Lambertstood before the table where until recently she’d kept a small, ceramic statue

of a piglet. The statue vanished since she’d last completed a circuit of her

room, which was more a hallway than a room. These objects lately developed

a habit of disappearing and she stood instead of walked and she thought

about the absence of the ceramic pig and she remembered a joke. A clown

walks into a butcher’s shop.

She spent her days (but here, she thought, there's no measure of that sort

of thing) walking what was both perimeter and room, a square if one

measured it as she had, endlessly with her steps. She could reach out with

each hand and touch each wall, the distance across the space the exact

1

distance from the tip of her middle finger on her left hand to the same

fingertip on her right. She preferred not to risk sitting and so she had no

chairs. Sitting invited the heat. Lambert walked and if she turned left there

was another hallway of equal dimensions and again and again and if she

turned left each time, which she was obliged to do since there was no other

path, she completed the circuit of her room and began again.

The walls of Lambert’s room were cluttered with nightstands and dining

room tables and desks and side tables and drawing tables and pedestals and

drum tables and sideboards and vanities. Some protruded out into her path

and she was forced to squeeze through whatever opening presented itself.

Some tables blocked the path entirely and she was forced to crawl beneath or

clamber over and whenever she was obligated to take what she thought of as

such an unorthodox route, though since the route had been identical since

long before she could remember, the route was quite orthodox, she controlled

her body severely as any abrupt movement or sudden motion could have sent

any of the innumerable ceramic animal statues crashing to the ground. If

there are fifty statues there are a hundred, she thought, and if there are a

hundred there are thousands and if there are thousands there are as many as

many can be. As it was, each time she encountered one of these obstacles she

found her body sweating, pushing it’s fluid into her clothing and she found

the room growing warmer and warmer until it was unbearable. She had to

move and move quickly until the heat subsided and her desiccated skin

2

regained its supple resiliency and her hair stopped smoking.

She didn’t walk solely because of the heat, at least not anymore. Now

she also walked because if she walked she could keep her statues in sight and

they never vanished when she could see them. She wondered when she

started thinking of them as hers. She didn’t choose them, nor did she choose

their placement. They were hers, nevertheless and she walked and she walked

because if she walked they would stay. They must stay, she thought. I must

make them stay.

Lambert stood still where the piglet vanished, but the heat did not

come. There on the surface of the nightstand she noticed a fleck of gray. She

bent closer, though the increased proximity yielded no fuller explanation of

the object’s identity. She reached out and when her finger brushed against the

fleck it melted into a dark smear across the particleboard top.

“Something is missing,” she said aloud and was startled at the sound of

her voice. She walked away.

She decided she only meant the piglet was missing, but immediately hit

herself in the thigh for being disingenuous. Like the other statues something

had vanished along with the piglet and all that remained was the impression

of thick hands reaching across an old, pine table to her, the knuckles a hog’s

hide of thick black hair and the fingertips square and blunt.

The palms are thick and cracked and the cracks are black and hard,

filled with something other than skin. They smell like roadways in the

3

summer when the sun fills her eyes and her nose and her mouth and the flat

absence of anything but sand and dirt forever and ever until the blue

mountains, so not really forever, but almost, and it all vanishes in the

closeness of the sun and the smell of hot tar. They are hands, but with no

arms or torso or head. There is the smell, but with nothing exuding it. There

is the sun, but there is no sky, only the interminable burning. I am small, she

thinks, when the hands reach for her.

-

Here, at the point where the clown walks into the butcher’s shop, at the

very inception of the joke, she was already second guessing the plausibility

of the situation. She was confident in her memory’s fidelity, at least about

something so trivial, so it was the joke itself that she took issue with. How do

we know this is a clown walking into a butcher’s shop? Has the clown

decided to do his grocery shopping in full regalia, and what else would he be

doing entering a shop that exclusively sells meat if not to shop for food. He

certainly wouldn’t have been hired to entertain. A butcher’s shop is a serious

operation, she imagined, and whoever stood behind the counter would have

little patience for uninvited clowns doing clown activities during business

hours. But assuming there is some unfathomable reason for the clown, who is

dressed as a clown, to enter the shop, he enters the shop, then encounters a

4

mother and child. This part gave Lambert no pause, but she paused anyway

to reflect on the feasibility of a mother hefting her child through a series of

shops during the day. The child is crying and in Lambert’s limited experience

with infants and toddlers and whatever else they’re called since they seem to

abruptly change ages every time one turns one’s back and thus perpetually

earn new appellations, these things do nothing so well as cry. The child is

crying and the mother is holding the child to her breast and rocking it. The

clown, presumably out of some sense of professional obligation, takes it upon

himself to amuse the child until the child no longer wants to wail and drool

and emit whatever other auditory and fluid issuances it feels compelled to

issue, though Lambert felt that if the clown were not on the clock, he would

do best to leave the child be and let its mother take care of it. But the clown

does not share Lambert’s feeling on the firm division between professional

and personal time, and decides to make a few faces at the child. After all, his

bright red orb of a nose has a single practical application and that is to induce

laughter.

-

Here, on a dining table that stretched across the breath of the corridor,

Lambert failed to find a tiny, red fox with a thick tail curled around his legs

and his ears pointed and raised high. She saw a long shed alone in the sand

5

and dirt, the planks dry and bleached by the brilliance of the high, high sun.

Inside, in the darkness crossed by pinhole shafts of light, a perpetual

scurrying, shrill screaming, low grunts, cages stacked to the ceiling on either

side and a narrow passage between. She smells ammonia and pine and

calcium oxide. She carries the knife tar-hands uses, the knife she’s been

admonished to never, never touch. It’s dangerous for little girls. The hands

will be so proud, though. The cages never stop moving and outside the sand

and dirt is still.

-

Lambert takes issue with the nose as well since everyone knows that a

bright red orb of a nose is de rigueur for clowns and one would expect to see

that nose if one is seeing a clown and thus the nose simply confirmed her

expectation and she felt on firm ground and firm ground does not yield much

laughter. Far more unexpected, she believed, would be a clown in his

complete suit and makeup, but lacking any treatment to his nose. The

omission would be riotous, she thought. The child perhaps shares Lambert’s

view because if anything its keening increases and now the mother and

butcher are growing a touch suspicious of the clowns ministrations, though,

Lambert supposed, that element is not in the joke, rather she attributed those

suspicions to them. Failing to stem the aural tide with simple faces, the clown

6

feels inspiration hit. He exchanges a few whispers with the butcher and the

butcher seems to catch the enthusiasm that now animates the clown. From the

case the butcher extracts a hog’s head on a platter and he sets the platter on

the counter. The clown then removes his nose and sets it on the tip of the cold

pig’s snout. The child stops crying the moment the clown’s red nose touches

the pig’s pink nose and the clown can feel a palpable upwelling of approval

and admiration from the mother and the butcher. He has succeeded in his

task. But ambition gets the better of the clown and he again whispers to the

butcher and the butcher is this time even more excited.

-

Lambert walked quickly and noticed a gray flake on the back of her left

hand. She swept it off of her skin, but the flake dissolved into a dark smudge

and her skin tingled and burned where the smudge stained her skin.

-

In her room the little girl strikes another match and her bright eyes are

dull with tears. This is a game. She holds the match head against the box and

flicks it toward the window. The tip flares and dies before it can fall out of

her sight. She sits on the bed and strikes another and another. A continually

7

cauterized black pit burns into her fingertip. The knife is gone and the tar-

hands have stopped their admonishment, but she strikes another and another

match as fast as she can. The heads leave brilliant trails in her eyes and she’s

sure they all fly out the window.

-

The butcher grows so excited in fact that he hops up and down and

claps his hands. The butcher hands the clown the carving knife he’s requested

and the clown blocks the child’s view with his body while slicing the snout

from the pig’s face. After he’s done he shoves the nose over his own and as

long as he doesn’t make any particularly hasty movements, the pig’s own

inert viscera gently adhere to the clown’s face. The clown covers his face

with his hands and turns and reveals himself in a dramatic gesture. The child

squeals in delight, overcome with a lovely fit of laughter, which, Lambert has

been assured many times, is in fact a quite lovely noise, though she felt such

an assertion was suspect and more used to assuage one’s doubts about a

dubious decision similar to praising a pair of shoes for which one does not

have an occasion and that cannot be returned. By now the mother and the

butcher are in stitches as are the child and the clown. Again struck by the

twin impetus of ambition and inspiration, he plucks the red nose from the

platter and again places it on the tip of the pig’s nose. Faced by the

8

multiplicity of absurd muzzles, one capping the last, the shop is shaken by

the volume and vehemence of the three people’s laughter. The clown,

gratified by his own talents and the appreciation of those talents by the

assembled audience takes a long few moments to simply stand and bask in

their adoration. The butcher slowly gains control of himself and waves the

clown over and informs the clown that he himself has been touched by a

moment of comedic inspiration and with the clown’s indulgence and aid, he

would be thrilled to try out his idea.

-

On a tall, thin entryway table tucked into the corner where she took

another of her endless turns, a horse, white with brown spots and a mane

improbably long, no longer stood. Tacky, gray flakes speckled the table’s

surface and all the surfaces around her and all the few remaining statues.

Several more drifted down and settled with the others. And here she saw the

sun and the dirt, the tall, stone wall and a slow procession. The Woman, the

one who sits beside her and writes in a notebook, has bound her in a pretty

gray dress and they stand on a pretty green lawn the same as when the

Woman stood on the sand and dirt above Lambert in the dark while the glow

of the house warmed one side of the cars and trucks and blotted out the stars.

She isn’t allowed to see him as she lays on the grass, but she saw him when

9

they lifted her from the dirt and his head was a slick bust, the protrusions

melted away leaving a clay man, his body latticed by black fissures. She was

most struck by how flat a face can look when divorced of its nose.

-

All these hands drag her tiny body out of the heat.They drag her out,

she's on her back, the heat too much for her little eyes, the embers fly

skyward and vanish and she feels the embers are stationary and she's falling

in fits.

-

The clown, gregarious with the intoxication of success, feigns

enthusiasm equal to the butcher’s and asks what the butcher would have him

do. The butcher tells him to close his eyes and when he again opens them the

clown will see another joke of the nose and while he’s sure it could never

match the clown’s own genius, he hopes the clown will appreciate his humble

offering. The clown readily acquiesces and closes his eyes. He hears the

butcher waddle around the counter and come close. The butcher’s breath is

pleasant and smells like sugar. The clown feels a pressure at the base of his

septum and opens his eyes. The butcher is holding the clown’s nose in his

10

hand and laughing as are the mother and child. At first the clown doesn’t

realize that his nose has been removed and it isn’t until the butcher sets it on

the platter to replace the pig’s missing snout and the butcher, the mother, and

the child are all quite genuinely rolling on the floor in paroxysms of laughter,

does the clown realize what’s happened. The clown looks down at the three

sternly and, through a curtain of red, says, “well that’s not funny.” That’s the

joke. And Lambert was sure there was some sort of moral there or a lesson

about something or about something else, but what she wondered was

whether or not anyone still went to the butcher.

-

She looks up through the one eye that still functions, her one eye that

mostly functions and there are no stars, just her own cold eyes. There is a

cold moon too, though she’s not sure what good it does her. Come to think of

it the stars wouldn’t do much good either and so they may as well have

vanished. She decides to stop dealing with the sky since it decided to stop

dealing with her.

Though she would not be opposed to a beatific vision floating down

slowly from the sky framed in a warm, red glow, perhaps in the shape of the

Woman, though she hasn't met the Woman yet and isn't that the Woman now

walking slowly forward, her face pale, her eyes clicking back and forth

11

between the charred little girl, bald like a melted doll, and what is no longer

the little girl's house, and perhaps the Woman could carry Lambert up and up.

The sky is quiet and dark and Lambert decides she’ll have to do it herself.

She pushes herself up on her elbows and and leans to the left a little because

that feels less bad than not leaning. The Woman, the vision, stands over her

and Lambert sees that the Woman has no words for the smoldering little girl.

-

The sticky gray flakes fell and adhered to the empty surfaces. They built

and accumulated, their weight causing avalanches where the breadth of the

surface no longer supplied adequate support. Pillars of gray rose and the

flakes fell and fell.

Lambert ran now and searched. There must be at least one left, she

thought though she knew it wasn’t true. She remembered nothing anymore.

Perhaps my name, she thought, but that isn’t really something one

remembers. She ran and she began to sweat, the fluid mixing with the flakes

stuck to her skin, her arms and face coated in a thin paste that only swelled

and grew the faster she ran and the more her body divested itself of its fluids.

On a low table, perhaps a nightstand once, though Lambert wouldn’t

have known which one it was now, she found a pile of shards, a mass of

ceramic debris, white for the most part, but here a cracked eye painted black

12

and here the pink interior of a long, long ear.

She no longer ran. Instead she stood in front of the table and allowed

her fingers to penetrate the shards. The room grew much hotter and the gray

flakes fell thicker. She could feel the closeness of the walls now that she

allowed them to come close and all the way to the ceiling she heard the

rattling of cages and the screams of fur. The walls much closer than the span

of her arms, the walls moist and inflamed, aflame now, red and swollen and

pressing in to smother her with their brilliance. And now she sat. If this is all

that’s left, thought Lambert, then I may as well have a seat. She swept the

fragments from the nightstand, the shards of whatever animal she’d been

forced to collect, and they disappeared behind the architecture of nightstands

and dining room tables and desks and side tables and drawing tables and

pedestals and drum tables and sideboards and vanities. She saw nothing now

and forgot why she swept them aside and why she was covered in this

curious, ever expanding sheath of gray. She sat and forgot and the ash fell

and fell.

13