The booms are getting louder. I’ve got to stop using the word “boom” in casual conversation, he confided to me. Then the sound effects drowned out the next thing he said. Only a pack of lies could save us now. But we were all running on empty, running down the road all scared and elongated like the Expressionists must’ve felt when they had their war. No hard feelings, at least none available at the PX. I had a horrible premonition you were drowning in a flooded foxhole full of snakes, that your three children were crying and your first wife was there too, watching your corpse float and turn, float and turn, in the brown water, the snakes curling over each other all around your body. Then it became so clear to me that this scene was something the Kurdish woman read in our coffee grounds last night, that her interpretation of the brown sludge was nothing more than a foresight of my writing these words, that she was the author of my story, that I have no hand in this but offer my own blankness to her telling. “Watch out for neighbor, she a ladies” “jealous, long ladies, tall” “very bad sign now, snake all around your house, under your house” “but it gets better after that.” The war was coming with all the noises we had expected. A very bad sign that premonitions were turning back on themselves, no way to stop the force of them, nobody left to interpret or even locate the meanings that came out of these ritual actions. I blushed when I imagined there might have been a first wife, or that three children are waiting for me in my future, like the scenes in Die Frau Ohne Schatten. Nobody’s found my shadow in these words.
