Sometimes in the morning I remember thinking: it is the sorrow of leaving a place you’re not done loving yet.
In the afternoon the satisfaction of the mophead’s gray overlapping circles across the floor as you advanced down a corridor of distress.
On your way to the corner store after work the simple pleasure of barking at the businessman in the flannel suit and brown fedora humming as he passed you on the street, all smug in himself:
Get the hell away from me!
Behind him the prissy woman with the fascinator like a small scarlet bird tangled up in her hair, staring down at the sidewalk, frantic to avoid your eyes.
Sister Superior Nightmare. Sister Hands On Fire.
I remember the uncomplicated happiness of watching them recoil, wondering what it was like walking around in such tight skins.
When has a weatherman ever gotten a single thing right? being the real question behind all the others, it strikes me now.
Answer me that, and everything else will fall into place.
You recollect nothing, by the way, of the day your mother died. There’s that.
That, and those seconds of weightlessness for a job well done, the mophead circling beneath you across the linoleum floor.
Or the dead face some people get when they don’t like living anymore.
For a second or two.
The unqualified wellbeing housed in the hospital kitchen as you extracted each plate from the four-wheeled wagon, scraped off the refuse, and loaded it into the dishwasher.
When Whillie’s hand touched mine I forgot. Because memory.
That emergency.
The way he would look at me with loving hopelessness. At a declining rate.
*
Every kiss a kind of bloodless bite.
*
I remember Harry of the long neck and vegetal ears adding up my purchases at the register at the corner store on the days I don’t eat for free, didn’t eat for free, in the hospital refectory: one can Campbell’s Condensed Tomato Soup, one bottle Coca-Cola (cold), three Tootsie Rolls.
You gave Harry a dollar. He gave you your change, saying: Windows broke out. Stores looted. 1968? Since when did this city become such a stupid idea?
Scooping up your paper bag, you replying: You can see me?
I mean how do you know your real name is the one everyone decides to throw at you and sometimes it is a sky full of clouds lit by flames, from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. 65 degrees, from 3:00 to 6:00 a.m. 39, and sometimes pudgy long-haired bearded hippie art student David Berglund singing under his breath outside your door on his way to the common bathroom from the apartment he shares with his rumpled wife Betsy and her green tree-frog spectacles.
Or the fly stuck inside your room or inside your brain. It sometimes being hard to tell which.
When I find myself in times of trouble, David singing.
Keep it down out there, goddamn it! you shouting.
It occurs to me this might be a good time to mention I have never played well with other people.
I have never played well with other people.
Now and then you can’t be alone enough. Plus: ten-hour shifts.
Twelve.
On occasion thirteen. Six days a week.
Six or seven.
When awake I kept the door to my room in the boardinghouse open for ventilation because mine, forty-three years, Box 14, 851 West Webster Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, full stop.
The tenants I have outlasted here, there, when the summer air was wet felt, the steam radiators kaput in winter, me shuffling through the frigid scramble in three shirts beneath the navy-blue coat the Army issued in 1914 as I prepared not to fight for them in that war of theirs.
*
Have you ever noticed how the body is mostly a risk?
*
Because you never ask weathermen for guidance, do you, them or the god-shaped vacancy, because the only response you’ll receive will be the screech of outer space, that million cicadas all at once, or: Saturday, April 7, 1973, today, for example: partly cloudy, unsettled, trace of rain, 3:00 to 4:00 a.m. 51 degrees, 11:00 a.m. to noon 66, 3:00 p.m. 70 and a little above.
The weatherman wrong on every count.
*
Ten hours. Twelve.
And every so often at night the radioactive shrieks when some husband somewhere on some street beat his wife.
*
Have I mentioned my library was tucked inside, may still be tucked inside, the closet next to my sink, to the right of my door upon entry: the complete Oz series, most Dickens, assorted hymnals and catechisms, various others, a dictionary, a thesaurus, nearly one hundred titles altogether?
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Johanna Spyri’s Heidi. And so forth.
Chronicles of the Great Chicago Fire.
Histories of the Civil War describing interchangeable weapons effacing interchangeable men.
Each bought secondhand or rescued from garbage cans, scattered for me like Easter eggs through the neighborhood.
I am a well-read man by coincidence, you could say without being
fully not right.
Or my stack of 78s (ragtime, blues, military, Puccini, tears, Tchaikovsky, stamped-out hearts, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, piano lust and fluster), to accompany me on my wind-up Edison gramophone while I worked at my desk, my oval desk, my oval desk in my room’s exact center, deep into the sleeplessness.
*
That and the smell of grilled meat leaking in through the open window on late spring evenings, the recognition reaching you that the Civil War on the day you were born was only twenty-seven years old.
Now how do I know that?
*
Anyway, do you ever wish you were flying a spaceship because humans want everything to change and everything to remain the same at once, they being who they aren’t?
*
I remember in bed on the glassy edge of sleep this idea turning up not irregularly: I must think more about Whillie Schloeder. I have not thought about Whillie enough today.
*
Do people ever squint at you as if in pain when you speak to them?
*
For every field sparrow, a rock thrown at a field sparrow.
*
Without overstepping any boundaries, I advise you to keep this information away from your children, for here is Henry Darger sitting among the stutter of his past, trying to convince himself life isn’t really occurring somewhere else without him.
Attaboy.
Keep up the—
What I mean to say is he, me, was given our first vacation at fifty-four, which bent the world into a chatter of worries about where to go, who to see, how to live, what to wear, how to pack, what to bring, what to leave, how to travel, Henry’s manic dizziness brought on by walking near brick walls and all the strangers he would have had to share oxygen with along the way.
After extensive consideration, he decided to remain at home. He has never regretted it.
He would like to say. In a sense.
In a manner of speaking.
__________________________________
From An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies by Lance Olsen. Used with permission of the publisher, Dzanc Books. Copyright © 2026 by Lance Olsen.
