The Sold Coast

The thoughts come in clouds. It is sometimes hard to tell if it is the mold thinking or the prior brain. A certain musty odor to the thoughts may suggest mold's distinctive influence. A cloud might develop near my right temple and slowly travel toward the base of my spine, trailing thoughts as it goes. Sometimes the world will clap its hands and I will suddenly become dizzy, the brown and beige room swinging around me like a gyroscope. I enter the yellow room and lie prone on the sofa.

The sofa could be a participant. It is old and crumpled. We inherited it from the family, and it carries decades of the family's dust in its cushions. The sofa is covered with loose-fitting cream-covered fabric. Pillows slant down toward the wall. Anyone foolish enough to sit on the sofa slides toward a black hole. We have long discussed killing the sofa -- dismembering it and leaving it out to be hauled to the garbage mountain. But the sofa is still here, emitting soft puffs of dust from decades of the family's dusty actions whenever it is prodded. The dust mingles with the mold spores. It stimulates the corners of our eyes.

We have carpet. I vowed never to live in a carpeted apartment, but perhaps I did not swear loudly enough. When we moved in, the carpet was new and blue, and had the odor of a freshly laundered schnauzer. Uma, our animal, claws at the carpet and pulls its fronds apart. It is now busy with dander: dead flecks of her skin. When I enter the carpeted room, muscles in my throat constrict. I lie on my back on the carpet, tossing a quarter or nickel up toward the ceiling, and catching it in the palm of my hand. When the coin slaps down squarely in my palm, it feels pleasant. Often I will misjudge the toss, and the quarter or nickel will go clattering against the keyboard of the laptop or the ivory control switches of the Vox organ.

When we leave here, the spores will travel with us. I will sneeze on a new wall, and the spores will rush out like a ribbon, and bounce into cracks in the white facades. There, they will establish cliff-face villages, like rock dwellers in the Hindu Kish. Life will be hard for a time. But they will propagate. Some will find their way back into my respiratory system. Reunited with old friends and old ways of life, they will rest together in hot valleys of mold. And will I breathe in and out, typing, always typing, as the colored clouds cross over the inside of my forehead.

# posted by Spring Chicken 2009 @ 4:06 PM