Joseph Voelbel

Harold often suspected he heard a low pitch humming. After a number of months he figured out it was just the sound of the laundry machine next-door. At present the street light outside his apartment window hurt his temples, and caused him to squint at the object of his study.

Harold stood up from his chair and stuck his hands in his jean pockets, looked about his apartment, and smiled. He enjoyed doing things that were audaciously normal, like sticking one’s hands in one’s pockets. Harold often acted “normal” on purpose, for if he behaved how he wished to behave, he gathered that society might not be able to grip him, and then he could become unstuck, which was a slippery slope. Not for Harold but for people who weren’t proficient at sliding. There was no question Harold still possessed all his marbles; the question pertaining to what he’d been squinting at was related to society’s apperception of those marbles. Playing marbles as a child had been interesting to him, a place between aesthetics and physics, bookended by his thumb and index finger.

The street lights that caused him to squint, the volume of intercoms on airplanes, and a good many other things, Harold felt to be askew. That included but wasn’t limited to, stores beeping upon our arrival, the way pop songs carried a similar amorphous tune and radio announcers that nondescript drawl - even across languages, how people said, “fine,” when feeling morose and spoke somberly even when there wasn’t much to complain about, and how people assume what they have read must be true. Oh, and not to mention the inexhaustible societal desire to relate, often again and again, stories of encounters with celebrity, no doubt spurred on by some warped conception of deity and magazines that rubbed off on your fingers. For these and other reasons, when it came to worldviews, Harold preferred the scenic route. If worldviews were planets Harold felt he’d be Pluto, as he spent much of his time on the periphery of our ideological orbit, and with such feathery mass that other planets began to accuse him of not existing. This evening, just what Harold was squinting at was the story in question.

Earlier that day, Harold had been on his bicycle, where he spun his wheels towards his destiny. He rode along a row of pines, and halfway between noon and dusk, he stopped, to sit among the fallen needles and beneath the tall trees, for a meditation. The scent of pine transported him to when he used to follow with bare feet the path of the deer, discover porcupine quills, and raise them high in the air like Excalibur.

The difference between that memory and that moment earlier today had become indistinguishable for Harold. This was an instance of sliding and it hinged on settling into this feeling of indistinguishability. From this Prosperoic center, a deep still well formed, and within it Harold pursued an expansion of his chest cavity – his rib cage broadened like the bellows of an ancient accordion. Just then, breath and spirit married, and were both within and about him.

Harold knew he knew that much about that but not that much about what he’d been squinting at.

Just what Harold was squinting at was a drawing of a dream he’d dreamed. Upon closer inspection he realized that if he could dream any dream again he'd dream this dream, again. For this dream was slipping into his reality like the yolk of a punctured egg gliding across the plate of his consciousness. The space between what he dreamed and how things seemed was diminishing. To Harold, this particular dream arrived like a large ship coming into the harbor. He could see it from shore, and waited for it expectantly. He just was not sure how it was going to dock.

Harold hoped the guidance of the lighthouse would keep it off the rocks, and he prayed that the mighty tides of Neptune would carry it across the vast expanse, and onto the dock of his life. Though still ashore, Harold in this instance, realized he was also the captain, but that this captain was the truest version of himself, navigating from yonder to burst back into his reality, that is, to come ashore and meet Harold. While squinting Harold could barely make out the picture in front of him, of himself in this dream, squinting to see the ship off in the distance, jumping up and down on the sand and waiving his arms in the air like he’d held those porcupine quills as a child.

At present, he was only half-there; he’d stepped one leg into this vision to replay the previous evening’s journey and its meaning with respect to the apotheosis of his soul.

These thoughts hung about his head as if his skull were partially submerged under water, but upended, as the water was above him, and he below it. This supermerging occurred for Harold at his own discretion, and as his cogitations swashed about in this mercurial elixir, mixed partly from memory and partly by imagination, he realized that in these instances, when he squinted because the light was too bright, he felt that whatever he could hope to say about his dream with words would be at least the distance his feet were from how far his eyes could see.