From the Fire Hills

Soft Costs

29 SOFT COSTS Not the steel of real green, sweaty presidents mutton-chopped and fretful, no fistful of ogling pyramids or nickel buckshot the jackpot vomits. Not the excruciating weight of the penny lost below that ’03 Yaris in the split-level, its corrugated edges turning the cathedral green of Danish copper. Not even the mother of all those popsicle kids crowding the checkout line, who waits for the register to end its refrains before she plunges into her ludicrous purse, slaps a checkbook open, and composes her elegy to speed. (Behind the window of her license, even the photo laments its holograph profile of the state of despair they are all trapped in.) Not any of that. Instead, think a pat of butter slinking off a turkey thigh, the down of a cat that naps your comforter to death. Think of comfort, reliable excess, pleasure in that numbers game, where the tidy ledger swells to blue and everywhere leaks its secrets like the Camembert in its balsa coffin, stinking of success, which is the smell of putrescence. For now, some digits in the Beatnik rant of your mortgage papers grow tired and old, wear their trousers rolled, order the fish at four, grow soft as lint in your pocket, which once belonged to your shirt and, further back, a farmer in West Texas, who at this moment dreams of you amid his plush green field. ...