COUNTING TO ZERO BY JEFFREY LITTLE

1
I’m sitting inside a circle of duct tape, counting tissues. Everything’s either boned-up, ghosting, or it’s Gone. It takes me about an hour to work my way to zero. Nothing yet has plummeted from the sky, not even a turkey. I’m beginning to think that it’s all a practical joke of some kind, or a new way of counting to zero. I go on-line and buy myself a metric socket-wrench for seventeen bucks. You never know. It’s true. Just today I found out why they put the Do Not Remove tag on a mattress. It’s complicated and involves the French, the Dreyfus Affair. When you see a picture of him, it looks like he’s counting. No matter what you may think of the length of the baseball season, we still must respect the primacy of the numbers. The tallying appears to have no end. Another siren, another false alarm. Or a real alarm, but lacking context, and context is what we’re all struggling with here. If you stop and really think about it, has any of us ever seen the inside of an egg? It could be like a palace in there. Roll top desks and weird green lamps. Like in France. I walk up the stairs and I wash my hands.











2
I walk down the stairs and I wash my hands. The things we do in front of a mirror. Everyone is sort of sick. Maybe if a trellis of smoke filled the sky, or I saw someone moved on a gurney into a black sedan. But this, this is a television show. Outside it’s just a little empty, and nice. A neighbor kid on her bicycle and a breeze. A breeze! Have you ever tried to count a breeze? It’s tricky. Someone’s always coming in from the cold. When I think back and try to picture the way things were it looks a lot like today, only now through a buffer of glass. In the right light a pane of glass can be a mirror. I see a version of myself looking back into the house watching me watch the neighbor kid riding a bike. This reminds me of the obscure dread evoked in old movies of staring down into a winding staircase, a splash of dissonant piano with a single cymbal and the eyes, tied as they are to the stomach, the eyes go wide, then bottom. I realize I’m looking out the glass screen door with what could only charitably be called a slack-jawed gape. The neighbor kid’s seen worse. She brakes, and counts on her fingers the number of cats.











3
Everyone is waiting inside except the cats, the ferals and the nearly so. They think themselves responsible for this change in the situation, they patrol like lions, and at night settle upon the empty porches. Beyond hammerfall and doomcrack this is, for now, what’s left us. I would’ve imagined something a bit more gothic. Not zombies, these days they seem a little too stylized, but sewer beasts, or wendingos, or a bomb, something with a gravitas to its wake, like that silent cortege of stumps in Siberia, in the Taiga, what was Tunguska in 1908. That, I could wrap my head around. No school, no work, no beach to scurry to away from, I see a lot of people just staring at the sky. Walking around town in my six foot bubble of separation I see a lot of things, but nothing desperate, at least not today, or at least not yet anyway, that’ll come with the flies, or when the liquor stores are locked and shuttered, and the dry it comes in hard. The last, last straw. Windows are made for one purpose, really, push come to shove, windows are made to break, to shower a sidewalk with the shards of the new transactions, now that it’s been rearranged.











4
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about our curtains. I want to open them, then I want to close them, I settle on open but I am unconvinced, I walk to the kitchen and I wash my hands. Today the number I need to know is 106, which is a larger number than yesterday, which was larger than the day before. The digits are twisted like balloons, as the nightly news broadcasts its warnings and careens from side to side. Six months from now we’ll have been returned to a semblance of normality or else we’ll be scratching at the earth with sharpened sticks, eyes peeled for a tuber or roots. I busy myself eying up the better branches. Our house, now, is always full. Wife, kids, cat, and work, cat, kids, wife. The steps lead somewhere, but where? I wake up and walk down the stairs and wash my hands, feed our cat and the cat plopped on the porch outside. This is my new commute. Someone has closed the curtains, which are deep, deep red. I feel like I’m inside of a vein. Coursing. The word for today is absentia. I heat up a cup of coffee, make a sour face like I’m working, then look out a window to see the sun, all the parked cars and the cats.











5
Still, it seems inevitable. No matter how many times I wash my hands the virus is somewhere waiting. It’s patient. Obsessively precise. Like an accountant or an actuary, as much as for exactly what the virus does as for what waiting on it makes of us. I need to anthropomorphize. I need to give it a face. Anthony Perkins. Nothing personal. I just woke up and I thought, Anthony Perkins, the coronavirus is Anthony Perkins. Now I can go about my day in peace. When I hear the mail jeep outside I feel just like a dog. And when I count I count to one hundred, but still to me it’s like counting to zero. Tomorrow they’ll have me count more. My failure is that I can’t not watch the news. I wouldn’t say that I pay it too much attention but I need to have it on, or available. It’s like being a methadone junkie, no kick but the kick of empty addiction. Usually, I don’t even turn up the sound. Our cat, in the window, looks at the near feral outside on the stoop, an entente is being agreed to. Our place, my family’s, in this informal arrangement, has yet to be determined. Bets, I can hear them being hedged. On the big board the odds keep changing.











6
We wipe down every surface here, only to wipe them all down again. I’m eating a sandwich and I bite my tongue. This is what it boils down to. Everyone is looking for someone to blame. Blame biology, blame life. If I had an electron microscope I could at least start to look inside of the envelope and satisfy some vague imperative. It’s a perfect day and the cats have moved from their porches out onto the lawns. I do a push-up and I count to zero, I wash my hands and I count to twenty, I walk outside and tomorrow moves another step closer, or away. At this magnification it’s impossible to tell. I feel quantum. Birds do bird things. I have no idea what the number is today so I just stroll across the grass to feel it give a little bit beneath me, then I go further down, to where the creek straightens before making a run for it underneath the cul de sac, and out the other side. I want to follow it as it moves through the dark. But there are surfaces that we need to wipe down first before we can wipe them down again. Nothing has prepared me for the next step, whatever the next step is. We eat dinner, we begin.




Jeffrey Little: “All things considered, I would rather be in Philadelphia, watching the Phillies swamp the Mets, eating a soft pretzel and drinking some ale. Heck, down the road in Wilmington watching the Blue Rocks, thinking of ale. Everybody’s missing something these days, or someone. This poem is thinking of them. For what it’s worth, I have three issues of Mudlark you could glance at, along with all the other fine issues housed there, now that you have the time. Also a poster; this poem makes it a Gordie Howe Hat Trick. I’ve always wanted to say that. I have two books of poetry from Spout Press (The Hotel Sterno and The Book of Arcana) and one from Rank Stranger Press (Five and Dime). I am supposed to thank the great, small State of Delaware for an established professional poetry grant. Thanks. Also, poems scampering here and there. Be well.”

Other Mudlarks by Jeffrey Little: The Secret Life of Nouns, Poster No. 154 (2018); Is Nature is as a Sound is as Zero is as the Hook Dog Blues, Issue No. 47 (2012); Biography As In Syntax: The Babble Poems, Issue No. 22 (2003); and crayola in arcana, Issue No. 15 (2000).




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