reworking piece from Jan

[fuckatherine]

 

As a child I held a strong fixation with the idea of superimpositions, of worlds layered upon one another. It began with the gutters, then the pipes. The drainage systems. Our row of townhouses enclosed an area of grass that sloped, increasing in intensity, into a large gravel bowl. In the middle of this little rock valley towered a hollow, screw shaped structure meant to aid stormwater management, but at the time, I could not see it as anything but a home.

On the rare occasion that the large bowl did not hold last night’s downpour, I’d slide down mud-parted fescue and venture towards the structure to knock cautiously. The sound, barely offset as echoes are, came back almost hollow, as if there were something occupying just enough space in it to absorb my greeting. I never stayed to see if there was a response.

The pipe system around this drainage pit mostly remained obediently underground. At certain strategic points around the complex the hill was permitted to open in rounded mouths, concrete maws with just enough berth for a flood rush to punch out and just enough width for a child to crawl in. I struggled to string together a mental map of their locations and spent those few hazy minutes before sleep thinking about the ways they could be connected to each other. The ways these mouths could be connected to the bowl, the house. 

At some point one of the neighborhood kids lost their kitten. We could not see it but we could hear it. Desperate mewling echoed from one of the pipes. The whimpers came multiplied and omnidirectional; this solidified my theory that the pipes all conjoined to one another. We eventually pinpointed the cries to an opening that looked out above the bowl. If I were to stand at the front of the structure and look up at it from inside the ditch it appeared more as an unblinking eye than a mouth.

The kid gave me a can of tuna to place in the opening of the pipe to try and lure the kitten back out. So, fish in one hand, the other in front, I crawled into the pipe. Within a few feet, the light dropped out entirely. As did the noise. I felt around blindly, unnerved by the sudden lack of meowing. Swinging my head back to what I perceived to be forward, in the near distance, I saw a pair of eyes. The claustrophobic nature of the pipe worked fast to skew my sense of size and space, but I felt that those eyes were much too large to be a kitten. 

I suddenly remembered the feeling of the almost-hollowness in the screw structure. Of occupancy. I could not shake the sensation that whatever was in front of me took up more space than it should. I backed out hastily and never ventured close again, certain for years after that there was another world below my own.