Harley Patton
Elk Tacos
While eating elevated cuisine at the sort of restaurant we never would have been able to afford before she got remarried, my mother told me how she’d just finished reading a book and so I asked what about. Just then the server dropped the elk tacos and everyone agreed they were incredible. Divine. Transportive.
The book, she said, was written by a hypnotherapist who’d pioneered a technique to cure almost anything through hypnotic regression. One patient for instance suffered from lifelong shoulder pain that his doctors were unable to diagnose. He was about to go in for a last-ditch exploratory surgery when he discovered by chance the hypnotist’s website on a bus stop ad. He was hypnotized the next day and regressed to a past life as a soldier for the Roman Army. He recalled how he’d been run through the shoulder with a lance during the Battle of Ravenna and awoke in that instant pain free. My mother said that she’d probably been kicked by a horse in Victorian England and that’s why her lower back always ached. I sipped my twelve dollar iced tea and considered reincarnation.
I swirled the fresh sprigs of lavender around in my mug and focused on the tinkling of the ice against the ceramic. Soon my vision began to blur and and I became in an instant an elk, sprinting away across the plains from the hunters at the treeline, ears bristling for the throng of a bowstring, barely hearing it before my shoulder went hot and I was sliding through the tall grass in slow motion, each pale yellow blade passing through my field of vision one at a time, until the plains slowly dissolved and in their place appeared an unexplainable still life of handcrafted ceramic ware and house ground masa, my last conscious thought a collection of sounds completely foreign to me: tacos.
Beaver Skull
At an oddities market slash taxidermist slash artisanal coffee roaster on the rich side of the highway last week, I found myself shouting over a Smiths song to ask the person behind the counter just what the hell exactly this was. Some sort of small rodential skull with two unnaturally long saber teeth sprouting from the upper jaw that curled up concentrically under the chin, the very end of the left one piercing into the bottom of the bone plate. The cashier slash barista slash taxidermist turned down the volume on the record player a bit and said it’s called the cranial base. The bottom of the bone plate. And that they suspected it was a beaver skull I was holding, probably one that got trapped somehow and couldn’t gnaw, seeing as rodent teeth don’t ever stop growing. Said the common pet hamster completely wears down and regrows its incisors once every twenty-two days. And it was three hundred dollars, if I was interested.
Something in the combination of holding the evidence of such a relatable tragedy and the smell of roasted coffee beans and Morrisey’s subtle vibrato on the chorus to There Is A Light That Never Goes Out just made me burst immediately into shaky tears. The casheristadermist just nodded politely as I tried to express in words that just like the beaver there are parts of myself that I’ve got to gnaw back, calcified thoughts that grow and grow, and they patted me respectfully on the shoulder as I wiped my eyes, and took two fifty for the thing instead of three.
Billionaires Are Bad Lovers
I would really love somedays to be relentlessly concerned with logistics. Matters of transport, timetables, fuel efficiency. I’d like to need to call someone by 8:30 AM New York Time on a Tuesday morning. Be a moment late to laugh at a colleague’s joke because I’m too distracted by the knowledge that any moment now the cargo plane will touch down in Buenos Aires. I’d like to stay late at the office watching live streamed dash-cam footage or a subtitled broadcast of a Japanese tuna auction. Anything to shift my focus outward, to abandon the search within myself for any crack large enough to fit a fingertip in.
I’d like to be able to tell you everything about shipping and receiving but nothing about my heart. I’d like to watch the market like a hawk but never witness my own reflection when the screen goes dark. I’d like to block my therapist’s email, to ignore all your calls, to speak to those around me with a curtness only accessible by the most stunted and uninterested and rich. I want to spend my life climbing stairs and then die at the top of the tower.
But no. I love you. So instead I’ve got to explain to you as we sign the lease today that moving apartments makes me want to scream and run away because my parents got divorced when I was young and I didn't have much consistency. And I’ve got to cry while I drive the U-haul too slow on the highway, and make you hop out when we arrive to guide me through the side mirrors so I can back into the parking lot without hitting anything.
Harley Patton is a writer and artist from Minneapolis who has forgotten where he's set something and is currently pacing around looking for it. You can read some more of his prose poem thingamabobs at miniMag or Edge City, if you’re into that sort of nonsense.
