Thomas Kent West
Past Lives
Spring stopped being enough for me. Every year it spills out over the hills, over the parking lots, rain painting the world green. I used to feel it: the blooming that expanded the world from dark, cramped winter to open blue skies. It used to pry me open, spread me out, like a seedpod cracking open in the heat. Like waking up from a nap to find the whole day ahead of you, friends already out in the neighborhood, rushing to grab your bike and catch up.
I don’t feel it any more. The sun on my face is thin and watery. The green has undertones of gray. Even the rain feels like pinpricks, the sound of it on the roof misophonia, keeping me awake.
I’m tired of the gap between the world and me. The space between myself and spring. I’m tired of wondering about the difference between getting older and slowly dying. I know what the trees and flowers don’t. I look at them and hate their naïveté. Don’t they know that they, too, will pass away into dirt? That decay is life is decay; that mushrooms will one day swallow the world, love, God. What is faith in the face of detrivores, churning flesh that lived and loved into soil?
I feel this, at least, but that feeling is not a comfort. I do not find God in the fact that the calcium of my bones was once in ancient seashells. I do not feel the freedom of knowing one day my blood will boil back into water, will pass over my bones as rain. I see the threads that link me to the world like a puppet sees strings, and realize I am trapped. This life is just a flashpoint, a singular camera shot of a landscape that defies interpretation.
I don’t read into any of this. The scattering of nascent buds on oak trees are a Rorschach test to me, blurred and meaningless. Old songs come back on the radio, making a second pass at the world. This spring blends into all the springs before it, shadows of summers I remember. Clouds move across the landscape, waiting for no-one.
There’s the migraines, too, not as bad as they used to be. That’s something else that died but didn’t. That’s another middle I mistook for an end. The headaches linger even after the medicine, the wine, the long walks in silent woods. They hide behind one eye, make my ears ring, separating me even from silence. The ring is always there, a berm between me and the world. I want to reach across it; to grab youth by the collar and shake it, wake it up. Tell myself to live, while everything else is living.
After we make love, we lay next to the open window and hear the world moving outside. It’s dark and cool, and warm and bright, and slowly the world seeps back to me. I play with your hair and think again about how life is all mixed up in death.
We’ve been talking about past lives again. About time moving forwards and backwards like waves in a pool. I like this place where our waves intersect; where the ripples you made in time touch mine.
Compost
In the summer I started a compost. It stood at the back of the lot, out past the trees and the grass on the edge of the wood. It was a good spot because it was half sun, half shade, and the smell didn’t reach the house.
In the compost I put the dead grass that dried up in the sun. I put sticks and twigs and dried leaves. I put dandelions and logs and whole fallen branches, and soon I had a great heap of dead things.
Very soon after I added scraps from the kitchen: eggshells are best, but veggie scraps and moldy lettuce and the end of carrots will do. Next came paper: receipts and wrappers and rotting books from the attic, old drafts of unpublished manuscripts, finger paintings from children that no longer came to visit. All of these entered the pile, reduced, became dirt.
The trick, they say, is heat. Inside the pile after the pressure and the time build up, press down, the stuff at the very bottom heats up. Like the molten core of the earth. I imagined it like this, a slow, flameless burn.
Summer passed into fall and the pile grew, now with orange and red leaves, now with oceans of dried grass.
I began adding more food: chicken bones and pork fat. Half uneaten birthday cake. The ends of bottles of beer. The aroma from the pit was foul and startling, and the hot waves of it reached the house at night, cutting through the chilled autumn air.
I didn’t care. Compost was all about starting fresh. Making new soil out of old rot, working through the dead things to make something grow. I smelled that rot and dreamed of roses, arugula, sweet peppers and beets and high stalks of corn reaching for the sun.
I added the dog’s refuse, then mine. I started loading more and more onto the pile: whole TV dinners and Thanksgiving leftovers and bottles of stale champagne.
I threw in novels and plays and files and folders. Then old farm scrap and kid’s bicycles and baby cribs with star/moon sheets. I checked out what I had from the bank and scattered it in the pile.
Soon the heap was so large that it took ten minutes to walk around the base of it, and smelled so foul that the neighbors — who lived a good five miles up the road — moved away.
And the pile still grew — it grew towards the woods and swallowed trees, rotting out their trunks until they fell into the muck. It grew over wildflowers and prairie, the old tool shed and the kid’s rotting play-set.
Years passed and yet the pile grew no smaller. No matter how much I fed it, no new soil formed in the engine of decay. So I walked the highways for fresh roadkill and fed the pile slowly. Years later, when the old dog died, I placed him gently on the heap and walked away.
The house went next, year by year. The pile crept in through the windows, through the back door, reaching from room to room with tentacles of branches and rotting flowers and cracked bones. Soon the foundation crumbled in, and still I fed the heap, hoping it would become something new.
And the day came where I had nothing left to give. I waded into the heap, fingers parting the grass and bones, and fell away into the splendor of rot.
originally published in Bright Flash Literary Review
Thomas Kent West is a queer writer of speculative fiction. He is the winner of the Rue Morgue “Artifacts of Horror” Contest, the Content Flash Fiction Contest, and the Black Hole Entertainment Short Fiction Prize. His work has been featured in or is forthcoming in Maudlin House, The Other Stories, MetaStellar, Bright Flash Literary Review, Corporeal, and elsewhere. You can read more of his work by visiting ThomasKentWest.com
