The Diary of Mitch R. Singer

Out in the orchard, kneeling beneath the swelling blossoms 

I sit on my knees and dig at the trunks of peach trees with a screwdriver and a broken saw, flinging the gummy frass out into the awakening grass. Tunnels reveal themselves, twisted things carved through living tissue, their makers hidden in darkness. Sometimes I finding nothing but the discolored sap. Other times I find an invader, a white, fat grub writhing slowly in the daylight. When I find them, I place them in the palm of my gloved hand and consider their place in the circle of being. Blind, mindless, ceaselessly boring, moving through their own detritus like creatures of a liquid element. I watch and then I crush them with the point of my screwdriver, gently. Knees bend and blood rushes to the head. The sun is out; the sky is blue. I am some sort of archaic thing, performing a thankless task. All tasks are thankless. We all have the same purpose as a clown.


Looking out my window, across at the park

He stumbles up the road, a clumsy man clad in ill-fitting clothes, the hair disappearing from his head, his movements like a puppet jerked to and fro in a manic rhythm. Two fat women take point; I can see them laughing but I hear nothing. The discarded children cluster around the swing set, obscenities causally rolling from their lips. They glance at the man with interest; suddenly he veers toward them, saying something. They scatter from his presence like deer from a wolf; I lean my ears out and I can hear him telling them that he is diseased, that he has a knife, and that he wants to touch somebody. What can I do about this? I look at my phone on the table and pick it up. A black pickup truck clutters down the road, the man suddenly at the wheel. How did he get there? As they disappear, I am left with nothing but a sick feeling in my guts, and the realization that it will be there for a very long time.

In my yard, looking across the street

The trashcan purges itself of refuse, sending the rejected contents of its innards out into the street. There are paper cups, plastic bottles, Styrofoam takeout containers, wrappers of all sorts. It sits there and grows against the side of the apartment building, spreading like an epidemic. The children add to it and play with it; they are used to its ever-present sprawl. They have nothing to do now but eat each other. The club-footed child is sent away by the raining of blows upon his back, all the meanness of poor, young lives placed in each half-grown fist. A man comes out of the back of the apartment building and displays his bare chest, which is covered in grotesque tattoos. The children don't mind him, and he does not mind the children. All the pieces are clicking into place. There will be a beast on the horizon, a glum, gluttonous cloud, and it will blot out the sun, and only the small will survive.