The Empty Head

The Endless Crab

I was unemployed and living in desperate poverty in my mother's house. Cigarettes were sticks of joy and scarce—I had six left in a crumpled pack in my black t-shirt pocket. Female companionship was my only escape and it was as rare as flowers on the moon. I was in no mood for it.

The complaints began to fall like rain from a pregnant sky.

“When are you going to get a job?” The standard opening.
“Do you know what it's costing me to support your lazy ass?” A demand for data.
“All you do is sit around and stare into space.” My philosophic nature does not inspire her.
“This has got to end sometime.” A hint of tears as she gazes into the unknowable future. My mother has no faith in me. I sheath myself in mental steel. Her corrosive tongue does not tire.

“Are you even listening to me?”
“Have you made any plans at all?”
“Have you even thought about going back to school?”
“I give and I give, and all you do is take.”

I found myself wondering, though the probability seemed infinitely small, if the house were built over an active volcano. Exploding red hot magma, I tell myself, would be a very sweet sound right about now. But I am too well educated. I am aware that the Midwest is tediously stable, geologically speaking.

The nag droned on, her voice attaining a marvelously shrewish pitch, not unlike the sound of a chainsaw applied to aluminum siding, or perhaps more accurately, the furious noise of a thousand wasps as they buzz angrily against a sheet of virgin tin foil.

“I don't think you're even trying!”

The volcano idea being a hopeless dream, I began to apply the techniques I'd learned from shy yogis living high in the mystic mountains of the Far East. Slowly, the blood vessels in my head started to close, depriving my brain of precious oxygen. I floated, dying, in a beautiful dream. My ears explode, and a blessed silence follows. I suddenly remember the six unsmoked cigarettes, but it's too late to worry about that now.

Then, the impossible miracle. The floorboards burst into flame with a hissing sound. She rises, screeching incoherently, on a giant fiery plume shat from the Earth's core, and I watch, astonished, as she disappears from view into the distant photosphere, taking her huge flapping lips and all her black, parental disapproval into orbit.

I revive myself quickly as flaming bits of debris fall around me and the house finds a voice, rumbling deeply like some live thing. I reach for my cigarettes and light one. Happy smoke exits my nostrils in twin curling streams as I reflect that sometimes dreams really do come true.

And not just in the movies.

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