Chris Bower lives in Chicago, where he is currently completing Promises to Keep: the Poems of Robert F. Kennedy and where in 2005 he finished an MFA in writing from SAIC.

SPINETREX
---

When I touched her head with my hands, my fingers burst into slightly larger fingers. There wasn't a sound that accompanied it or anything. She didn't notice.

I didn't completely understand what was happening to me, but I suspected it had something to do with the medication I'd been taking for my spine, which had begun to grow a few months ago. I had noticed my neck getting longer, the skin there uncomfortably tight. Spinetrex was supposed to control the growth.

I didn't ever go to the doctor. I was riding home on the el and this guy came up to me. "You know you have Spinal Growth Syndrome, right?" he said. I didn't know what the fuck he was talking about, so of course I said "Yes."

"Are you taking Spinetrex?" he said.

"Since when do doctors ride the el?" I said.

He said he wasn't a doctor, just an SGS survivor. He gave me the name of his doctor.

Before he got off at his stop, he hugged me and I hugged him and then he kissed my tight neck and I got off the el with him and we had a couple tacos and margaritas, disappearing afterward into the alley to fuck. But we both backed out of it in the final moment. He said he wasn't gay, I said I wasn't gay either and we cried and then kissed a little, and he confessed to me that the greatest days of his life were those when his spine was growing toward the sky and every day he'd be a little taller with no idea why. I told him I felt terrible about my SGS -- it felt like someone trying to pop my head off 24 hours a day. He cried some more and gave me a ride home.

The bottle of Spinetrex warns against abnormal bursting, but I was hoping it was going to be something sexual: good or bad, intense or awkward and sad, exhilarating or humiliating, sexual things are still pretty interesting, a lot more interesting than slightly larger fingers.

But that's what happened when I touched her head with my hands. She didn't notice. I decided not to freak out and just kissed her.

MY ROOM
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I had a terrible fight with my wife, and for the last two days I've been sleeping in this bowling alley game room behind the Japanese Dancing video game.

I wake up because some little kid just set yet another annoying record, and I hear him and his friends giving each other weak high fives -- the jealousy in the air is so thick you could dance on it.

But records stop being broken, the air hockey table stops buzzing, and the popcorn on the floor sits quietly now that it's safe from feet.

After some shouting, a lot of keys turn inside a lot of locks and the lights dim and dim and die.

In my room late at night, the only light is the blinking orange "out of change" bulb on the change machine. I think about the plastic rifles around me that dangle cold on their cords as the animals and criminals silently run the woods and streets.

Before I fall asleep, I hope to continue this good dream I was working on before, in which European castles have legs and keep moving out of strategic positions in the middle of the night despite angry protests from military generals.

It continues to be a good dream and I sleep like a baby.

I wake to the tune of industrial vacuums eating up all the food left on my floor. I smell coffee, hear coughing and loud lonely strikes, and I forget all about the fight, sweep my stuff from a few ball lockers into my suitcase, and go home to remember why I left.

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