The Three Fates and the Barefoot Angels

We live in a house on a street with an ordinary name. An ordinary house, save for butcher paper taped across window panes. Its coordinates, however, spread across a map’s axis. All the city streets and rural lanes.

Do you want to know where you are going? Angels don’t wear socks, we are able, at this juncture, to reveal.

Where am I? Where am I? you call out. These words reverberate across the cool skim of consciousness.

Where am I?

And if we were to be so bold to respond: Might we divulge that you stumbled slipping out of bed? How banal. But it’s all banal, we must say.

Have I nothing? No photos? No jewelry?

We wipe slivers of sweat from your forehead and reply nothing.

Why am I here?

Because you couldn’t arise from the floor.

It is as if we speak in foreign tongues. We conjugate verbs backward. No one understands. We live in constant misunderstandings. Misdirections. Miscommunications. The toll it takes.

We play purple shadows, the sound of a fever, on your shoulders. We’re the only ones who know how close you are.

We’re the only ones who know your other name.