october 7.

Yesterday and today were wonderful days. And they were peculiar! It involved despair and almonds and night-kite-flying. You'll have to listen.

Some few weeks ago, I went to my friend Sallie's room, which is downstairs in my house hidden behind the fireplace. It is a special room that feels like it should be in a big old house by the ocean, with birds flying past the windows all the time. It smells good because it has pine paneling on one wall. When the radiators come on it makes the pine warm and fragrant. That afternoon she was listening to a really beautiful song. I walked in on a voice buzzing with clicks and bells in it, and I thought of the Music Tapes. That was the only time some other band had reminded me of the Music Tapes. I really liked them. They were called the Microphones. After that day we have only been talking about how we should get them to come here and play. Sallie wrote an email inviting them.

Last night the two weathers of fall and summer pressed up against each other. I predicted an adventure. With the wind and the clouds the way they were, and the fact that we don't like anybody else, there was bound to be some adventure. I could just tell. We were sitting someplace and some boys we knew came into the room. They asked us if we'd seen the show that night. No, we said, what show? "Two people from k records were here..." "The Microphones!" I cried - like it was a joke, but I already knew it had to be, because I am me. He nodded. My hands flew to my mouth. Maybe I squeaked a little. "NO!" wailed Sallie.

Please understand that the Microphones are just one 22 year old boy from a tiny island off the coast of Washington. That he somehow showed up at this particular small place in Vermont so shortly after we started willing him here with our imaginations is the strangest thing in the whole world. Or, at least, the strangest thing in the whole week. Although I actually smiled at the boy I like with the stuffed anteater named Nijinsky, and he smiled back, and that was pretty strange too, in an altogether nice way.

But this was strange in a bad way, a very bad way, because we had missed them! We were in despair. I thought maybe we could build a time machine. We couldn't. Why hadn't we known? There hadn't been a single poster. It had only been announced at dinner that night, by ringing a glass with a fork, and we had missed dinner. I think it was the first night we'd ever missed dinner. We missed it because we were trudging home from the natural foods store with bags of carob-covered almonds.

In a stupor, we wandered over to the café where the Microphones had played a few hours before. I saw a boy who I thought would know of such things, and shoved Sallie in his direction. He found the proper authorities to process our wailing. It was a girl with skunk-colored hair who I guess knew the Microphones and had brought them here to play, but just didn't really tell anyone else about it. Are they still here, we wondered; will they play tomorrow? She told us they were still here, they were staying in the orchard!

So we went back to Sallie's room and made valentines. Or I made valentines and Sallie wrote them a letter. It said things like we really hope you sing some songs tomorrow, and we're sad we missed you and such. The skunk girl had indicated that they might play for just a little while at 11 o'clock the next day.

We walked to the orchard to deliver our tidings. The orchard is a road of red houses kind of in and out of the woods, up towards the music building. At night it is like.. hm.. like Sleepy Hollow! With gritty paths that get in your high tops! When you look at an old barn, it looks like one side has burned down entirely, but it's only shadows. We walked around and around in this darkness, with the wind blowing down chimneys. Then we saw a house with a light on. I thought there was a rocking chair in the window. We stood back on the road for a little while, imagining them being there, happy and peaceful in some quiet, adventuresome place with moths hovering around the porch light. It reminded me of The Musicians of Breman. I don't know why - I just suspected to see a donkey standing by the window, silhouetted against candlelight and the smell of peach cobbler. There was a sad-looking old station wagon kind of sunk in the driveway. We went closer and I bent down to look at the license plate. I saw the famous shape of Mt. Rainier embossed in the smeared metal. "Washington!" I hissed. The back of the station wagon was heaped with musical things.

We ran up to the porch, opened the screen door, and shoved our bundle of papers through the handle. They fell out. Luckily I was carrying, in the pocket of my overalls, my Edward Scissorhands action figure and a roll of tape. We pressed the letters to the door and slathered them with tape. Then we retreated with all the necessary giggles, back up the driveway.

Vermont is full of trees and open fields of high grass. Under a nearly full moon, the fields look like water; and in strange weather the wind in them sounds like waves crashing at night. When we were walking away from the house in the orchard, I saw such a sight. Behind the dark trees, a perfectly clear greyness of grass looked just like the ocean. We used to go to St. Augustine every summer, and if I ever have dreams about that place it is always night. The ocean is some thing you might just accidentally walk into before you even know you're there. We ran into it and lay down when we were tired. If you'd been standing in some other part of the pasture you wouldn't've even known we were there. The grasses covered us up.

I think we sat there for a long time. We were downfield from the house where the Microphones were sleeping or, I suggested, kissing, or reading a book. So it was a little like being in their backyard, except their backyard was the biggest one in the whole world. There were trees around the house like lampposts in a Czechoslovakian city. The light in back suggested living people. It glowed over there, and it seemed like there should've been a tire swing hanging from one of the trees. I lay on my back with my feet pressed against the sky. I had a wonderful hallucination of a goose parade marching up through the field and passing between us, muttering honks and looking very shiny in the moonlight.

After a long time we went back to our house. We weren't in despair anymore. It was such wonderful, windy weather. On my posters that I made for the informal alliance for the blowing of dandelions, it says "we will meet when the eyes of clouds are bright and blustery." And that's just what it was like that night, so Sallie said we should call a meeting. The first meeting! We flew Sallie's kite. When you fly a kite at night, it looks like a giant moth, or a stingray, or a ghost. The wind was so strong. When I flew it, the kite practically leapt out of my hands into the sky. It was all plastic and fluttery like a heart, and the string was holding it to us, and we kept getting tangled up in the string and then the string got tangled in the trees themselves, we said they were capillaries. Then the string snapped and we had a runaway kite to deal with! We were running all over the place chasing it. It dove nosefirst into the grass one too many times, and broke. But it was really beautiful for a while. I realized it was the very best thing to be doing at 2 o'clock in the morning on a Friday night at Bennington, because usually at this time I would be in bed, trying to sleep or read, while from another house stupid people would be playing stupid, throbbing music very loudly, which makes me bloodthirsty and then I start fantasizing about shooting them through the window with a bow and arrows. That is the thing about Bennington, is that there are some really neat people here, and then there are really stupid, annoying people who scream and drink and throb and keep me awake. I hate them. What are they doing here? And it just started hailing while I am typing this - that is another thing about Bennington. But it stopped in the amount of time it took me to go back and capitalize those last four sentences. That is another thing. That, and they finally got vegan soycheese in the dining room. You know what this means: Ubersammiches for breakfast lunch and dinner!

After that we went to bed. I could hear the wind rattling my windows in their frames.

By eleven o'clock the next morning, it was cold and raining. I huddled into my Wellington boots and slopped off to breakfast. Sallie and I were thoroughly on the lookout for Microphones. The skunk girl had indicated that if they were to play this day, it would be in the dining room at eleven o'clock. We chewed upon our waffles with large, wondering eyes.

I saw a boy with a beautiful sweater wander around for a bit before sitting down in a different room to eat his breakfast. The sweater was blue with a giant tunafish knitted on it! I can't say what made me feel this was the Microphones' boy, but that's exactly what I thought when I saw the sweater. I went back and reported the news to Sallie. We debated for a while. Even though neither of us recognized him, it was still most likely that he was just a student at our very small school that we had not seen much before. But, I pointed out, surely a boy with such a beautiful sweater would wear it all the time, wouldn't he, and then we would recognize him by tunafish alone. Well, that was possible. We hemmed and hawed about whether or not we should talk to him. Finally I took a napkin and wrote, "Your tunafish sweater is very beautiful" on it, along with a picture of a tunafish, who was singing. I thrust it at Sallie and told her to go put it on his table and run away. She is very brave, so she went to do just that. But then she came back, still with the napkin, because now there were other people sitting with him. Some of them she recognized as Bennington students. I frowned. My confidence wavered - maybe he was not the Microphones after all. I still said that if, in a few moments, we were listening to songs played by a boy in a tunafish sweater, I would scream.

Well, I didn't scream.

What happened was that we went downstairs, and they were standing around in a way students never do, looking at photos on the walls and such. Then I saw him carrying a guitar case and mauled Sallie in the arm. We sat down on a couch and tried not to look so suspicious. But we must've not done a very good job, because after long enough the girl who was with him asked us if we were waiting to see the Microphones. "Are you the Microphones?" blurted Sallie. I think that was the question that'd been in her mouth all along, and the fact that they talked to us first did not alter its course into the world. It still seemed kind of horrible. "I'm not," the girl said, "he is." She pointed to the boy in the tunafish sweater, who was sitting there quietly, holding an old guitar. Maybe I squeaked a little.

I was really happy when Sallie suggested we go to the treehouse, and they agreed. We four tromped up the road, and by then they probably knew we were the girls who'd left peculiar things in their doorhandle the night before. But they were very polite and friendly.

We climbed up into the treehouse. It was wet, I let them sit on my raincoat. It was only a little cold. Everything felt clean and happy. Actually, it felt a lot like Washington state, and we all agreed it seemed there was an ocean nearby. Then I wondered if they'd seen us last night, behind the red house, looking to them like a couple of tunafish splashing in the grass. I was holding my breath as he started to sing. He played every song he'd ever written about climbing into trees.

Ocean 1,2,3

Sallie made me promise not to tell anyone about the Microphones in the treehouse, and I'm not sure if this counts. But it is after four now and I don't even have time to tell you about it, so I won't!

Oh, I forgot to tell about how we met somebody walking with two dogs and got to play with the dogs! It was sooo nice. It was a lady walking with a thirteen year old golden retriever and a thirteen week old puppy. I ran around and the puppy bit my pants! I felt sorry for the lady because she had come to visit her son and couldn't find him anywhere. I wish my parents would come here and bring Hen and Chelsea with them so we could play and romp together again.

- - -

october 3.

Sometime last year, I started having dreams that John Berryman was my real dad.

I want to live in a state whose postal abbreviation is 'KT'.

- - -

sept 30.

Tomorrow is October! Hurray!

This weekend I made up the Bennington College Informal Alliance for the Blowing of Dandelions. There aren't that many dandelions here so I think we're just going to fly kites. Yesterday was the happiest day when I saw a boy flying a kite all by himself, close to the clouds. It was the first thing that made this feel like a real place. Then I sat on the roof.

I'm also starting an animal rights group because all the activist people here just want to go to protests and burn stuff down. In my group we will eat frookwiches and build birdhouses and rescue lobsters from the grocery store!

Sometime in the spring we are having a circus here, and I'm going to be the pretzel vendor.

I am supposed to be writing a paper right now... I just typed "She was a child preoccupied with thoughts of cornbread," and got really distracted and started typing this instead. I had graham crackers and cereal for dinner so I am not in a very good mood.

Our radio station is supposed to have webcasting pretty soon if we get money for it. I don't think anybody here listened to White Noise for White Skunks last week and got to hear Aphasia Shirk and her singing saw (recorded on a sheet of tin-foil) replete with frothing opossum sounds. We also played all of syr 1 and the music tapes and a live version of engine with saw accompaniment kindly provided by myself. That was fun.

When we played Starfire we turned out all the lights in the radio station and spun around amidst the greens and vibrating needles.

- - -

sept 27.

Someone asked me what I did today.

"I went to the cemetery. There was a dead tree. And I tied some leaves to it."

I felt sorry for the tree because it was dead.

This morning in class we stood around a piano and screamed into the soundboard. We screamed so hard the strings moved. And when we stopped, the piano was playing without anyone touching it. In the sound it made we heard ourselves. In one sound, we each recognized our own voice and no other. I stood there gaping in awe. I'd stopped thinking there was something about my own voice that I would recognize, but I was there, I heard myself clearly, screaming a little bit in the strings. "It's like a ghost," I said.

No two people scream the same way? We did it again, I was trying to hear other voices. But I wasn't hearing my voice, and strangers' voices - voices that I just couldn't differentiate - it wasn't like that. That is how it was when we were really screaming. Before we stopped, and became ghosts.

Someone said we should scream a word. As if we were just hearing an echo; as if we were screaming into a gulch. "We'll all have to scream the same word." "'Butterscotch'!" I suggested.

So we screamed 'butterscotch' into the soundboard. And it gave back the same sound as the one rendered from our stupid, human howling. There was a little murmur of disappointment among the others, because they really wanted to hear the piano say "butterscotch." I was glad it didn't. It taught me something. We are actually playing the instrument with our voice, I thought.

Some ground-down part of our voice.. some very integral part of it..

I sat down and drew a badger and a black leaf.

I would like to make a recording where voices screaming are reflected in strings. A whole record of tonal reflections without any human mutterments at all. Maybe tomorrow.

- - -

sept 26.

A wonderful parcel of feelings from arrived from Minneapolis this afternoon. Cookies, pudding, candy bars, a soapdish with a pelican on it, pink vampire teeth, and - you won't believe what else - a love letter from my best friend! My atrophied little heart began hopscotching all about when I saw it. A message to me from Kirk With A Kite himself!

"Hello Sarah, I don't know what to write so I started doodling." Then he drew something that looked like a pony or a peacock and scratched it out.

You might not think it is much, but I was falling all over myself with happiness. I rode away on my bicycle and rolled in the leaves! Best friend best friend best friend!

- - -

sept 25.

The prettiest boy at school moved into my house. I met him once whilst standing in line for spaghetti sauce. I was pretending to look into another room instead of at his shiny black fingernails on the tomato sauce ladle. When he turned around and saw me standing there with a plate of noodles and my Edward Scissorhands action figure, he said - "That's beautiful." So he is my friend? I can't remember his name.

I told him my name was February.

I know I might never muster up the nerve to talk to him, so I did what anyone else would do and started a Bedtime Story-Telling Cooperative at my house. So maybe someday I will get to sit on his bed! He seems like a boy who would wear a nightgown and sleep with a stuffed anteater whom he'd given a beautiful name. Could a boy like this please exist? I don't see why not.

Hello February.
Hello. Wow, what a wonderful anteater!
Thank you. I found him at the bottom of a dream.
What's his name?
Nijinsky.
Nijinsky the anteater!

Um, anyway.

I finally found one other person here who knows Frank Stanford. Who loves Frank Stanford. She is my poetry teacher. I am on a mission here to make people read him. My poetry class is a sad sight except for when we talk about pigeons. Everyone is dumb and stares down at their books, and they don't say a word. There are two boys who give each other looks over certain things, like when somebody talks about James Tate, and I am like - "Look at me! I like James Tate, too! Fuckers." I want to throw bits of paper at them. The only person I know to have potential looks with is the boy with the slurpy neck, which is nauseating unless he is sitting in the right direction.

Classes are okay, but they're hardly even half of all the learning I'm doing. I think that's how it should be. I like to lie, facedown in the cemetery, and breathe.

Someone send me some muffins. Raspberry chocolate chip, please!

Writing that just made me miss seward co-op with all my heart. Did I forget to mention the part about starving? I eat celery now, and beets. Beets!

On Monday I made a surrogate voice puppet. He is a fox who wears a red cape emblazoned with a waffle. Around his neck is a satin ribbon, stained with beet juice, tied in a bow. I impale him on a broomhandle and use him to voice vegan concerns in the dining room. People always pay attention.

Today we taught them that compassion can begin on the dinner plate! And that grape juice and graham crackers are a delicious meal.
- - -

sept 22.

I went by my friends' house around one-thirty to see if they wanted to play music together; one of them was still in bed and the other had a throng of sucked-at places all over his neck. They are seventeen year old boys. For some reason I hadn't thought of it before.

I stopped being disappointed by people a long time ago. Almost anyone is disappointing, unless they are a donkey. I just feel so sorry for them.

They probably don't think they should feel sorry for themselves, when they are getting sucked on and everything. But they should.

I'm already looking for someone here to have a crush on, but never speak to.

I am no less lonely. I draw myself with claws and flowers.

- - -

sept 20.

Describe the stormclouds at five o'clock: "They look like mountains." "They look like a bag of dirty marshmallows." We rode into downtown Bennington today, played a ukelin and watched birds fly off the roof of the church. There is a tiny health food store (no muffins!) where I bought a bag of chocolate-covered ginger. I am trying to do my reading for tomorrow, but I think I've lost all ability to concentrate on anything that doesn't require exuberant leaps and bounds of the imagination.

The development of a thick and resilient hidden transcript is favored by the existence of social and cultural barriers between dominant elites and subordinates.

I can't read past the words "thick and resilient" without thinking about brushing my teeth through a mouthful of warm tomato sauce. And I don't think anybody in my Domination and the Arts of Resistance seminar is going to care very much about that if I say it out loud in class tomorrow.

Which I might.

Today someone asked me if I was wearing my dad's pants. I was in my postman pants. Someone said, "Are you wearing your dad's pants?" "No," I said, "I am wearing my own pants."

I think I would have troubled dreams if my father and I wore the same size pants.

- - -

sept 19. 88.9 fm bennington, vt

i have no idea how much of the radio you can listen to through the internet, but if it is possible you should surely listen to my radio program, white noise for white skunks, tonight from 11pm to 1am! we will bring you a scatter of skunk paws immersed in puddles of static.

it is every wednesday (and thursday too, i suppose).

- - -

sept 15.

Behind the house there are fields of goldenrod. There's a penguin in a chair, wearing a crown. There are hills, a gravel road, and a thickness of trees. In the trees is a clear slope where people were buried one and a half centuries ago.

Tonight we walked down to the cemetery, carrying instruments. Two girls and three boys.

"This would be a fun place to be buried!" I cried.

(neutral milk hotel revivals and sing-a-longs on cold nights in the bottom of the season)

That is something I would have only dreamed about a few months ago. A few weeks ago. Tonight I sat on a cold grave and we played 'Oh Comely' with pipes, guitars, saws, harmonicas and trumpets. I sang a little more softly than another boy. It is hard to sing when you are smiling so much.

While we played I saw a procession of men and ladies in formal outfits walking between the white stones. They were carrying parasols. I think they died in the springtime. When the song ended, they turned into some kids from school. People had heard us while wandering in the woods.

I did not find a job today. But I am making my own radio station and joining the circus!

And I try not to be afraid of my own voice. I would talk to you, I would talk to any of you, if you were here now.

I had a dream I was a boy who wanted to be a ballerina. I was in his body, dancing. People placed drops of soy sauce on my forehead. When I spun around it splattered and formed a brown star on the ceiling.

Now I'm going to look for a job at the library.

- - -

sept 13.

Today I wandered, surrounded by a meadow of brooms standing upright in the soil. I am not sure what leaked out of me as another creature approached. Some sound she held in her lap. From far away it sounded like a flock of geese flying out of a circus tent. I wonder how far you have to walk before it sounds almost like nothing. How far before it sounds precisely like nothing? I wish I could leave my body, and walk away, and find out.

Feet in the air. Feet pressed against the sky again. Everyone comes down here to glance at the charred remains. Trumpeting remains.

I sit in an open field watching a bunny for nearly an hour. He is so close. He licks his spotted legs.

I lean over and pretend to eat from the snow. The brooms stood upright. Bells and thistles lay on their sides.

By the time I got home, human dinner had come and gone.

It seems like some people here do not have very much confidence or desire to approach other people. I want to corrupt them. Walking past houses tonight I heard 'Holland, 1945' through the open window of someone else's room. From the same room, I also imagined, was the slow punching of typewriter keys. I stopped and climbed the tree closest to that window, singing my way up onto a branch. I saw a spider!

When I took the more human approach, up a flight of stairs, I found I could not say anything, not even that.. I loved this record, and I wanted to see who was playing it. I found a boy in a room with an open door, sitting at a computer the way I do sometimes. I stared at the back of his head for a few minutes, and then walked away. As I left the house some small white moth seemed to fly out of my eye.

A hand moves; a song ends. A small girl creeps among the bees. Bees fly through the sculpture.

I miss my accordion. I'll unpack it tomorrow.

- - -

sept 12.

They told us that gravity or something of that sort would keep the stars from falling. But their wisdom and their detachment hadn't kept the stars from falling.

- - -

sept 10. squall of slugs and saxophones

When I look out the hind window of my room, I can see the field where my ornamental lawn penguin sits rapt in an old folding chair. He looks westward, towards the Green Mountains. They are just a looming color. Today they're a grey slab sitting next to the sky like a Mark Rothko painting. It's started raining. Wind taps the plastic wings. There's a flock of goldenrod in front of him. Yesterday, somebody pinioned his neck under a door to keep it open while they unloaded their car. That made me frown.

Today is the first day that Vermont is covered by clouds, so I am peaceful again.

Grey skin, displaced carrots. Castors castrating. His voice was a flute made out of discarded rifle parts.

The other day I found a cement throne at the edge of the woods. It was full of leaves. I swept them aside with a human hand. So far that is my favorite place to sit. The treehouse is nice too. It's really easy to be alone here. You just have to walk in one direction.

Classes start tomorrow. The past four days has been "orientation" - that means you have to tell people your name a lot and eat fruit salad for every meal. Well, there are good bits too. On Wednesday night they're showing Pee Wee's big adventure on a bigscreen, except it's outside in a field! I will ride up astride my bicycle and pretend it is like a drive-in movie. Tonight there is supposed to be bouncey-house and a giant slide on the lawn, so I do hope it stops raining.

It's too bad I haven't been writing here because now I have too much to tell about. I have seen white skunks and had conversations with squirrels! Probably I should tell you about my adventure of making friends. It was very effortless. The first few days here, I was not a likely candidate for becoming friends with anyone at all. That's because I was hidden. Whenever it was mealtime, I would retreat to my room and eat pudding cups. "Ostrich-sized from the get-go!" I thought cheerfully. I never suspected it would change. People were always saying things like "nobody is going to come knocking on your door" and "don't be one of those people who just sits in their room all the time. Don't be one of those people." And I didn't care. I did sit in my room. I am one of those people. Last night, I was lying on my bed reading the last few pages of The White Bone when someone knocked on my door. I made friends with her because she was seeking vegan sunscreen.

We went to dinner together and scrounged up a meal of curried lentils and lemonade. Some dumb people came and sat at our picnic table and we both stared at the floor for a little while before I suggested we go try to climb on the roof. Someday we want to record the bell that's in the steeple up there, tapping on it twice a minute with railroad ties. We will probably fall through the ceiling and die. The building is apparently the biggest fire hazard in the state of Vermont or something impressive like that.

Later we sat on the lawn and I was disemboweling a cattail. The stuff inside looked like gosling feathers. A boy came up to where we were sitting and asked if he'd overheard correctly that I played the accordion and the singing saw. I nodded. Then he asked me if I so happened to like the Music Tapes and I nearly wanted to kiss him. We talked for a while and all arranged to meet at 9:34 that night to play music in the old stone mansion by the meadow. I like it there a lot. It is like something that fell out of time. The woods in the back are thoroughly haunted.

The boy brought his ukulele (no joking) and the girl brought pipes, bottles, bells, and a frog-call. Other kids came too and played with us, on a guitar or beating on a cardboard box with twigs. It was really the most fun I'd had since I got here. When we finished playing we ran around through the house and our feet made nice songs. I wanted to sled down the big stairs on a piece of cardboard, but they were covered with some sort of sled-deterrent and it didn't work very well. One boy tried to get a running start on the landing and ride the cardboard down on his stomach. Instead, he came to an abrupt stop on the first step his sternum hit. I stood there kind of giggling. Yes, that's me: the girl who inspires people to jump facefirst down flights of stairs!

The mountains are black now, crowned by tiny, motionless clouds. The weather changes very quickly here.

- - -

sept. 2

i am leaving tomorrow morning; i am taking eeyore, a pillow, an armful of bruises as deep as the ocean.

you kids write me sometime..

- - -

sept 1.

cold mud and flying foxes
slowly stir the heart.

i will put it in a cage so you can still come and see it. the spot of fox. bundled into boxes beneath my eyes. i will put it on display like a zebra in a zoo.

having things
is oppressive.

having to eat things
is demoralizing.

I'm at my parents' 'til I leave Monday. Everything is the same color. I ride my bicycle for miles along the deserted railroad line. There are big wooden bridges and besides that no human things to be seen anywhere. In Minneapolis it is always hard to feel that way. It reminds me of the day when I will live with donkeys.

We'll record the clouds and there will be
sheafs of asparagus.

I moved out of my house two days ago and'm already back there having dreams about it when I go to sleep. I miss my best friend. I want to marry him. This is the first time I've held a pen in two days..

"LA LA LA LA LA LALALALALALA LA LA!"
"Jesus Christ. What is the point of that?"
"I'm spreading cheer and joy!"
"I'm impervious. Go away."

Yesterday I washed the hundred year old quilt that is going to Vermont with me. It came from my grandma's house. My dad says that my grandma is a lunatic. He said that about five times today. When I asked if people would call me a lunatic when I was grown up, he said they already did. Anyway.

You have to wash a quilt in the bathtub with a giant wooden spatula like the ones used by bakers to retrieve loaves of bread from the oven. We didn't have one (I think they only have them in France), so I just used my paws - to squish and squash the soap through a century of hardened sweat and tobacco spittle. The water in the bathtub turned brown like some sort of broth. It made me really eager to sleep with this thing.

After rinsing it out three times, I swaddled the quilt in a bedsheet and got my mom to help me carry it to the porch to dry. We had to transport it in a shower curtain so that water would not slop all over the place. I imagined I was carrying a dolphin down the stairs in a glistening sling! It was heavy. When we set it down, the quilt was curled up in the fetal position. It looked just like some malformed little child, a boy, wrapped inside with his knees pressed up to his eyes. I was afraid to unwrap it. It was like a premature foal, stillborn with less legs and hearts than usual.

i think i am being haunted by conor oberst. i don't know what this means. i feel really sick.

- - -

august
july
june
may
april
march
february
january
& december
& norris & the dreaded biscuits