Free The Sky Below by Stacey D'Erasmo Page A

It looked like a sentence to me, like a rebus
—screw time circle bubble.
I couldn’t quite make it out. Was it a line from a Morrissey song? I squinted. No. But I felt the space between the random items on my art table as a bar of music, and I felt this odd opening in my chest, as if the smoke from my cigarette had turned white, cold, and propulsive. My left hand began to feel as if it was burning.
    Down the creek, something was whirling. The air darkened, bent; it made a low, booming sound. The whirl was wrapped in rain, like the invisible man. It was the wind in the arroyo, became two whirls. Three. I could see them all rushing, keening, moving rapidly up the creek. My left hand burned hotter; my ears popped. I was afraid, but I couldn’t move. The hair on my arms stood up as if yearning. The whirls, and everything around the whirls, rolled toward me, thundering my heart, my ribs, my knees. They weren’t my sister’s cloud of golden birds; they were bulls, they had hooves; and yet they weren’t animal at all. They were something else. They were enormous, nearly pushing me over. But when they arrived, I couldn’t see them. Instead, a heavy, warm rain strafed my face. I desperately grasped the trunk of the cottonwood tree with both hands; I clutched it to me like a lover. I didn’t care what I looked like or who saw me. As their massiveness descended, they filled me and moved me, they pressed at my eardrums and hardened my cock. Instinctively, like a smaller animal caught in a stampede, I pushed myself up into the tree, the rain falling hard on my face, falling on my hair and inside my collar, slithering down my spine. I made it onto a low branch, climbing roughly, scattering bark with my boots as I went, digging awkwardly into the tree. My left hand was still burning. More or less perched in the tree, holding on to the trunk as hard as I could so as not to be blown into the air and lost forever, I closed my eyes. I let the whirls talk to me.
    I surrendered. I took their breath into my breath,
shivering, my cheek pressed so hard to the bark that I nearly became the bark, stiffening and cracking. They filled me, and then as quickly as they had arrived, they swept up out of the tree and away, leaving me drenched, shaking, and cold. I made my way down from the tree. I crossed the creek, wading right into the water, my chains tangled with mud and silt. In my wet jeans, my wet sweatshirt, I trudged back across the creek and into the dome. I took my wet boots off and the muddy chains smacked the floor. I took my soaked socks off. In my bare wet feet, I stood with my head bent in the center of the art room. My left hand was cool. I began to cry. I thought it had happened—that I had been changed.
    From that day on, I nearly lived in the geodesic dome. I felt like I was in my own space station orbiting another planet when I was in there. I was full of inspiration. I brought in my father’s old transistor radio. In Arizona, it got a mixed schedule of born-again rantings, call-in advice shows, and oldies. I listened for hours and hours at night as I carefully taped and glued in tiny watch gears or pubic hairs or teeth or little heads I cut out of tin, or I wrote a sonnet in an interior corner of the box in minuscule handwriting that couldn’t be read unless you were a mouse hanging upside down. I made a Tereus box out of feathers and bones that I’d found along the trails outside, plus some arrows I pulled out of a souvenir Indian maiden’s tiny suede quiver. I made a Phaëthon box with a half-melted Ken doll and a Hot Wheels car in it. I built the boxes myself out of manzanita that I cut into thin strips, planed, sanded, and nailed together with delicate, expensive nails I ordered from a supplier in Belgium. You can’t get nails like that anymore; they had been used to make wooden microscopes. I spent all the money I earned from drugs on those nails. It seemed like a fair