April 2007
• LITERATURE •
NEEDN’T NEED
An Excerpt By Kyle Hernandez I Now it’s a miniscule ring of dust on the not-so-white baseboard where the little rubber doorstopper that goes “boing” used to be. Also there’s a minute black hole, first punctured by a thin nail or possibly a screw, where the ants come and go in long lines sometimes, but only if you focus hard and usually for hours at a time. All of this combines creatively to create this picture of the bigger picture (most likely a surrealist painter’s rendition of a God-like bird with no beak). Its meaning? Just a window. A rainbow? A filter. And don’t you know where you’d be without a filter? Probably on your knees, lacing an actor’s navy, spaghetti shoestrings behind a lush, red velvet curtain, with an audience screaming for just one more occasion to joyfully throw fresh roses and maybe-not-sofresh silk undergarments. You’d be scraping paint from old wooden lawn furniture, sanding down the water-raised grain, and anxiously awaiting your chance at applying a fresh, thin coat of oil-based mahogany stain and then perhaps several more coats of something called “polyurethane”, but you’ll have to be sure to read the label again. Or you might be munching grass and dandelion in an expansive green meadow at the foot of ominous mountains (“ominous mountains” your words, not mine), waiting for the crusty shepherd to harvest your precious wool. If you knew about us, would you ever allow yourself to end up like that? You wouldn’t. By the way, we see everything you do. And we just have to tell you… we just thought that you’d want to know that you’re rubbing your eyes too much. They’re getting so red and irritated. You really must stop that. God, I hope you don’t have pinkeye. And constantly picking lint from your bellybutton or navel (“navel” your word, not ours) isn’t going to make you any more of an adult (“adult” your word, not ours), so you should stop that as well. You don’t want to rip anything or irritate your intestines or prevent the growth of hair. Plus, you might create stretchmarks or other scars that will later have to be lasered away in some plastic surgeon’s office while his assistant, who can no longer move the once-delicate features of her face, looks on with dead eyes. Just be careful. You don’t want to end up like that surgeon’s assistant, do you? Of course you don’t. You know, I’m truly sorry that we see everything you do. Oh Lord, how sorry I am. We don’t mean it when we walk in on you while you’re masturbating or wiping your ass or singing
FARAWAY
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