It was a green block of – something.
I discovered it in a closet and was drawn to it powerfully,
inarticulately. I pushed a finger into it and it felt like
something that would spring back – it resisted with some spirit –
but it didn't spring back. The dent remained. And it gave with a
faint crunch, like crusted snow. I didn't know if I had ruined it,
whatever it was. I hid it where I found it, upside down, hiding the
finger-dent.
My childhood is full of such hidden
transgressions. It's strange, because my parents were mild and
reasonable people, and I was a willing and obedient child: a quick
confession would have liberated me from many quiet miseries! But I
was unable to confess, then or ever. And I crept back again and again
to take the stuff out, and to stick my fingers into it. That strange
snow-crunch; that feel of breaking flesh; and an odor of post offices and attic rooms.
I suppose it was floral foam, of some
sort. I'm sure it cost less than a dollar. Soon there was no way to
hide the fact that I had mangled it. I kept going back and crunching
it, craving the sensation, wondering what it was, wondering if it was
poison, wondering if my secret transgression would end up killing me.
“I had no idea he was going into the closet for that,” my tearful
mother would say. Everyone would say there was no way she could have
expected it, why would any boy do such a thing? And behind her back
they'd note that I had always been a queer boy, no accounting for me.
This at least was quick. Perhaps it was a blessing.
You could lodge things in it:
paperclips, toothpicks, straws. It would take the imprint of a key,
of a coin, of a knuckle, though not very finely.
Like almost all the stories of my
boyhood, this one trails off into hypotheticals, variants,
perplexities; it changes locales and characters. I'm five years old,
or ten, or thirteen. I can remember my sin being discovered, in
various ways, but I doubt any of them happened. My mother found the
mashed up foam and clucked at me. She discarded it without a
second thought. It disappeared and I never knew why. I was challenged
as to what on earth I had done it for. Who knows? At most one,
perhaps none of those things happened. I will never know.
Tonight I find myself longing for that
block of foam, for its unearthly lightness – like balsa wood; for
its malleability; for the burst of strange tactile information it
sent pouring up my nerves. And above all for its secrecy, and for the
alien countries it hinted at, where this was the stuff of soil. The moon rose in cold backwash of fog and fir bough tonight, contending with the streetlight, and all of it, even the streetlight, was too far away to touch.