A TINKLE IS THE SOUND OF TWO THINGS MEETING BUT FAILING TO MERGE

No. 1

The girl was born with the head of a boy growing out of her right shoulder. As she reached adolescence, when she showered or changed her clothes, the eyes of the boy would look down at her growing womanliness with desire and sadness. He desired to touch what he saw, but they weren’t his hands to which he was attached. Or if they were his hands then so too were they his breasts, his triangular tuft of hair, and his loose skin between the legs he could sometimes catch a glimpse of in the mirror. Maybe the other head was the intruder.

Eventually the girl took to touching herself, and the boy felt nothing through the hands, nothing from between the legs, and he knew for sure none of it was his. The girl, sensing his sadness, or growing tired of her fingers and hoping to experience the coupling she heard the single-headed girls talk about, decided to act. She went to the garage and took an old wood saw from the pegboard. She sawed away at the base of the boy’s neck. There was no pain, except once when she cut too close and nicked her shoulder.

A small flap of skin remained connecting them, but it couldn’t bear the weight of the boy’s head, which tottered, ripped off, and fell to the concrete floor. The boy winced at the impact, but was grateful to settle at such an angle that he could look up at the girl and admire the even shape of her shoulders.

No. 2

The husband sat on the couch every day, and at night he fell asleep there. He ate his meals from the coffee table, and though he must have gone to the bathroom on occasion, his wife never saw him rise from the cushions. Always in the background the television cackled, and he stared at the screen without ever focusing on the pictures. The husband grew heavier from eating bad food and never moving. With each day he sank deeper into the cushions until the wife said she could no longer tell him apart from the couch, or the couch from him, for the essence of each had seeped into the other. Where once rested the couch and on the couch rested the husband, there was now a blob of unidentifiable material, neither man nor couch, but at once vaguely mannish and couch-like.

The wife hosted a cocktail party one evening. The guests could locate only limited seating, unable to discern the couch from its occupant, and when the husband greeted them, they did not know the source of his voice.

“What was that?”

“That’s just my husband.”

“But where is he?”

“He’s there on the couch.”

“What couch?”

“Bah,” said the husband, and he stood up.

The guests gasped. To them, he had suddenly appeared out of ambiguity into concrete form, and behind him the couch had similarly emerged.

The wife turned around to find she could no longer recognize her husband or the couch and perceived only empty space where they had been.

No. 3

They clinked the wine glasses together. Then again. They clinked harder and harder until they finally clinked so hard the glasses shattered. With new glasses they repeated the process. Again the glasses shattered and the cascading shards embedded in the flesh of their hands. Blood dripped onto the starched white tablecloth and blended with spilt Merlot. They tried all night, went through dozens of glasses, but no matter how hard and earnest their toast, the glasses cracked. They were left with topless stems held in the tips of their pallid, red-streaked fingers.

“To the future,” they said, thinking of a future where the two glasses were one, sipped at from opposite sides by each of them. The distinct properties of the individual glasses would give way to a unified whole, the original components forgotten. Pushed together like two lumps of clay, leaving only a larger lump identified without reference to any preceding lumps or other subdivisions, down to the molecular, to the subatomic. But first, a toast.

Again the glasses shattered, and, giving up, the couple turned to their entrées, which were long since cold and covered with glass.

No. 4

“I painted these paintings for you.”

“I don’t like them.”

No. 5

When he retired the old man built a boat. He went to the forest and cut down the trees for the wood. He shaped the trees into planks and beams. He nailed and bound and glued them. Once the shape of the hull was formed he sealed it and painted it white. Along the top he painted a red stripe. He removed the branches and smoothed the trunk of the thickest tree. He mounted it in the middle and secured to it a white sail that would seem to glow in the sunlight. He mounted the rudder from brass fittings. He carved oars in case the wind wasn’t blowing.

The sun was bright and the wind strong on the day he loaded the boat onto its trailer and took it to the lake. There had never been a boat more boat-like. As he backed down the boat ramp the other boaters stopped to stare. With wonderment they beheld the white sailboat with the red stripe and the sail that looked like glowing silk. From the top of the strong mast to the lowest protrusion of the rudder, nothing had ever represented the idea of a boat more perfectly.

The old man felt the weight of the boat float away, and he pulled his truck forward, dragging the trailer out of the water. He parked and returned to his boat at the end of the boat ramp. He stopped. The boat was not floating in the water as he had thought, but hovered in the air two feet above the lake.

The old man’s old fishing buddy walked over.

“That’s truly a fine boat,” said the old friend.

The old man shook his head. “But how can something so perfectly formed fail to do the thing it is perfectly formed to do?”

“You’ll catch plenty of fish in that old girl.”

But as the old friend said this the boat floated higher. It drifted in front of the sun and never emerged from the glare.

No. 6

The little girl peered from around the door, which was open just enough to see out into the yard. In the yard the little girl’s best friend was playing with an imaginary friend. The best friend’s imaginary friend was an imaginary version of the little girl. The best friend saw the little girl in the doorway and waved. Suddenly ignored, the imaginary friend disappeared. The little girl closed the door slowly, peeking out the whole time. The door was fully shut. The best friend climbed the climbing tree in the yard, all the way to the top, and stayed there forever.