One grows tired of killing snakes, gutting lizards, crushing spiders. My furniture is full of death; there are bones in the walls. They don’t speak nearly enough. The carpet is an ocean where I am lost all the time. Outside the window, blue dust stirs in the wind. Further, the wild screams of children eat up the air…
Fiction
Polichinelle
You have taken my bones, yet charge me with the crime—then laugh at me because I walk funny; failing to mention the extraordinary willpower I exercise in order to walk without bones—
Then, you want me to forgive you, after these biological…
Prose Without Meaning
A boy claps his hands and two clay pigeons come to life and fly off into nowhere—Nazarene. Nazarene is too full of blood, too full of nothingness—
no way out except the way you came;
and I’m too old to understand…
Darling
The smell. It infiltrates. It arrives sooner than you anticipate. It always comes first. You begin sniffing drifts of it a few miles out, and as the boat draws close—I’d try to describe it but a word’s a speck of dust and this smell is a whole different world.
A Frenchman in New Orleans once told me freshly dug truffles reek of sex and soil, oil and ash, sweat and citrus. The odor on Jarvis Island doesn’t need you. Been fine alone a million years or more, and wasn’t till fifty-six did President Pierce think to stick a flag in its silver dollar stench.
Remember those Louisiana peaches we worked picking one summer? Made good money and could talk all day while we did. Good chance those trees were grown with guano. Good chance that guano got dug on Jarvis, God’s last rock tossed careless into blue Pacific oblivion. Good chance a cormorant might rest upon that rock, weary from its westward flight. Good chance a thousand might. I see a flock now amassed upon a petrified cliffedge, their sharp caws blended into one blank drone. Watch them fly. Their long black wings waver like rippled satin, their white bellies flash and vanish as they dive through the darkened evening sky. They are falling confetti, the blink of stars…
The Dandelion Tender
On a bright and cloudless Tuesday with the sun shining in the May sky, Conrad H. Moss knelt in his front yard, his fingers brushing the yellow heads of the dandelions the way you touch something you intend to keep. He stayed there longer than was necessary. Then he went inside and found the warning […]
By the Beach, Facing Ruin
“Can you come over?” The text across my phone screen lights up faintly within the increasing murkiness of my solitary day. Outside my room window, the city moves at its usual pace. I look at the phone twice, surprised to hear from that person, who I won’t name since there’s a decent chance you’ve heard […]
The Sharpness of Grass Blades
Forget about Pakistan for a while. You are on King Street, Newtown, Sydney, and here, you don’t see the moon-swallowing powdered horseshit and the smoke of two-stroke auto-rickshaws that choke the sky above Lahore. The winter sky is clear and vast, the stars glowing. The Friday night crowd of merry Sydneysiders is around you. Gay […]