PRESSURE PRESS ARCHIVE

SPELLING s-e-r-e-n-d-i-p-i-t-y on a steamy window Some evenings the rain that sagged upon Erie, Pennsylvania, was all mist, a cloud lowered like a palmful of opiated smoke over the city. Flavored fog with aromas of oranges & diesel & worms, rat-shit & fermenting grapes, soft garages, chemically-layered lawns seething chlorine & methane gases, brown whiff of late trees as they sing toward sleep & ice, fish burping right under nostrils, & the flatulentness of satanic crows, all edges of these wet smells coalescing in human skulls washing thru levels of memory & experience create the glue to nail zoology to Life in America. Within the rain, John Serrano sat cross-legged on a hard kitchen chair in front of his typewriter behind a broken door-frame door his young son had slammed & slammed & slammed for a couple years inside the shell-white house on the corner of the block; dry, doubly, after kicking two decades of hard, wild drinking. Still, he tasted bourbon in his chest. He remembered the fuzzy beer buzz of that first can of the day. Dealt the choice of booze or wife, John wisely picked Mary Ann as his true companion thru the future. She was cooking sausage but getting popped by bullets of grease at the stove. She yelped a few uncontrolled obscenities before bursting into John's room, squashing her hands across tight under her armpits with a sour, sore look of pain on her face. "I burned myself," she sobbed loudly. "It hurts!" "Ouch. Let me see." John tried prying her elbows. Mary Ann was frozen by the thought, the image of her hands on fire, flame flying from her wrists like an ejaculating pair of roman candles. She shook her body no. "Come on, just let me look." Tears had begun to stream from her watery, panicky eyes, & when she finally decided to unclench her hands from her own grasp to show John what happened, she wiped the sides of face with her bare, moist forearms. She looked drenched in tears & a sweat of fear. John kissed the baby robin red skin of her burns. "You'll be ok," he soothingly whispered. "Run them under cold water." Mary Ann obeyed. She returned to the sausage, sniffling. After supper John returned to the typewriter, & the rain on the window & the rain in the night.