Artwork © Robert Fleming

 

Christmas Eve in Silent Hill

There’s at least a foot of snow on all these empty, well-lit streets at two a.m. here, here where the few are all one in their interior madness, strangled Chrysanthemum cries behind sagging clotheslines, here where the locked doors moan for their lost keys like pain, like desperation. A sudden, ubiquitous exhalation of hip-high fog quiets you, undulates a few feet above the mute avenues, rolls through trash-cluttered alleys and circles its way to the start again, back to the place half-light calls first position. Decrepit, filthy and slender apartment houses scrunch their abused shoulders under the Moon, lament how the icicles tug them closer to the ground. They said we should expect a visitor tonight, a stranger come to bring every one of us a gift, to bring each one of us something we have wanted. Something we all said to the sky that we had to have. Just ahead, a streetlamp glows too much in response to your stare then snaps, scorches the air with a kiss of sulfur, hot copper, and half the block is now too dark to know what’s happening. Inconsiderately, the fog thickens, visibility less than ten feet in front of you or me or anyone now. These streets and these streetlights and these apartment house stoops don’t seem to know it’s a holiday. Body count on one hand the things they do know: scarcity, hunger and fear. Miles above, the stoic pearl of the Moon beams on, shining on something, a comet maybe, rocketing across the sky. And the morning, or God – you can’t tell which – whispers if this isn’t a good time I can come back later. Shiver from the biting cold, but think of the visitor with no gift for you at all and shiver more than ever. When it gets too much, let the minute hand of the clock in the center of town cover your eyes. Walk with your shameful thoughts to the crunch of the packed snow under your feet. Sleigh bells jingle slowly, a warning from somewhere over there in the dark silver of the fog. Listen and pretend that what you hear is only the bark of a far-off dog, realize that the other thing you hear is a mother with her head out of a fourth-story window, calling for a child she just cannot find at this hour. Her Christmas wish tonight is an easy one to understand.

 

Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in The Nervous Breakdown, Eighteen Seventy, Menacing Hedge, The Rye Whiskey Review and Cultural Weekly, among others, and he has work forthcoming in Eunoia Review. Rich recently served as Associate Editor for the online literary magazine BOMBFIRE. He is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me, a collection of poems published by Jules’ Poetry Playhouse Publications. Peep at his Bandcamp for more. He loves his life with his love Leann in the perpetually intriguing Southwest.

Robert Fleming is a gay-man, word-artist, and scientist born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada who emigrated to Lewes, Delaware, United States. Robert follows his mother as a visual artist and his grandfather as a poet. In 1986 he published the second psychological research study on gay men’s response to AIDS in United States. Then, in the 1990s he was a contributing member of the District of Columbia’s Triangle Artist group. Now Robert is a founding member and contributing editor of Devil’s Party Press’ Old Scratch Press.