Daily Archives: July 10, 2009

At some point, the hungry ghost had stolen my eyes and slipped some spare dead ones into the sockets.  I had probably passed out.  With the wrong eyes I could see only the ends of things- little children growing into bad adults.  The death of a new potted plant.  Ghost dogs and cats crowding sidewalks and windowsills.

Every place spoke to these eyes of decay.  First thing in the morning there were corpses stacked in the kitchen.  Whose kitchen was this?  All the women that lived here before me were gone and they left me alone.  Rattling the burners in an empty flat that should hold a family.

I fled the hungry ghost, but I took its eyes with me.  I began to notice they weren’t working properly.  At parties, they would see empty rooms.  They were reverse heat sensors.  They saw only cold inhospitable bodies.  Following them I tried to pound the chests and breathe air into the lips of the long dead.  The dead struggled, irritated and embarrassed at my attempts to wake them. My fingers stroked a cold man’s sides and felt many fresh wounds, lines slashed precisely to numb his living body.

After I fled, I began to walk carefully, like trying to navigate the floor while looking down into a mirror pointed at the ceiling.  I didn’t bother trying to retrain the eyes, but I stopped taking them seriously, stopped defibrillating marble.  There go my eyes again, following the worst person in the room.  I planted my ass on a couch and talked instead to people who seemed dull with life, who didn’t need me.

In this way I bored the ghost’s dead eyes so much that one day I woke up and they were gone.  Instead of empty cellar pits I saw houses with light in the windows.  Instead of the curled up body of my first dog, hiding in the grass to die, I felt the insistent licks of this year’s dog, hungry for breakfast.  The world now appeared crowded with life, stretching in every direction.