My God, Is It Raining Hard
by Wes Wightman

--I am floating and hugging a fetid seat cushion 50 miles south of Cuba in a sea of jet fuel and bread, all wrapped neatly, afloat in their plastic sheathes. I tread gently, contemplating bread and how I don’t really know any black people. The strange thing is-- I was completely lucid when the plane was going down. I know where I am because the pilot had just announced on the intercom that we were roughly 50 miles south of Havana, Cuba.
--Now, everything is gone.
--I see nothing but bread. I am waiting for rescue or death or a sandwich.
--Then, with a thunderous splash, rising up from the very bottom of the ocean, I am ceremoniously carried off by four women who used to love me and may remember what I look like naked. Legs thick like sequoias with shiny fuselage arms, their rubber lips dispensing gentle kisses. They collectively place me on the nearest thundercloud and I fall as rain over Cuba. I am quickly placed into a dry woolen bed and surrounded by Spanish murmurs.
--The light coming though my window is so beautiful. It casts mint green shadows that fluctuate between infinite possibility and certain death. Not car accident death, but Grandma is at peace now death. It feels cashmere warm and tile floor cool. The light clarifies cobwebs and imperfections in vivid detail. I rise to look in the mirror and an adult howler monkey is tattooed on my face. “Millions of people have tattoos on their face,” the doctors tell me in Spanish. I am mysteriously fluent.
--The Cubans feed me nothing but guavas and retrieved bread. I grow nourished and healthy. I become the lover of a woman who is both marshmallow and regular human meat and smells like my paternal grandfather. Cinnamon gum and sebum.
--I bite and eat her marshmallow meat face and head until she has no expression. Faceless, our lust grows even stronger until she melts into a sticky pool covering my entire body. Devastated, I plunge myself into the sea to rinse her off and away.
--I am floating again, this time on my back, without a flotation device or bread. I become a fleshy boat and drift about the sea collecting bits of memories and hopes and all of the trite and meaningful and beautiful brilliant ugly terrible tingly pain and fear that I lost long ago. They look like ancient coins and I stack them upon my belly. The coins quickly pile high, yet I can only accommodate a finite number of these coins on my belly at a time. Eventually I have collected enough that when something new is found it is always at the expense of something else, as it falls off my stomach and into the deep water below.
--All of this drifting has also gathered a lot of human debris which are now like barnacles clinging to my legs and arms and testicles. My new refugees appear clean, but I know there are microscopic bacteria chomping their skin, and invisible smatterings of fecal matter clogging their pores. My barnacles require so much from me. They want berry pies and clean water and back rubs and various plastic objects. Some of them want a ride to Florida. Day and night for 9 winters, I drift and gather as their needs and burdens grow larger. More coins trade places on my belly and more barnacles form on my neck and feet and shoulders until I am completely invisible.
--One by one, I call my barnacle people over to me with the promise of a bite of orange candy and push them down until the air in their lungs is replaced with water. Exhausted by futility, I cast my coins east and north where I know I will never find them again. Now instead of floating, I kick my legs vertical and simply walk away.
--In an attempt to normalize my existence, I enroll in carnival life and develop a sophisticated moustache which makes me look dashing and emits an electric pulse to repel rodents and insects. Alone, but for my facial monkey; the carnival swirls around me and my growing moustache. People pay to stare at me with my tattoo face and my twisted gnarling moustache. Sometimes I do a diminutive dance and make gurgling sounds or push wind through my colon. The spectators think this is hilarious and they roar, they roar with cruelty, disgust and awe.
--This is my life, I muse. This is what people do. Now, I am doing it.
--I move my little fingers and toes and make my stupid mouth chew. My involuntary muscles and bodily functions perform, as the planets circle and bump around the galaxy so many times that I learn every swirl and bounce by memory.
--I barely remember the days of speeding above the clouds in jets with so much bread and floating and raining and collecting and fancy moustaches and sexy marshmallow women.

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