There is something about me, Geryon thinks, that makes me disappear.

—

His thoughts are desperately pedaling back and forth across his headscape.

The school building is behind

him, doors an open wound, every student a blood cell but only Geryon is

red. In class, the markers

were spread out evenly and somehow every time the box was passed around

it was handed over Geryon’s

head to the student behind him, the student before careful of Geryon’s wings.

Avoiding something without

registering it as real is a conundrum next to time in Geryon’s mind.

Geryon wrote in a notebook

while everyone else drew pictures of their favorite mountains in colored markers

Geryon’s mountain was

written into being with the stub of a charcoal pencil and snubbed out

by the rain. The school is still

bleeding, and Geryon sits on the steps and thinks and around him

the blood flows.

In empty soulspaces abandonment is the ultimate gravity.

—

He waited in the old warehouse by the docks until the moon died.

They were supposed to

meet Geryon there, they had asked him to take photographs of them on the water.

The instant before drowning,

one of them asked him to capture. He thought of a drowned fly and agreed,

wound up cold and lonely

overnight on the inside of an inventory. There was a period in Geryon’s life

when he stayed away

from everybody, and kept himself locked in his room once his brother moved out

and nobody came

to check on him because they figured that locking the door meant leave me alone.

He waited days then,

and like a defeated general descended and had breakfast in the wee hours of morn

and wept into the empty fruit bowl

and drowned a fly in his tears. With his head in the fruit bowl the house emptied

around him and then he went empty, too.

The worst of being imaginary is having once been real.

—

Geryon stayed in Hades and watched Herakles forget him from the next chair over.

Somewhere in the allotment

of skin and flesh someone remembered Geryon but too late and there were only

feathers left to give

him, and there was only red. In between stints of painting Geryon wrote in his book

with the stub of a charcoal pencil

and sketched out photographs in dark smudgy grey. Somewhere at the back:

an attempted self-portrait.

It was in charcoal but through the lines you could still make out the implicit red.

Herakles’ grandmother stopped

putting out a chair for Geryon to sit in a few days after Geryon wrote down

some photograph of a family.

Geryon withdrew from Hades in red-winged obscurity. He called Herakles

from the bus depot.

He picked up and in sun-yellow voice asked who it was and Geryon said so and

Herakles’ voice scrunched up,

and Geryon could see his confused face on the other end of the line as he sputtered

back into sangfroid

Yes, right. Geryon. How’ve you been? Geryon hung up the phone and remembered

he left his book there.

He decided to do as Herakles did and forget himself. He never liked that portrait

he drew anyway.

There wasn’t a monster named Geryon.

—

That was just a story that Geryon told himself as he tried to remember what being

remembered is about.

Around Geryon, seconds gang up into minutes and coalesce into hours and weeks

and they ignore him, the sun

passing over Geryon’s head like a carton full of golden colored markers, carefully

avoiding getting tangled in his wings.

Geryon steps forward, reaching his arms out trying to catch time in his fingers

and move forward, anchor

himself in the momentum of the world, dig in his heels and let time drag his life

a furrow into reality.

Herakles finds Geryon’s book and recognizes the portrait in the back but throws

away the book anyway.

The wheels of Geryon’s thoughts spiral down the storm drain and out of mind.

Geryon was written into being

with a stub of a charcoal pencil and snubbed out by rain and around him the world

still moves as he stills.

Geryon empties like a house from memory, words slipping off the pages into

the volcano’s maw of forgetting.

[Here there is the outline of a shape drawn in shaky red marker but the substance

of it is melted.]