The Adam West Conspiracy

~ The everyday-ness of these lines are anchors the reader can hang onto. "Yeah, that's how my smartass buddy talks. I get this. This is real." Could the writer want anything more from the reader?

        ...a crayon—periwinkle, the label said... “You were right,” he said. “It is a bullshit color.”

        ...dandelion seeds...“Plant these,” he’d written. “They’re assholes. They’ll outlive us all.”

~ "a town I’d buried a decade ago." I originally read this and was excited (talk about dark!) that there might be another Land to be explored. But as I thought about it, I recognized that the town referred to was a survivor guilt that had been accommodated long ago: the loss of Kevin and the speaker's own subsequent survival.

~ The telephone. The ubiquitous telephone. Nurses left voicemails; the vines drank those too. In this context, the speaker is withdrawing into himself getting ready for his own outward journey. The nurses trying to talk to him in his hospice bed no longer reach him; he is busy with more important things. He doesn't even try to keep their words in mind, because he knows they no longer have anything that will help.

~ Resin. I'm rather glad to see this one, although it goes by the name of "oil" here. Oil, resin, viscous phlegm filling the lungs. This having been such a prevalent icon in Relic, I feel validated that some of my interpretations of the symbology of that story were accurate.

~ Vines. The vines of orchids bind and clutch, as in Noctuary; these vines caress and protect. I'll admit, I think I'm a little late to the party in realizing that vines represent the reach of emotions post mortem. Again, the tying together of other stories is giddily exciting for artsy-fartsy old farts like me!

~ Mother. Her sachet, the somehow uncomfortable perspective of her believe in omens and such. She may not be as direct an agent in this stories as she is in others, but there is a tinge of darkness to her. One must wonder if it was Mother's cigarettes the boys began smoking in the first place.

~ Dandelion seeds. This is such a complex and touching metaphor. They are inconvenient, a weed—much as the sick and dying often seem to those who are well. And the seeds themselves are dead, the color gone from the flower. But a slight wind will carry them away—a beautifully subtle reference to the frailty of cancer patients, many of whom look like a stiff wind really will blow them over. Let the wind blow; these seeds will make new lives just as the seeds of these men may likely have grown the new lives of children or grandchildren themselves. Yes, it is true that they will outlive us, these flowers from our own seeds. And yet, you slip the jab one last time, revealing some lingering bitterness that even the most sanguine of terminal patients must feel toward the active, vital, living individuals around them: "They're assholes."