It Was Like That, and After That, It Was Like That, Only All the Time

In the dream I have about your brother he is eating stones. On his hands and knees, he shoves dirt, rocks, and moss into his mouth while explaining something about history. Something irreplaceably ancient. Something widening and shaped away. Something brimming and tepid and arid and taxied through the delphinium-colored night. Because what is history, after all, but a dream of invention inventing itself? What is history but keys trapped in locked rooms; a meteor uninterrupted; a boat made of water; a one-armed forger writing someone else’s name over someone else’s name? In the dream about your brother, I carry him down a crumbling cliff. Some horizon before us like an overbite; God’s crooked tooth. At the bottom of the cliff, there’s a lion. And just before I think the lion is going to maul us it speaks instead. “Slow down,” the lion says. “Slow down.” And when I wake, the sky is the color of a poached elephant—surrounded by wounded elephants. Trumpeting from their worn and disfigured trunks. Just mournful debris. The bitter-sweet rumblings of now. Voicemails from your many missed appointments. Voicemails from your doctor’s office; your debt collectors; your long, long history of other people’s voices. The chalk-eraser taste of granite; of wreckage; of rubble. How you try to go someplace no voice can find you. Then they find you. Then they find you again. 

-Corey Zeller