At work they are hammering nails through the back of his head staring, and with suspicious whispers. It makes him want to cry being so alone and his stomach hurts always. His home is a hole in the ground where he collapses like a cigarette ash and swallows wine until he can stand again.
Sex gluts with grief and rutting. Shelly’s lips haven’t been ransacked since the wedding, but Micky plows her torso with all the gusto his tiny limbs can muster. Mornings, damp with baked muffins and billowing coffee, smile blandly; cling to the mirror of each other. The couple practice lurid hearsay, family claws, spoonfed silences.
Mother stands frozen in my bedroom doorway… a block of stone: arms splayed, legs spread, a barrier to my exit. I cannot move her, never could; she’s as heavy as her gaze when she first looked in on me. So, I am left to chip away at her, like I did before she was transformed, but literally now.
Here is what I know: I have a quiet little boy in my car. I’ve bungee corded him to the passenger seat, which I recognize may sound cruel, but actually it provides him with a bounciness he seems to like. I ascertain his approval despite the fact that he has not made much sound.
The next shift has already queued around another corner across a narrow waterway, some sipping libations whilst others partake of their first meal, all their caps tilted at various rakish angles, depeche mode, as is the fashion, a fashion now in, now out, now in again.
“I knew some top-notch reporters in my time,” the old man said. “They were decent men, drunks most of them, but decent men. But they could not print the truth if the editor would not let them. Do you know who the editor worked for?” The old man glared at Karl. “The editor worked for the bosses.”
A young woman holding a baby blocks Florentina’s path. She holds out her hand and asks for money, her raspy voice barely above a whisper. Her baby is sick, she explains, and needs medicine. “Please,” she begs. “Can you spare anything?”
“Yeah, we’ve seen an uptick in robberies by sea creatures lately,” Officer Brimley said. He had unkempt hair, a toothbrush mustache, and a belly that hung over his gun belt. A blob of cocktail sauce, shaped like a sea urchin, stained his khaki shirt.
She always did insist that we use a condom, and I don’t think it was mainly to ward off diseases. Or maybe to ward off the worst of diseases. That would be us, humanity.
“I just figured that if I were racist, I would’ve been the first person to know. And yet I didn’t. How many times have you heard me tell people there’s not a single racist bone in my body?”
“Dad, we’re on strike. It’s crazy here. People get arrested just for looking the wrong way at a cop. And a lot of time it’s not just the regular police but this special Tactical Squad that’s full of nutcases who LIKE to hit people.”
The paddy wagon door opened, the floor white grey the color of seagull shit. There was a small barred window and a metallic bench. As the door closed, six Tactical Squad officers lumbered in, helmets strapped, visors down.
In my neck of the woods, we call any switcheroo like that, finding Jesus. If you finally decide you need a divorce, finding Jesus. If you are an alcoholic, and decide suddenly to go to rehab, finding Jesus. If you go to your job with no plans in mind one morning and quit your job that afternoon, finding Jesus.
The girl’s subatomic particles suddenly interacted with each other and every other subatomic particle in the universe until, a yoctosecond later, through a cascading near infinity of quantum events, they caused her of her own free will to walk home from school, first between the rails of the railroad track and then on one of the rails.
WRITER sits, and cannot write, because of a strangeness characteristic of a life without truth. In his empty works, he has discovered the ideas which to him have already been lost, and he can only begin to look for them.
In this dream I am 112 stories high, a fluffy kitten placemark thrusting up from my summit adds another 13 stories. People crowd the windows of the observation area on the top floor and ooh & ah at the violet-burnished clouds, the sun squeezed tangerine at the horizon.
A female delinquent spoke. She described how her male beast was a cock artist. “It lives inside my brain. A Twisted thing, it tells me its secrets – dirty and unclad it hides behind objects and silences. It satiates victims for amusement.”
Robyn resembled Liza Minnelli and belted out a bit of “Cabaret” to anyone who would listen. I listened. She took a fast fancy to me in a bar one Saturday night, but when I learned she was nineteen I waved goodbye being thirty-two.
When the hood is removed, I am standing alone on a small stage in what appears to be a long-neglected theater. Totally dark, except for a single footlight directed at my face. The two shotgun-wielding kids are positioned on the floor directly below me.
It’s just an excuse to get nearer the whales, and especially the dolphins. We can’t keep them here, you see, because of the high amounts of sulphur in our atmosphere which would fry them straightaway.
Twice I got as far as the selection stuff with it but both times one of the lawyers booted me off jury. Neither of them ever said why but, I don’t know, maybe they could tell somehow that I don’t have what you might call a high opinion of lawyers—or anybody else who wears a suit to work for that matter.
“Watering roses is a lazy job no Caucasian would ever stoop to,” Harold announced. He was the least qualified man on the planet to preach on lazy. I could beat him digging a tree planting hole, teaspoon to shovel. His height and stride mirrored the Frankenstein monster. I'd never met a Mexican in person.
So, our conversation encompassed a myriad of topics: music, art, nature, why humans are nearsighted and stupid (despite his species affiliation), Why chocolate, wine and cigarettes are the most important contributions humanity has given earth, and ultimately, poetry.
But something about the way that cigarette hit, the way the Shiraz tasted, the rainfall outside on the Sitka spruces, and she could see it all again – the weave of her hoodie, the silhouette of a tiger disappearing into the first snows of late November.
On Sputnik’s launch date, October 4, 1957, Uncle Theo’s body was found in the East River off the Greenpoint Piers. Had he jumped or been dumped off one of them?
She was born with wings, but no knowledge of flying. Her parents never commented. Maybe they didn’t notice, since at first the wings were more like nubs or odd bumps, and anyway, they were often too busy with the drama of the day’s many logjams and potholes to notice much but each other’s inadequacies.
I thought that I was running but actually I was leaning, creeping at most, without direction, following instinct, reacting to what threatened me, to the strange and sudden difference which had come without forewarning
He doesn’t to seduce me anymore, caress me, kiss me, say sweet things. He just spoons me a bit then pulls my panties aside and slides himself into me. After a few months of me asking him to take his time with me, he started sleeping in his office.
When the gods returned, government pretended to be afraid. One ballot replaced another. Transcendence among reptilians voted authority, under the influence. Terrorists at Homeland Security kept shopping.
If Mother Nature be my mother, I say I wish myself to have been immaculate—no mother like that for me! I say she is an enemy, not a mother. I say it is she who cast the first stone—the first among many!
“I can’t be a lovelorn ghost,” said Diane, musing aloud, “One of those forlorn, romantic yearners. I don’t think anyone really loved me, and though I was often obsessed, desperate, and too willing to debase myself, I’m not sure I ever truly loved any man.”
Billy Luck’s bones rearranged themselves on the bus headed out of Gibsonton for the Tampa train station. He looked out the window, away from his trailer, all rusted, awnin torn, bricks holdin down tarp over a portion of the roof, lookin like other junkyard leftovers from his carnival days.
You tell yourself that you’re not fragile, or if you are, you’re fragile like a bomb, because you hear the timer ticking inside you, clicking like teeth, the cadence a little too precise and insistent...
Snow grooming can have negative effects. So can the snow packing that goes along with it. Compacting the snow reduces permeability and the water holding capacity of the slopes. Heat flow rates and the length of snow retention can increase.
I decided to make it my life’s mission to heal the ugly racial split that, like a jagged, infected wound, divides our country and planet. As a white male, I had the power to do so by impregnating as many women of color as possible, helping to create a new, post-racial America, a post-racial world.
I filled in the articles on incorporation, listing myself as sole director, and stated that Regis Treadwell, Inc.’s purpose was the production of ironic, hipster comments. After I paid the hundred-dollar filing fee, it was official. I had become a corporation.
Decay Dan was about to put his arm around Arnie’s shoulder but retracted the motion. “It’s the decay, boy. Don’t worry. It’s not you, it’s the garbage of disease. She’s scared, that’s all.”
The cardboard sign read “You’ve got the Pot, I’ve got the Pan!” I smiled when I saw it—my dad would have thought it was funny. Taking out one of my earbuds, I stepped closer to the homeless guy who sat on the low wall separating the high school’s lawn from the dirty sidewalk.
"Captain Finn has his eye on you. Henceforward, your work will be supervised by Rank Two Officer Deft, the promising young woman who recommended your posting. You would do well to follow her example, just as she has followed her mother, a decorated officer from the Great Sucrose War."
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