Allergic
A giant viburnum lives in the yard. I’ve crawled through the brush to see behind it and can verify that its trunk is thicker than my thigh. Its green branches bear millions of green-white flowers. To walk to the shed beside it is to walk through the JC Penney perfume department. I wake up with my eyes glued shut. Red eyes all day like I’ve seen horrors. The insides of my ears and the way-back of my mouth’s roof crawl, just out of reach of the scratching pinky nail, the probing chopstick. One thing I do is take in a mouthful of seltzer and tip my head back, trout mouth open, letting the bubbles accrue and scrub the palate back there. That helps for a minute.
The girls hide in that bush. They creep through the east side and come out the west side, happy to have a secret spot, the perfect hiding spot. Bigger than the swing set. Bigger than their rooms. I can’t cut it down. It’s so big I don’t know where I’d even start cutting it back. So every year it’s bigger and more harmful and a better hiding spot and dearer.
I used to wonder if you could itch to death. Not necessarily scratch yourself to ribbons and bleed out to death. I think I can conceptualize how that would do the job. I mean the itch itself. The mean the itchself. So much itch, pure itch, that it bends your skin unnaturally and your brain fails to keep up with all that badness that’s not quite pain, so much that pain would relieve it. I think instead of black everything would go electric green. I think next year I might find out, like it or not.