Literary Vandals

by Nick Gaudio

1.

The boy is woken in the night. A small buck has broken in the house.
The deer nuzzles the boy while he lies still in his bed like a mannequin.
The deer snorts. The boy develops epilepsy, a transparent love for Disney.

2.

A father and his son plod over tracks in the snow.

They walk around a frozen lake, 

up a winter-green mountain. 

The son doesn’t realize his father intends to shoot

the fox or her pups. 

You get up high like this, the father says, where you can see
the whole world and something inside
you says ‘Everything down there —
everything below — is yours.’ 

‘Maybe that’s what’s wrong with us, 

that that’s our first impression.’

He hands three pelts to the boy, a map to get home. 

Fox and the Hound.

3.

A boy laughs in the dark hallway. 

4.

On Sunday a father and son watch a race — tens of dogs, hundreds, thousands of dogs — the first past the line only wins because it’s terrified. 

See? the father says.

5.

A boy lies still in the night under the sheet like a mannequin,
thinking of dogs like foxes and foxes like dogs. 

His father keeps bullets in the fridge in a Tupperware container — in case of more foxes.

6.

The boy becomes a mannequin, a Tupperware container, a fox that resembles a dog.

7.

A girl saves herself from a carbon monoxide scare.

She admits to her new friend (the neighborhood boy, who seems transparent enough) she was up all night looking at porn .

Open oven porn and porn about automobiles idling with the garage doors closed.

Gas porn, the boy asks. 

Poison porn, the girl says.

8.

A daughter lies about the etymology 

of the word forgive. 

She makes up the origin of the word 

promise for her new boy friend. 

Her mother says: We’ve built a society 

around the sin of dehydration! 

A daughter is baptized in the word 

Water.

9.

An orphaned girl sees that her mother 

has succeeded in dying.

10.

A bird chirps. 

At what point does trying to sing become 

singing, she asks the boy. 

Mr. Blue-bird on my shoulder, 

he sings, without the slightest trace of irony.

11.

A boy and a girl watch the glorious red sunset 

on the far mountainside. 

The boy starts to fear that the only reason he finds anything beautiful is because he wants to fuck it. 

Kiss me, she demands. He does. 

The trees are on fire.

12.

A boy and a girl.

13.

A girl leaves a note on a boy’s car: Nothing was real. I don’t feel sorry. He pictures her leaving town while he sits still, like a mannequin, in his bed. But maybe for you, she’d written on the other side.

14.

A girl is about to leave town on the nearest terrified dog. She says: Stay with me.

A boy and a girl make tracks, 

then angels in the snow. 

They lie down. 

Above them, ice-gleaming boughs obscure the night sky.