of CEOs.​

“Ties are a badge of power for men,” she said, pointing to the very tie he was wearing, “but it could be something else.”​

“What do you mean?”​

She described an energy called kundalini that she said was coiled like a snake at the base of the spine. When the snake tries to slither up the spine, she said, it gets snagged on the way by the attachment we have to our bodies.​

“Yogis raise the kundalini to the crown of the head,” she said, “and it makes them enlightened. Ties choke off the energy before it gets there.”

“So if we loosen our ties, we’ll become enlightened?’​

Chloe looked at him as if he were a dolt.​

“Truth is a dangerous thing,” she said. “The structures of society and the economy depend upon keeping everyone ignorant.”​

She began holding forth on Marx and class struggle. He let her talk without interruption, bathing in the moonlight of her intellect, his eyes involuntarily dropping to her breasts, looking for the outline of nipples pressing through the thin fabric of her blouse, but the restaurant lighting was too dim to illuminate what he knew was there. He recognized that he had stopped listening and was in a trance, so before she noticed and said you’re staring at my breasts, he forced his eyes back up. But instead of looking her in the face, his gaze settled on her throat and he saw it again. The bow. It was tiny, almost transparent, and he had to be very still or it faded. But if he was careful, if he focused his eyes and concentrated in a certain way, he could see it.​

“You’re staring at my neck,” she said.

Her words broke his attention and the bow disappeared.

“Sorry,” he said, prepared to be chastised, but her smile was flirty, as if her antitheses was rubbing against his thesis and there might be synthesis later. His heart pounded like a big bass drum being softly struck.​

#​

They finished dinner and went to her townhouse. She took him by the hand and led him to the bedroom, flipping the light switch that turned on lamps on night tables on either side of the bed. But the room seemed brighter than two lamps could make it. David looked at the ceiling and saw the mirror.

It was huge. He pondered the logistics of installing a mirror that big without cracking it. Butterfly anchors wouldn’t suffice – the mirror had to be secured in the ceiling beams to hold that kind of weight. David felt Chloe’s hand on his face, and watched in the mirror as her hands wandered over his body and slowly undressed him. Once he was completely naked, she told him to tie his necktie around his neck.​

“Really?”

She looked at him, which he took as yes is there a problem? He did as she asked, excited by his own vulnerability, not knowing where she was taking him. When he was knotted up, Chloe smiled her approval. Then she opened the top drawer of her dresser and took out a red scarf. She undressed herself, and when she saw how he was watching, slowed down, turning it into a tease. After everything was off, she tied the red scarf around her neck.

They sat on the bed and kissed. The tie and the scarf became part of their foreplay, exotic undergarments, something to loosen and tighten and slip fingers inside of, as if their throats were a second set of sexual organs. They managed their momentum as long as they could and then she rolled over, raised her knees and opened her legs. He slid in, and she grabbed the ends of his tie and pulled, choking him.​

“You do it, too,” she said.

Supporting himself with his elbows, he pulled at the ends of her scarf until it circled tight around her neck. It was a race to the finish, either orgasm or passing out, as they pounded against each other at one end and choked each other at the other, two link sausages that couldn’t break apart no matter how hard they tried. They climaxed together, letting go the neckwear, and endorphins from oxygen rushing into his head combined with those from the orgasm was like being catapulted into a state of non-ordinary consciousness. ​

They lay on the bed, recovering. Everything was dreamy, except David’s throat hurt. He studied Chloe’s reflection in the ceiling mirror. Her eyes were closed and she looked sated. Then he saw it again – the bow on her throat.​

Very carefully, he turned his head and looked. The bow was transparent, delicate like blown glass, but amorphous like plasma, and he was only inches away. He reached to her throat and touched it. The bow felt like spooky gelatin.​

“That tickles,” she said, not opening her eyes.

The bow represents something important about her that she keeps to herself. That’s what she’d said at dinner. David felt an overpowering desire to untie Chloe’s bow.

The knot was small and it moved away when he touched it, as if his fingers were coarse. Holding his breath seemed to help stabilize the knot. He took hold of it. He sensed that she realized what he was doing and wasn’t going to pull away. She was going to let him undo her bow.​

“Are you sure you want to?” she asked, her eyes still closed.​

“It’s all I’ve ever wanted,” he said, something he hadn’t known until he heard the words come out of his mouth.​

“Will you still want me?” she asked.​

“What do you mean?”

He spoke gingerly because the bow was starting to fade. He slowed his breath and the bow became substantial again, like a radio station signal becomes strong when the dial is tuned just right.​

“You want the meat sack,” she said. “You like the meat sack.”​

Meat sack? Her gibberish was interfering with his concentration. He caressed the knot, gradually enlarging the opening, and worked his finger in.​

“After it’s undone,” she said, “will you love me?”​

Her eyes still were closed and when she spoke her lips didn’t move.​

“Yes,” he said.​

It was the yes of a dream. He realized that he was asleep. She was asleep, too. They were dreaming together. Chloe’s knot was a dream that could only be untied in a dream.

“Are you afraid my head will fall off?” she asked.​

He could tell that she wasn’t afraid – she was worried for him. He tried to block her voice from his sensorium as he worked his fingers deeper into her knot, now so familiar that it seemed part of himself. The knot was almost undone.

Suddenly, light exploded from Chloe’s neck. The room filled with countless faces expanding in every direction like corridors of mirrors, faces male and female, faces both and neither, inside a giant mind that that had no discernable boundary.

“Chloe’s Knot,” by Mike Wilson, first appeared in The Phare, Nov/Dec 2020

https://www.thephare.com/chloesknot