The Empyreal: a boy puts a pencil up his nose



During math, a boy puts a pencil up his nose. Another boy whacks the pencil further in, a slim spelunker entering the inaccessible dark of the first boy’s head, a small and secret Lascaux at the back of the class. Blurry images of the boy’s life. A video game in the long grass, a bus trip along a snowy highway, Twizzlers, and a man waving frantically on the lawn.

The pencil is a yellow joystick. Images are a flurry on the concave whiteboard of the boy’s skull, a bony Empyrean limit to the starry dark of the boy’s mind.

The second boy begins to write with the pencil, interior cranial graffiti like a whisper in a shouting crowd, an iridescent hork into a midnight sea. It is his name, his joke, his story.

Blood on the knees of the boys and the classroom floor. A teacher flailing. Dark matter. An expanding universe of friendship and loss. Hands held to the face. A diary.

Comments

Anonymous said…
thats the gayest thing i ever heard
gary barwin said…
Hello Anonymous,

First, thanks for all those folk songs you wrote. They're great!

Secondly, by saying that the story post is the "gayest thing" you've ever heard, is that a compliment, or a testament to your limited exposure to homoerotic literature? I suppose that the story could be interpreted metaphorically. I mean the first three letters of 'pencil' are suspiciously similar to the first three letters which spell out the word for male genitalia. I always did wonder about Pennsylvania.
Anonymous said…
i dont think it's gay. I think it's kinda depressing and poignantly extreme.