After they had gone into the woods I couldn’t hear them anymore. The sky’s blue was darker and the mosquitos were starting to wake up. The moon was kind of hanging shy, not ready to come out but sort of peeking. It was just an awful time to go anywhere, I thought.
The freight yard was gray, turning into a thick crusty looking gray at this time. No trains would be coming through. I looked around at things and I was glad that all of the dudes had gone away, but I imagined Crocs out there in that nasty buzzing dark place with them all. I imagined them all perishing one by one in pockets of danger in the trees, except for Crocs. I would save her somehow, or she would just come back out. And nobody would know where they had all gone, the dudes. I wouldn’t even tell anybody what happened.
I was pretty sweaty for reasons I did not know. I walked around and picked up some of the beer cans lying in the back yard and threw them away, then I went up to my room and went into my bed.
I was lying there for a little while, trying to decide if I should turn the light on or not, looking at blue shapes that the light was making on the walls, when I heard the door open and I saw Crocs peeping in.
She didn’t even ask or say shit, just moused on across the floor and got under the covers sneaky with me. And that’s great. That’s real awesome. Cuz there’s Crocs and I got no idea what shes doing or how she got here, like there are black holes everywhere in how I understand things, but this is still what’s going on.
And I’m looking out of the corner of my eye at that lady lying on her side with her face pointing the other way with her hair so giant and kind of getting in my face and her legs curled up a little, and the first thing that I think is that good lord is it giving me a hell of a time figuring out how to live.
Crocs just lying there in the bed. Like what the total fuck, I’m just puzzled off my ass. But who wants to look too deep into anything, probably better just to let sleeping Crocs lie. But she’s probably only pretending to sleep because its been like 14 seconds and nobody I know falls asleep that fast.
Its weird that she’s here. Like whats the idea? She’s always making me make things up, making me ask questions. Her face points towards the whole wide room, mine faces towards the wall, her butt facing me, I’m lying on my back.
I can see the skin of her neck is really clean, white and shiny like when you peel an onion, like an egg, her hair loose and ragged, creeping around all over. And even though she’s facing away from me, I can see part of her face, the shape of the bones in her face is weird from this angle. She’s got a sort of long ear too. I wonder, how did she get up here? Did she go in the woods and then come back, or did she not go in at all?
It seemed like it would be the best just to have Crocs just stay with me and just stay still for a while, not even be pretending to do anything. And that’s what we’re doing now in my too small bed, and its messed up because all I want to do now is tell her to get lost because now that she’s here its only a matter of time before she goes somewhere else.
Now, I don’t want to just sit around waiting for that to happen, so I feel like all I can do is just tell her to hit the road, take a hike, go jump in a lake. Or I could just tell her it’s a nice eve, chit-chat about the weather, but something had to go down, you know?
I’m looking at Crocs out of the corner of my eye, wondering if I should say anything, when I notice that she’s totally drenched, like she had just been caught in a terrible rainstorm, or like she had just gone swimming; like she had gone swimming with all the dudes at that stupid secret spring and then ran on back, to come to my room and cover my bed in water. And then I looked closer and I saw there was like way too much water on her, like it was less on her than coming out of her, like she was melting.
And she was melting, or dissolving, all of her colors were running and swirling around together, then flowing down the sides of her body, pooling all down on my sheets, with parts of her and her colors seeping onto me and on my clothes. I tried to say something to her but it just wasn't happening, I wanted to ask her where she was off to in such a rush. I could be like, “Hey, whats the hurry, cool your jets for a minute.” But there she goes, melting away. Oh hell, what a shit storm, I thought.
I rolled onto my back and put my arm over my face so that I couldn’t see anything. I could feel her melting more and more, cold parts of Crocs gathering around me and pooling deeper.
When I took my arm off of my face Crocs was gone and I was just lying in the pool of her colors, a pretty deep pool too. The colors all looked dark blue, just like a pond does at night, but if I could really see them they would be reddish or like milky swirly white clay. Either way, I was all by myself in this crap ‘natural spring’ made of Crocs. And I’m just wondering, what the hell am I even going to do. Not even particularly now, just in general. Nobody is around to help?
If I just kept laying there, I would feel worse and probably get sick. It was already cold in that Crocs pool. It seemed a little unfair that even in my bed all of this could still feel gross and terrible. So I turned on my side and curled up, if you were looking at me from up above I would probably look like one of those nasty ass pictures of the fetuses in the goo. I closed my eyes and felt some of the stuff from the pool going into my mouth and then into my nose and it got hard to breathe and my heart was kind of lumbering around in my chest.
I had a dream about being a Dad. It was some nice ass weather and I was just cruising along a road, probably the straightest road that was ever built for cruising. And cruising I was, in a real fine Truck, crankin the Tom Petty and just feeling great. And in some weird way I could feel that Crocs was around again, but I couldn’t see her. There were some great kids, like my kids, riding in the truck with me too. Those kids were shouting and flailing like great kids should. This is the zone, I thought. But then I noticed that every time I looked over at the kids they were always facing the other way and then when I looked out the window everything was black, solid black with no sheen, and I wondered why I had thought it was sunny.
I guess I woke up or something, it was like officially night and it was raining a little bit. My bed was dry and I was all by myself, so I tell myself that its just one of those nightmares, or if not a nightmare just one of those weird dreams. Its sometimes hard to tell the difference. I listened to see if Mom or Dad was home, moving around in the kitchen or something, but I couldn’t hear shit. Even though it was raining the moon was still coming in pretty bright through the window, everything looked sort of thin and blue and this whole ordeal spelled S-H-I-T-T-Y because now I’m not going to be able to go back to sleep and I’m going to nod out in school tomorrow.
I got up and looked out of the window, all of the trucks were gone. I wondered which truck Crocs had ridden in. Then I head back to my bed and I just look at the wall, where I got this poster of Jeff Gordon even though I don’t give a shit about NASCAR. So I sometimes think that things might be allright without the dudes, or if I never went swimming, or if I never did anything at all; if I just stayed in bed.
But there’s always something that’s gonna follow you to bed and its easy to drown
even there. But really, when you think about it, whose fault is that?
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