Didi Wood's Editor's Pick
Exquisite Alarm
by Michael Cocchiarale
Exquisite, yes, and passionate, and incisive, and dizzying...this story leaves me breathless every time I read it.
Three revolutions usually serves, and here comes the coffee table again when you catch your breath to say we're just like a clock, two interlocked hands spinning across the face of our flesh-colored carpet, and thumping toward exquisite alarm . . . only since I list endearingly to right, we're really dialing backwards. This is some consolation, I concede, but not enough for now, the tick tock morning of my fortieth year.
To say you're sorry, you reach back into your time-honored bag of tricks, and I know the suit of the card long before the soft slow slide from the deck, long before the jubilant flip and slap, long before you even ask: that feel good? And that?
Of course, of course. Still, all this ticking has got me out of sorts. Here, in our blinded living room, is the soft, warm present fact of you, yet as we fly, propelled by beats of wax-winged hearts, I can't keep focused on the love at hand. Damn those neighbor kids, so new, so young, so screaming in the drive – the across the street boy, the next door girl, the splashings in her plastic pool.
Together now, the boy implores, and then in the unbearable leap of silence before the splash, I see them dry as baby powder, jumping from a craggy perch, their long, awkward tumble through air, hearts pounding through breastbones as eyes grow equal to their fate, and I hear the hard crack of water that kick starts me back to you, me – us in our morning dusk, in the middle of our lives, spinning and spinning through some strange marriage of now and then and now I'm quickly close, so close I have to clench my teeth, ball my fists together, count to seven, and eight, and nine and when all that might not work, I conjure up the things that give me pause: the cold, implacable fact of forty . . . the dry and wrinkled end to all my timing.
I fall back into the heart of our lovelorn couch, unspent as a personal day. You lay there smooth and white, blinking with incredulity. For twenty years I've wandered – in and out and in and out toward something that always left me dead as suicides on rocks below. But this time – this one and only time perhaps – I've come out with my life intact. Hear it in my back to normal breaths. Feel it in the prickling of my sweating skin. See it in the bulging of my eyes that stare beyond the cutlery of our blinds, out there, where the revolutions of morning blur, out there, where everything is coming – and I mean everything . . . in one back-winding dive towards birth.
Michael Cocchiarale lives and works in the Philadelphia area. Some of his other creative work may be found in Slow Trains, Eclectica Magazine, Tattoo Highway, and Pindeldyboz.