012.

Mike stood at the top of the concrete stairway. A warm night’s breeze snaked around his legs. He contemplated the railing. It was low enough. He could make it up there. He nervously tapped the tail of his skateboard with his foot. There was a lot of stairs to make it down.

The others, bored with Mike’s hesitance at the railing, harassed a passing bum. “Go on home and suck on your momma’s titties!” the bum said, provoking laughter from the boys. The kids didn’t know how young they were. The bum did.

He pointed accusatorially at Mike. “You gonna work in this damn building! Then YOU gonna run the kids off! Got it so safe now it’s gonna be easy to give up. You won’t even know you doing it.”

The metal ding and scraping sound of Mike’s board grinding down the rail echoed against the empty downtown buildings.

011.

“But I need an extension.”

“You haven’t attended class or even called, emailed or used office hours to tell me why.”

“I couldn’t make it here when you were available.”

“And your computer blew up?”

“It did.”

“You could’ve called. Did your phone explode too?”

“No.”

“I don’t see …”

“A demon ate it.”

“That’s the best excuse I’ve ever heard.”

“I got a copy of The Necronomicon from the interlibrary loan…”

“That’s a fictional book.”

“Heartland had a copy. I was trying to figure out how to cite it, muttering about how much I hated working on this assignment – sorry – and my job when I guess I started reading aloud…”

“And a demon sprang from the pages.”

“Yes.”

“Plausible. Let me see.”

The student handed over the book. The teacher opened it, selected a page and read some out loud. Then a demon appeared and ate the student whole.

010.

The crowd shoved her face into his and it was in this way they met. The first song collected the crowd in which she stood and pressed it against the security railing on the opposite side of which he stood. The surge brought her off her feet briefly, sending her forward, and this was the moment their sweaty foreheads collided.

In the space between learning she existed, the beautiful face suddenly and uncontrollably being hurled toward him, and their moment of impact, he imagined an entire future with her. This was the only way he could meet the woman perfect for him. This band. This night. This way.

The woman behind the beautiful face saw only the groping maelstrom before the wet collision of their skulls turned everything into stars. Claustrophobic elbows pressed into her sides, trapping her where she hadn’t wanted to go. Her brother’s band was always shit.


PEX3QEAW3YCH

009.

Holding the thorn in my hand, I thought about Jim’s leg. It was a stress fracture of some kind – I didn’t remember the details – but Jim had been walking on what was for all intents a broken leg for at least three months. “I thought it was a muscle strain,” he’d said in the hospital.

Once I’d discovered and dislodged the thorn from my side my entire chest opened up. Breathing in my first full breath I imagined Jim’s relief after his surgery. Fixing something he didn’t know was broken. The removal of something painful he didn’t know existed.

The ceramic thorn had been painted and fired in a seventh grade kiln. “May 4, 1989” was carved in it above a girl’s initials. She had curly hair but, years later, no name. She was just initials.

“See! I told you it wasn’t me!” my wife screamed.

She had a point.

007.

Sean always intended to come home. He’d said so in the letter he left on the kitchen table just over a year ago.

The unmistakable bulge in Colleen’s belly led him to suspect she didn’t think he was a man of his word. The milk bottle exploding against the wall beside his head confirmed this.

006.

A sinewy veil came to rest more heavily against me the farther away I fell from the library. The fabric, being stitched by some unseen hand, slowly became more real. It had the texture of clouds. Then silk. Wool.

The print in the books tossed across long mahogany tables faded. Limitless reading lamps coalesced into a singular light like mercury rolling across a table. I held onto the sight of them for as long as I could. I tried to keep the lights separate. I squinted to keep reading the books. These things were made from other atoms. Their dream was breaking apart.

Her breath thickened into a whisper behind my ear. A string of voiceless ideas became words. She made one last point as she gathered my bed sheets around me. “Don’t forget. Don’t forget what I showed you.”

But I did.

005.

This post is not meticulous word counting or agonizing over vocabulary. This post is not the perfect turn of phrase. It is not a metaphor. This post is the first thought. This post is the eschewing of editing. It is forward motion. It is wordplay strapped to the hood of the Oxford English Dictionary and turbo-charged by the timely release of pages chosen at random from the great canon of Western literature.

The steady click clack clack of the keyboard continues regardless of what is being typed. The words coagulate in pools of pixels strewn across your screen haphazardly. This post’s magic is lessened by autocorrect.

Print this post out and take it to the grocery store. The cashier won’t give you any discount and will look at you funny. Fold it up to make an airplane and throw it to China to visit the butterfly flapping its wings destructively.

004.

Rob’s job was to forget about this morning.  

Katie did well drinking almost the last bit in the bottle before forcing what remained on Bob.  She muttered something Rob had long stopped listening to and promptly fell to the floor.  Bob seemed apologetic before falling down himself. Kyle prattled on about something he obviously thought was important. Since Kyle usually did this, Rob tuned him out too.

Rob focused.  He looked at Frank, who’d been laid out by Kyle earlier (always entertaining,) and forced himself to look forlorn.  He had to forget the crisp morning bedsheets.  He pushed away the memory of loving eyes.  He stopped anticipating their return.  Instead, he had to be sad.

He thought about Denmark.  Approaching soldiers.  The people on the floor.  Kyle mercifully finished falling over and Rob, conjuring his solemnity, delivered his grave line: “...and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”

003.

What type of butterflies were they? She'd said once but he didn't listen. "Then the agent takes us into the living room and there's this giant, awful flutter of ____ butterflies all over the walls!" Monarch? Were there other kinds?

She didn't want the place. She'd shuffled her feet in the kitchen when the agent left them alone. Her shoes squeaked against the linoleum. "We'll have to redo everything." Sunlight from the bare window hit a line of raindrops remaining on her shoulder.

The money had been convincing. It convinced her to move in. It convinced her to move out. He spent the last of his on rubber gloves and giant bottles of vinegar, ammonia and liquor. The smell burnt. The Monarchs were getting exterminated tonight.

The first sheet came down in one enormous chunk revealing hidden messages on the wall: "If nothing changed, there'd be no butterflies."

He drank.

002.

"The greater sin then," he continued, "is to ignore the beauty surrounding you."

A star-shaped glint bounced off the brass railing from one of the lights overhead. A breeze touched the dim lamp, making it sway and the light shimmer before me. Reflecting on it, the halo shining now somehow greater than its source, it became a pinhole looking into heaven. A similar constellation shone from the choir of bottles beside the cash register. I imagined each one looked into a different heaven.

"And they do," he said. Limitless? "No. Only as many as my brothers."

"There are fewer of us the longer we're here." This from his brother sitting on a fresh napkin. "But as we go, we can show you more. Like her."

Her damaged eyes grew bright when they reached mine. Pockmarks smoothed themselves into her skin. Her scarred smile became alluringly crooked. This was powerful magic.

001.

The blinking red light brings eighty-five down to zero. Look to the left. Now the right. Turn down the stereo. The city, unlit, is nearly indistinguishable from the miles of highway leading up to it.

The deep new knocking of the engine failing falls in sync with the disappearing line of winking traffic lights ahead -- listening to something stranger, predicting, composing the staccato score of the last leg home. Shoes lay in the street soaking up rain. Roll down the window. Feel droplets of ice melt when they reach skin.

Press down slowly on the gas. Advance.