February 2012
23 posts
1 tag
3 tags
From the first time he went to stay with his mother, Bruno knew he would never be accepted by the hippies; he was not and never would be a noble savage. At night, he dreamed of gaping vaginas. It was about then that he began reading Kafka. The first time, he felt a cold shudder, a treacherous feeling, as though his body were turning to ice; some hours after reading The Trial he still felt numb...
Throne of souls
I think my beer was empty, which is why I lifted it into the light, to see what was still swimming in there. My friend, my coworker—he saw me and, I thought, understood my search, my head listing in a buoyant way. When I am curious I approach weightlessness. I look as if I am fainting into an investigation. He didn’t know any of this, just knew that I enjoyed beer and deliberated about how,...
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Aunt Dahlia’s face grew darker. Hunting, if indulged in regularly over a period of years, is a pastime that seldom fails to lend a fairly deepish tinge to the patient’s complexion, and her best friends could not have denied that even at normal times the relative’s map tended a little towards the crushed strawberry. But never had I seen it take on so pronounced a richness as...
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“Not gonna ask about Steely Dan.”
“A lot of Steely Dan songs transpire on historic Brooklyn docks, probably.”
“If that’s the case I quit grad school.”
“You can’t go to grad school without being somehow implicit in Steely Dan.”
‘So!’ he said, at length, and it came as a complete surprise to me that fellows ever really do say ‘So!’ I had always thought it was just a thing you read in books. Like ‘Quotha!’ I mean to say, or ‘Odds bodikins!’ or even ‘Eh ba goom!’
Still, there it was. Quaint or not quaint, bizarre or not bizarre, he had said ‘So!’ and...
Marco
I touched up his skin tone, carefully, microscopically, and when I had finally adjusted it to a perfect smoothness between head and new body, I noticed a shimmer in the screen, as if his whole face were sighing, relaxing into the neck.
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“Dude, be honest, are you gonna go to that [redacted].”
“Dude, the whole point of me going is to take part in disaster.”
Interior of life
It means he is full of blood and sinew, blood and sinew, which fills out that last region of boot, creeps up just barely into his eyeholes. More of it than any unexamined man can handle, rich deposits of it in his elbows. Magnified from space he is woven red streams engaging in a flex.
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Delay
Miles held his cellphone into the dim, subtracted space between train platform and track and announced to no one, “According to my phone, the train is already late.” The train arrived just then, I think, a tectonic healing in our experience of minutes, which was approaching some kind of full stop. I tried to assure myself, oh, eventually we’ll float. The train rolled slowly in,...
Essentialists
Dude behind me in the cafeteria line, head supporting a brazed-blonde mullet, holds a tray on which lies a copy of Finnegans Wake and a bag of chips.
I don’t mean to exaggerate. I knew what words meant, more or less. A cup was a cup, a window a window. That much was clear. Was that much clear? There began to be moments of hesitation, fractions of a second when the thing I was looking at refused to accept any language. Or rather, between the thing and the word a question had appeared, a slight pause, a rupture.
I recall one evening, it...
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