Lake Shibishikong 1968

From Ollywiki

I want to write something about my childhood summers, one in particular at a place called Shibishikong, my sister and I with our weeping impetigo sores, the deer fly bites little volcanoes of infection from the fever piss water we swam in with the sunbeams diffracting through it onto the ripples of silt and my corpse white feet sinking in and candied air pregnant with dockside creosote and the dead, warm grass and drifts of lustrous flies, sapphire twinkling on the blood-stained, cardboard trays, arrayed on the garbage pile like a little Sydney opera house while their frantic hairy tongues lapped at the de-hymenated Saran wrap and all I felt was longing so I dipped my blue, plastic bucket into a black shadow of catfish fry to pull them into my shrinking universe of off-gassing vinyl upholstery and road dust on the dashboard and my sister’s matted head bobbing between her goat knees, as she puked on the rubber mat beside me, a travel trailer, burning out of control on the shoulder of the road, the grub-armed woman next to it sobbing into her hands and our family driving right on through the thoughts of her incinerated children and the tiny, dead fishes sloshing in the bucket at my ankles, the pin prick stares of their silent suffocations piercing through the surface film till we pull into our cul-de-sac, its pavement still in the death throes of the last afternoon of summer, the summer still gasping for life, as I poured it into the storm sewer and slunk into the stagnant furnace of my room.