WHITE CHEESE
Little black snakes were dancing in the new snow, tunneling and making holes. My front yard seemed a white, soft cheese.
The time was 6:17 AM. The sun had just risen. And so had I.
Look. If I tell you that no one existed on that day, if I tell you that everyone skipped ahead, moving the calendar forward two days without me, would you believe me? Yet it was true. Somehow, for one single rotation of the earth, nobody existed but me. Everyone had crashed straight from Monday into Wednesday, forgetting Tuesday in her entirety. Leaving me here in a Tuesday, all alone. They all thought they were inside a Tuesday now, of course. But secretly it was Wednesday, and they were all out of joint.
I say everyone, but of course I don’t mean everyone. Just the humans. Just your Billys and Sallys and Toms. The plants and the animals? All still here. And some odd new others were here, too. Who were the others? Well, those snakes for a start. Things that didn’t make sense. Things I’d never seen before. Unpleasant things, and pleasant ones, too.
I’m a curious man by nature. As a curious man, the first thing I did was walk inside my neighbor’s house, and rummage through the closets. And the bathrooms, and the kitchen. Etc. I didn’t take anything, of course, I just walked around. Inside of some of the chest of drawers, I found little metal chipmunks. Nesting, twisting. Making funny horrid scraping sounds. Collecting rusty metal, and fortifying all the doors. Fortifying against what? Against some unseen devil? I wasn’t sure of their aim, but I wished them luck, and left them to it.
I quickly noticed hazy “glow spots” scattered around the neighborhood. Hard to explain them, exactly. It just felt like a “something” was there. Or should be there, yet wasn’t. A kind of man-shaped afterimage. Or a placeholder. Whenever I got too close, the hair on my arms would rise, as though they emitted their own static electricity. I avoided passing through these points of strangeness, not knowing exactly what would happen if I did. Not really wanting to ever find out.
Another thing I noticed was the absence of the number seven. The seventh house on every block was missing, for instance. And when I put my two hands together, the seventh finger would be gone. But if I separated them and looked at only one hand at a time, it would return. Same with the toes, or anything else. If conceptualized as part of a numerical sequence, it would be missing. If isolated from that sequence, it would return. And if I counted aloud from one to ten, my mind would skip seven, unable, time and time again, to speak the missing number.
One would assume this would cause major problems. But in point of fact it caused me absolutely none. So I ignored it completely, and continued on my walk.
Living in this embarrassing “suburbs by the sea” I was often led, more or less by accident, towards the beach. Today being no exception, I soon found myself facing the lovely ocean with a pound of sandy snow in my tennis shoes, and my eyes in heavy squint.
The beach was unoccupied with the exception of a bearded white mouseman who was collecting those hazy glow-things I mentioned earlier from various points along the beach, and assembling them into a circular pattern near the oncoming tide. When the geometric shape had been filled in, the glowing empties would flash out completely, leaving behind a true Nothing. And then the mouse would collect more hazy empties with his paws, placing them back in the newly opened slots, and so on and so forth. A seemingly endless, thankless task. I walked up to his vague symbol in the snow and asked him what all the activity was for.
“It’s for the harvest, don’t you know?”
“No, I really don’t know,” I responded.
“We harvest absences. Every seventh rotation. Around that little sun. Make sense?”
“Make sense? Hmm. Maybe so. But what about me?”
“Not absence.”
“What then?”
“Accidental presence.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Means nothing.”
I knew I’d get nothing out of this tricksterish mouse. Nothing usable, anyway. I decided to gaze at the sea. The absences that had been so recently emptied from the mouse’s inner circle suddenly rose from the ocean’s hidden depths. They were gold-painted now, utterly unnerving and without expression. They moved in perfect tandem, these gold-painted gods of the void, inching slowly toward the beach, and toward me. They opened their mouths, yet I heard nothing. There was nothing behind those painted lips, nothing inside. Not one single squirming tongue. I turned and walked away, feeling dizzy and unmoored.
I’ve always been a quiet, introverted individual, but the lack of any decent companionship was finally starting to sort of bother me. So I ransacked the local houses and shops, searching for anything vaguely human-shaped. I gathered dolls, teddy bears, mannequins, action figures... And then arranged these new friends in the circle of beach chairs I’d set up in the middle of my cul-de-sac.
The snow was beginning to fall again, giving the dolls a soft white covering. And I spoke to my friends slowly, explaining my life, my loves, my ideas. Just like a teacher to his pupils. Some seemed attentive, others glassy eyed and distant. But no matter. I continued expounding on the virtues of Japanese literature, bluegrass music, and my mother’s autoharp collection until the fading sun had reached her finale.
I looked up at the distant sky, enjoying the pleasant exhibition. She had divided herself into reds, oranges, pinks. And as I watched, I began to feel an odd sensation. Something in my fingers, something down below. I raised my fingers up towards my eyes, and I counted them.
Still no seven. And yet, each time I reached what might quite possibly be seven, my mind stuttered. Stopped. And it felt as though there was a vague something at the tip of my tongue. Something waiting just around a corner…
And it felt as though the rest of my body was beginning to fade in and out. And the snowflakes, or at least some of them, were beginning to fall through the emptiness of my skin. And the ____ finger, the one between the sixth and the eighth, was beginning quite possibly to reform. To break through reality, and be reborn.
A swap? Some cosmic trade-off?
My friends, my little toys, they all turned and held that finger to me, too. The one between the sixth, and the eighth. The one I almost couldn’t see. And yet (maybe) somehow could.
The doll between the sixth and the eighth doll ascended from the throne of his beach chair, joints squeaking. On two plastic feet, this king approached me. He reached out his unwarm hand, and placed it through my half-gone chest.
He spun it. Spiral motion.
I dissipated, became a dream. An angel in the snow.
My finger remained, falling to the half-covered asphalt.
It was the seventh one.
[Wednesday, 7:13 AM. A little boy on a red bicycle circles the cul-de-sac over the half-melted snow, hooting and hollering like an injured gull. His bike wheel hits a severed finger, which bounces and gets trapped in the spokes. The finger remains here. Pointing. Circling. Guiding the way to the void…]