2:30 AM/PM by Jason Heller

The knock at the door comes at 2:30 a.m.
I am alone and awake to greet it.
I pad down the hall in soft socks and weak shadows, my shoulder blades
twisting beneath my skin like insects trapped in a napkin.
Charlie says it’s a kind of ritual. Charlie doesn’t know shit. Charlie has the
teeth of a horse.
Somewhere a car starts. Outside, maybe.
I turn before I reach the door and scratch the knob with one fingernail, two
fingernails, three fingernails.
What’s on TV? Better to know before you turn it on. Never turn it on before
you know.
I reach the living room and turn it on anyway, reckless in that room for living.
Light tilts and pours out.
Before long it’s empty.
My eyes open and close like machines.
– – –
The knock at the door comes at 2:30 a.m.
My skin is awake before I am, migrating across the meat of me. Has Charlie
ever had to feel this? Does he know where the light goes when the bulbs
break and the sky sags?
No, probably. Charlie has a flood in his skull.
I wonder where he is now, even as the knock echoes. It sounds sad this
time, a sigh of knuckles on pine.
It doesn’t get any easier. To keep him out. To keep sleep up. To keep skin
still.
I wonder what a kiss would feel like on that skin. Lips are bumpy and purple.
I saw it on TV once, a disease.
Has the knock gone away? I wait to find out. The distance between each
thud grows until the cracks begin to show.
In the cracks are insects, aching.

– – –
The knock at the door comes at 2:30 a.m.
I took a car ride once, with Charlie.
His teeth were like statues. The window wouldn’t roll down. Garbage
foamed up around my ankles. He didn’t drive very fast.
The living room is similar.
I feel like I’m inside a lung, maybe Charlie’s, black from all that garbage.
Charlie is an idiot. He wears a digital watch. He can’t tell time otherwise.
Time has turned the knock into a code. A tattoo. A symbol of itself. A plan
for a distant future. A history of the moon. An ache, a death, a drum.
Time has stretched the room, and me along with it. My skin stays still, but
the rest of me grows. I expand beyond the room, but I’m still inside it. The
TV’s on and what’s left of my head melts into the light.
A cell bursts.
A wall breaks.
A knock falls.
– – –
The knock at the door comes at 2:30 a.m.
The start of the car comes at 2:30 a.m.
The tilt of the light comes at 2:30 a.m.
The flood of the skull comes at 2:30 a.m.
The kiss on the eye comes at 2:30 a.m.
The black of the lung comes at 2:30 a.m.
The death of the moon comes at 2:30 a.m.
The tooth of the horse comes at 2:30 a.m.
The ache of the clock comes at 2:30 a.m.
The sleep of the skin comes at 2:30 a.m.