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The pink sunrise alighted on N's closed eyelids. Though the tide was low and far off, its sound still permeated his dreams in bits and pieces. Slowly and all of a sudden N opened his eyes and was awake. He sat upright and dusted the sand out of his curly hair, and before he could notice the wind or the salty air the thought entered his mind: K was still living at his place. K was still sleeping in…
In every man’s life there are certain events that are said to transform him from a boy into a man. For me, it was two separate but deeply connected events, one nested inside the other. Perhaps not surprisingly the outer event was my wedding ceremony, and I’d be hard-pressed to find a man whose wedding was not equally as transformative. The inner event however was something that I witnessed long…
I awoke in a holy silence from that darkened womb where I’ve remained a child. My eyelids shut tight, my ears sewn with a thread from a loom that I had made so long ago I’d forgotten why. Strewn about too are a collection of trinkets so cherished and worn, though I was told to worship them. And I heeded the command so eagerly, but mostly just when my masters watched. They said “otherwise you’ll be…
A woman is humming in the common space now and I feel very calmed by her, though she doesn’t know me and I don’t know her. Or maybe I’m just easily calmable right now because I hardly got any sleep last night; there’s no insulation in my room and it must’ve been as cold as it was right outside my window, if not somehow colder. I awoke every hour and a half—if you could even call my shivering dips…
I knew that the two of us had grown slightly crazy in the few months we’d been living together, but honestly I didn’t realize the full extent of it until that one pale-skied Friday in November. And it wasn’t just the lung thing, or the car thing, either. Yes I think V was crazy for pulling what he pulled, but perhaps I was even crazier for letting it slide, and then for loving him all the more so.…
There is nothing other than this molten mass of iron we call life. Mostly though we only hear the hiss and crackle when it plunges and cools. A black knife is raised up under the stars like a sacrament. We pray to our creation, hoping that it will save us from a return to that white hot orb of which we were born. The ancients spoke of dust and ashes—but our origins are even more without form than…
Termites on the Bridgetop at Forest Park are red and small and easy to mistake and smudge with your finger. And the chipmunks cross the road in silent skipping, scattering amongst the leaves. Thou shalt not eat animals. The pine trees, though, are eternal. Heat that lifts the pine air off of the ground is warming on your skin which was burned by ivy. ברוך אתה 'ה אלוהינו מלך העולם, בורא פרי העץ
In his dream the other week Dr. Lintel stood hand-in-hand with his five-year-old son David at the edge of a nauseatingly-high cliff, and from the top of that precipice it was somehow apparent—in the way dreams often are—that they were the last two people on earth. He whispered to his son as they both stared into the abyss: “We don’t know why we’re here David, but we’re going to find out once and…
She let a cloud of smoke exit her mouth, and then rubbed her eyes and face with her left hand. The smoke didn’t come out in plumes or rings; in fact, she hardly exhaled it at all, instead just letting it fall out from between her lips in a limp cloud, as if she simply couldn’t be bothered to push out the smoke with her breath. Her hair was similarly limp. Thin and dyed a maroon-reddish color, it…
“Today is the day that I change my name.” The previously unchanged-named boy proudly declared, suddenly standing up from the street curb. “From today on, I will have a new sort of relationship with all things, people and places alike.” “And what sort of relationship will that be?” Plain old originally-named Anabelle asked from down below, still on the curb busy burning an anthill with her…