THE SWARM
The dim apartment smells yellow and glows yellow. It is sparse and
food is rotting, the scent trapped in the refrigerator. The Venetian
blinds are crooked, no trace of the steady parallel light rays they
should promise. The large square hands of the old man hold the flesh
of the hips of the young busboy, a large kite and an apron from which
a book is slipping lays on the kitchen table. One leg has a dusty
dictionary under it to keep the whole table from wobbling. There are
thrusts and grunts and soon the boy pulls his pants up to his waist,
securing them with a thick woven leather belt. A
cigarette dangles from
his dry lips and bare-chested he looks around
for his shoes.
He has already taken the small apartment in, the old man had walked
down the hallway and he had trailed behind, studying the man's
awkward, heavy gait. The man had tried two keys from his key ring
before one slipped in and unlocked the door. His finger flicked the
light switch and the busboy had drifted around the room, the bed was
made neatly in a military style. The rest of the room was in shambles.
Chipped and mismatched dishes with floral patterns of them, a few
books wilted on the bookshelf; Frost, Poe, Whitman. The busboy had
picked up a leather bound copy of "Song of Myself", leafed through the
pages and read a few lines aloud. The old man picked up where his
voice left off, reciting the words, pulling them from his memory,
pulling the book from the busboy's hands.
Now the old man is making coffee, the bitter scent permeating the
small apartment, beating against the windows and circling back to the
boy's nose. The old man is naked except for a pair of striped boxers
over which his stomach slightly protrudes. His chest is hairy and
silver, the coffee looks like thick back tar, barely moving as he
blows against it. The boy pulls on his shirt and apron, finds his
shoes.
"You really should quit" says the man in his voice, accented as
heavily as his steps, gesturing towards the cigarette still dangling
from the boy's mouth, growing shorter all the time. The boys smiles
and nods, says something that could be, "sure" and walks out the door
without a backwards glance.
He runs his hands over the rough wallpaper in the hallway and realizes
there is only the butt of a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He lets
it fall to the faded carpet and nudges it with his boot for good
measure. He sticks another between his chapped lips, inhaling as he
lets it touch the flame in his hands Smoke billows from his mouth and
he pulls open the heavy door and the light that barely made its way
into the old man's apartment now hits his eyes, scalding them. He
squints and takes another long drag, trying to remember where he is
going. His next shift starts in twenty minutes but when he walks to
the bus stop he takes the one going the wrong direction.
The bus is nearly empty so he sits towards the front, takes his
book from the apron
and reads the same line several times before looking
around. An old woman
with cobwebs around her eyes sits across the aisle from him.
He spies a tiny dragonfly barrette nestled in her white hair.
"You like dragonflies?" he asks her, his voice accidentally falling
into a whisper halfway through his sentence. She looks perplexed for a
moment, thinking the question had come from nothing, finally she pats
her hair and remembers the barrette.
"Yes, they are beautiful" she answers and looks past him out the
window. His mind bubbles and he wants to tell her about male
dragonflies finding the weakest female who cannot fight him off. He
scrapes all competitive sperm from her body and injects her with his
own, often making holes in her skull or eyes when his claws hold her
too tightly, he wants to tell her that this ritual evolved over
thousands of years, at least. This is their highly evolved, best, and
most simple way to survive. He gets off at the next stop, the heat
hitting him.
McCall Johnson has been involved in the independent publishing community
for many years, has put out many zines, and her poetry and short prose pieces
have been published in many publications and writing competitions.
