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Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.

You know it too! … The charm of funerals in the rain,

the special effects men with their hoses well aimed,

huge drops exploding on

classically beautiful

black umbrellas.

You know them, -

the houses like fat vegetables

stuffed with old lace, ceramics, silverware, dust –

secure as bank vaults.

                                    Who will inherit?

Vittorio is dining with

that Chinese actress again…

Will the kingdom be divided?

Who will keep

the chandeliers in good repair

and tend the lists of public enemies?

Rachel comes to the porch holding herself and asking for

my uncle. We say he gone to the store but he’s years dead.

She keeps holding on to herself like her body remembers

what her mind lost. When he get back, tell him he owe me $5.

We offer to pay. She says, No. Tell him.

Mano’s job at the water treatment plant was easy and relentlessly boring—most days she wondered why they kept a receptionist at all. The water treatment facility was spared the public wrath of, say, the utilities department, where citizens regularly marched themselves down in person to shout about their bills. Nobody came to the water treatment office. People rarely called. She sipped the coffee while watching a few trout glide behind the glass of the tank that took up half the wall opposite her desk. Trout did better in the river’s upper sections, where the water was colder, but they could be found in the river down here as well, and Lloyd insisted on having a few in the office tank. Recently, the city had cut the budget for the tank service contractor, and she and Keith had both been pretending they didn’t notice how filthy things were getting in there. 

One way Mano passed the time was to spend hours, on-the-clock, with her oil pastels, working to capture the rosy blush of trout gills, the way the red stripe along the side of the greenbacks faded in and out, almost woven through the deep green-brown skin, the way the rainbows kept a consistent blush that practically glowed. She’d named every rainbow trout in the tank Stevie Nicks, while the greenback cutthroats were all Lindsey Buckinghams. The tank, full of river water, was meant to display the health of the ecosystem, but it also served as an early warning system. If something was killing fish in the river, it killed the fish in the tank, too. 

AGNES:

I feel at home.

My friends like it here,

better that their own apartments.

I’m not a fool.

I know that what’s coming

will be bad,

but not unlivable,

and not eternally,

and when it’s over, I will have clung to the least last thing,

which is to say, my lease.

And you have to admit, it’s a terrific apartment.

I could never find anything like it if I moved out now.

You would not believe

how low the rent is.

(End of scene.)

Slide: JANUARY 30, 1933.

Slide: PRESIDENT HINDENBURG

Slide: APPPOINTS ADOLF HITLER

Slide: CHANCELLOR OF THE GERMAN REICH.