A young Algerian pushed his hand, once, hard as a stale cigarette, against your belly. He told you the pushing back, from within, meant that the baby would be born hating anything that grows in winter. He said, the child makes up its mind to arrive and we can do nothing. But without a womb, you can only turn eyes downward to the fleshy pole kept warm behind linen, maybe overuse. Thinking back to the man’s black-licorice smell, his perfect teeth, you remember how Jung wrote in circles about circles and all you have on the kitchen wall is some canvas already burnt in three corners. It’s good, so good, that you did not listen then, and that no Algerians disturbed your peace for long.
Henry, your fossa, your one true companion, your pet who did not steal you, but could have, might break the window today, might escape permanently into the Savoka damp. That one song you play every morning plays now, too, and you toss keys from right hand into left. It’s true we are like ourselves best when we are faithful. Henry, paws plantigrade over your worn, faux suede loafers, yawns his consent that your tedium awaits and his does not. You will miss him beyond what passes for reason should he disappear, should you fail to magnify the glass that keeps you both englobed.
You glance over your windowsill once and recall that what lasts longest is some country orchard road and not this regret, not this hopeful antennae borrowed from early summer millipedes. You work hard to remember what Harod promised: a swaddle is the difference between reputation and redemption. This knowledge helps your jacket slide cinnamon-sweet over your shoulders, picnics in the past, parents sailed far off, rosewood boxes marked fady still napping beneath your and Henry’s bed. As a small boy, you wanted an enthusiastic father to carry you on his shoulders, crossing sand in Nosy Iranja. Instead, you were denied his vowels and received only his knee’s weak grunt when he rose to shut tight the door on his way back up a plank, nets already wedded to his knuckles.
Your disappointments might flavor the pot’s carbon rim, but your mother answers when you call into some memory-shell and ask her about tilapia, how heat makes the flesh into sonorous seduction for Henry, and is just a meal for you. And this is gratitude, even when you fall asleep too fast, too easily, like the bagworm moths you welcome into the hallway. What are your aims in this life, anyway? Nothing was ever able to catch your love letters tossed into the bucket and maybe you overlived, over-expected, and now your gloves wait impatiently for mud. Your modesty ends there. Henry’s baculum thumps against the scratching post he does not use and your shame rear’s-up to say small man, simple island boy, this city devours you still.
None of this is, of course, your reality alone. There are no constellations above or places to write your name, scribble anything over construction site signs warning other pedestrians take heed. Your Renibe used to yell there is no dry beak, or any wet cloaca when your laziness won an afternoon. Yet this day, this urban perpetuity, has no grandmother watching over its fat head, its greasy hair. What shines to beckon excludes you entirely—you who never notice the luminous.
The door locked, the window locked, Henry’s chittering for eggs heard in the space between brass bolt and fire escape, you make your feet march toward mundanity. The Traveler’s Palm tattooed on your wrist helps the short walk to your train stop feel momentarily exotic. Adolescent longing a proper distraction, you trip over your wide, round-toe shoes and water captures your knees, then wraps your waist, your shoulders twin planks for what should be embarrassment, instead becomes common, and the resulting sigh is as expected as any early week accident. The sidewalk’s sink-hole pond pulls you inside her, a lover stationary, guarded by plastic box turtles, admired in the way geese leave their useless eggs out for painting. To passersby, with your two penny hangover, you are a pocket watch emblazoned with restraint. It must be so exhausting, today as when you were ten, watching a carp gulp past your sinking ankle, for you to be the youngest child still immune to tenderness.
On this Tuesday, propelled by itchy desire, any man might beg the old Sais for some rough mead as he showers, dresses, arranges paper to touch pens, clips, bundles of unease delineated into columns, numerated, necessary. But you are no Saxon. The facts of explanation escape you now, books on the Brits lost in easy tides when you had it so well, pole in hand, lemur fur tickling an ear, your dirty neck’s nape. In the city, floating moss positions itself, featherlight, sticky as earthworm saliva, over your sleeve’s soaked elbow nook. You pull your whole body, redundant in its ineptitude, back onto what passes for shore. Not quite 9am and the day has determined itself and left you, again, on the periphery of drowning.

Renibe said The feather stands in for the whole bird.

You ambulate 26 steps, dragging water droplets the way sheets invite lint. The train cars exhale their approach, all fog in their throat, no elegance the way a bluebill shifts sounds over water. There is no surprise when viscus cement calls your name, seduces the second fall forward, in a morning ripe for your immortal mark to be made with a chin, then mouth, teeth barred against entry, nostrils cupping the grey as twin lovers bent over soup, wholeness. Your face, the entirety of it, sinks parallel to Dis. Fight the man is finger-crafted into the cement muck inches from your eyebrows, sinking in time with your temples. Swallowing becomes your universe, you become the swallowed.
Concrete hardens faster than you remember, the quickness a proven lie like so many others, every Tuesday before, though previous ends now. It’s fitting that you settle as an eel in permanent repose. Fortuitous to those passersby that the shock of your body under their heels swirls into expected, into city eccentricities, details of which pass along over the phone when anyone asks about visits, about the day-to-day, about tables burned for heat off some other block where the grocery’s shuttered doors are the perfect nesting ground for rough pigeons.
Henry will kill seventeen chickens before he lulls anyone to sleep with his tongue. You will not see him, needle-points of glass falling from his coat, when he makes his trek to the shipping docks, finally free of you, your watchfulness, your resignation. You will feel nothing of his claw retracting the fifth of inch into where your cheek might have been had the concrete dried slower in this morning smog. The women whose heels now skirt your buttocks as any pothole marking the streets ask each other Inona ny vaovao, Inona ny vaovao?