"Forest of Borders II" by Nicholas Grider
1. Me. There is only me here now, me left, or left behind and not in the Christian Hollywood sense, just here, fragment or remnant, smelling like nothing but grief and salt and sleep, and all my grief and salt and sleep is in agreement. We miss you being around, a vicinity, a center, but we don't—I don't have time to deliberate about a good label for sadness over you being somewhere else. You were always somewhere else, tall and thin and tucking in your shirts and cracking butterscotch candy in your teeth and squinting and being squinted at; you were always somewhere else, that's just more the case now.
2. Value. I collect all the emptiness around me and at night stitch it with a thread of profanity into a border that saves me from the storm of you being forever an uncertainty. Will I ever know. Do I want to. Should I ask. Pursue or allow pursuit. Seal the border with spit and pray for a demon-free night, unsubtle sleep, no dreams about men in tan slacks explaining exceptions to the rule.
3. Words. There are no. Or maybe were but have been forgotten. Some were never on the list. Companion is not the word. Love is not the word. Balance is not the word. Salesmanship might be one of the words, or brinksmanship (if there are words) because even if you’re far more than a manageable stroll away I can still pluck the string connecting us. No one ever plucks it back, not you, not yours, not a vicinity’s volunteer. No words but a thread, but then maybe not even. Maybe sky. Maybe how you think you’re breathing air and don’t even know it’s mostly nitrogen. Maybe something like wistful but a hell of a lot more pragmatic and rough-hewn than fucking wistful. It was an undertaking—that might be the word. We were an undertaking. We were in bloom. We were a pop song that forgot to fade out.
4. Neglect. Was what romance, stripped of floral and cuddle, actually is. I neglected who I thought I must have been in order to tether not to you but to whatever's between us that isn't tether, which is probably neglect, which is everywhere and infinite like God but easier to name, at least neglect not measured in distance, neglect that isn’t about forgetting or ghosts but about loosening grips of complicated heroes in museum-level films. The extreme end of I didn’t get this pale all on my own. If there are words, they’re all circumvention, they’re circumnavigation, I am the fixed point, the crooked red pushpin in the map, and I can’t even recall my own damn name.
5. Storm. Tempest is a word. Allegiance is a word. Allegiance is a goddamn festival. And I have been to one too many goddamn festivals, I don’t need allegiance, I don’t need eloquence so I can render your beauty as museum candy, I need a big pile of dead ends and slack lines and I need them organized according to human coherence. Not that this is an indication of or invitation to sprawl. I gather, tangle, bundle, set alight. When I was young I used to want to use the word tangle to mean romance, but now I know that tangle just means you’ve got a shit ton of hard work in front of you, not all of which has a point, but this is just my spit hitting crabgrass, this is not a lesson or a metaphor.
6. Knowledge. If love is a word I’d say it applies about 63% of the time. Otherwise it’s a shrill whistle of unknown location and intent.
7. Absence. Not going to slather an absent you with “tell me you love me” requests because I could tell myself just fine that you love me, and how much, but all the laughing would make me cough until I got lowered down in hurt. I don’t have my hands tangled in your dark, wavy, oily hair, I’m busy laying most of my money down on possibility and laying the rest right on down on absolutes. There are very few absolutes, but I know, in time, they’ll blossom and swell just like distrust.
8. Waiting. There are still no words, motives, duties, accurate or useful dreams. There’s aluminum. I've got a sturdy aluminum memory of you. Aluminum patience, aluminum heart. I've got a terrified desert. I let you pack all the bags inside me and then unpack them, then I gathered myself into the form of a citizen and buried all the sterling silver in the back yard, then I crawled into the bed I made for sorting isolation from solitude. The bed is still big enough for two people to be lonely. They might be strangers anyway. If strangers are still possible.
9. Salvation. Theosophy won’t even. Nor will motors nor hilarious anecdote. I got a maybe bone to pick, I got a maybe hackle to raise. I got a long list but its length matters not because I always neglect it. I have, in your wake, become a mastermind of neglect. Magic neglect. A neglect expert. Nothing to do with words or how they collide like falling Erector Sets. I got a lot of words I want to say to you, but the deal is that I don’t want you to hear them. Nor just go on your merry way. Have a heart. Have several. Mine is no vacancy, is brownout, is metal-studded mud.
10. Lack. I used to want you to X or Y with or for me but all slid away but the memory of want. A memory of want is not worth much, is not legal tender, can't be filed with other aches. But what I want to tell you with my words is not that I miss you but that I lack you, and lack is a cheap and reusable kind of neglect, lack is what connects us. Sour fruit and amplitude. Lack is what transforms winner back into small-named, blank-faced persons away or alone.
11. Love. I don’t want to go to hell because of you, I want to go to hell with you.
Nicholas Grider's first short story collection Misadventure (A Strange Object, 2014) was longlisted for the Frank O'Connor Prize and their stories have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes and the Best Microfiction anthology. Grider's work has appeared in Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, The Fanzine, Guernica, Midnight Breakfast, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere; Grider is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel and a music composition/pre-med student in the upper midwest.
Nicholas Grider's first story collection Misadventure (A Strange Object, 2014) was longlisted for the Frank O'Connor Prize, and their/her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Guernica, Okay Donkey, Queen Mob's Tea House, Vol. 1 Brooklyn and elsewhere. They live in the upper midwest and are an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel; more information about Grider and their work can be found at www.nicholasgrider.com as of Sept. 1st.
Forest of Borders collects sixteen of Grider's flash stories written in the last five years, all fewer than 1500 words and all exploring, from a variety of angles, what happens when "average" American white men attempt to establish and police borders between each other and between themselves and the world. In the stories, as in life, things rarely go according to plan.
"Plagues and Obligations" (as Simon Henry Stein)
http://x-r-a-y.com/plagues-and-obligations-by-simon-henry-stein/fiction/
"Big Ideas (Don't Get Any)"
http://thefanzine.com/big-ideas-dont-get-any/
"Same Husband Twice"
https://queenmobs.com/2019/07/fiction-the-same-husband-twice/