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Adam McOmber
Things Behind the Wall
A skeleton or something like a skeleton. Wood framing. Wattle and daub. A secret passage. A milk-white room. A place you’ve never been before. Pipes for water. A lost manuscript. The early memoirs of Lord Byron or Shakespeare’s Cardenio. Green mold. Silver mold. The beginnings of a memory. Wasps. The jewelry of the countess. Two mirrors. Old letters. Tools that were used to make the wall. Brick hammer. Pointing trowel. Neuroses. Images that surpass all experience. Long-eared bats. Dust-colored moths. According to the rule of simple encounters, humans alternate between states of hope and fear. A painting in a gilded frame. What is the subject? The underworld. Black cliffs. Black sky. Something like the moon. What floats there in the water? I can only see its eyes. Screen memories. Hysteria. Obsession. To sigh. To weep secretly. A daguerreotype. A strange garden. A space inside the mind. There are shadows shaped like things from childhood. Primitive narcissism. A jar of old coins. A locket with a knot of hair inside. Your double. My double. The extinction of the self. A second wall beneath the first—it’s something like a layer of flesh. Intellectual uncertainty. A jar of buttons. The notion of the “dark precursor.” Wood shavings. A rusted sword. Here is something true: the main property of any given object is to eventually be lost.
About the writer:
Adam McOmber is the author of three queer speculative novels The White Forest (Simon and Schuster), Jesus and John (Lethe) and Hound of the Baskervilles (Lethe) as well as three collections of short fiction, Fantasy Kit (Black Lawrence), My House Gathers Desires (BOA) and This New & Poisonous Air (BOA). His work has appeared recently in Conjunctions, Fifth Wednesday, and Hobart. He is the co-chair of the Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Hunger Mountain.
Image: House of the Labyrinth VI 11,9 Room 24 (or 21?), west or east wall of tepidarium by Wilhelm Zahn (1800-1871). Pompeii wall painting. (Image from a book.) 1849. Public domain.
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