He limps home from the war with a lopsided gait. A cripple with a dark green uniform hanging on his gaunt frame. They stare at the colorful ribbons and shiny dangling medals on his chest as they avoid his vacant, hollow eyes hidden in bony valleys of dark flesh.
Nietzsche’s cutting quote, “If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you,” is by now a redundancy. And so, when I became a San Francisco probation officer, I prepared myself to keep company with the abyss. But I had not quite realized how extensive the abyss was. I saw it in the eyes of the senior probation officers, so exhausted by massive caseloads that they were counting the months to retirement. I saw it in the faces of deputy jailors, disaffected shift workers who were all but deaf to the human clamor of the cell ranges. And, of course, I saw it in my clientele: hollow-cheeked crack heads, asocial gang bangers, vagrants with thousand mile stares. But at least the abyss could be mellow where probationers were concerned. It was mellow in the case of Joseph Shepherd, a middle-age drug peddler on probation for choking his girlfriend. Entering my office for his intake interview, he glanced at the tower of case files on my desk and chuckled. “I know you have it rough,” he remarked in a voice that could be poured over waffles. “So I plan to make it easy on you, sir.” He smiled with the insular charm of a sociopath then shook my hand with a python grip. He seemed to be a man of elemental strength—a brawn with a life of its own—yet his broad open face and puppy dog eyes set me completely at ease.
September 24th, 2014 10.15am
He sits on the comfortable sofa and assesses his surroundings. He is in a spartan, minimally furnished room on the second floor of a nondescript Syrian apartment. There is a lamp-shade to his left, and a small coffee table in front of him, on which there is a bowl containing some dates. Somebody has tried to insert some signs of civilization, and he appreciates this. Outside, staccato gunfire is the false fire-cracker sporadically popping in the distance. The automatic bursts have an industrial sound quality, as if the trigger-happy fanatics shouting their devotions are contractors hired to destroy the city incrementally by hosing it with their bullets, and their RPG rounds.
“You want?” asks one of his swarthy captors unable to develop the question any further, because of limited English.
Leaning against the grimy brick Mel scuffed her feet on the flags. She flicked a fag end into a puddle of scummy rain water. Her fingers quivered and shook, fiddling and picking at the little gold clasp on her shoulder bag. She sniffed, wiped the back of her hand across her nose. She needed a fix but couldn’t have one yet, she needed to keep her wits about her. She hated being out on the street, well of course she did but it was Saturday and so there was no choice.
Holly spots a lucky omen far downhill: every backlit tree in a row of poplars along a stretch of the Port Washington Narrows is clasped like hands in prayer, except one. A single, stunted, sloppily unfurled poplar, unloved in shadows, holds the luck. It watches out for the others; it allows them to be confidently pretty by giving the eye something less to compare them to. “Unpoplar,” as Ogden Nash might’ve put it.
The golf course trees, however, don’t say much of anything to Holly. Coddled elms and hand-fattened maples protected against the harsh November winds that howl down the Narrows like steamed souls passing through cracks in hell, have little in the way of luck. They might as well be painted onto the surface of the eye. Stage prop trees.
Continue reading “Time and Chance Happeneth to All Gods by Leila Allison”
One of the consistently pleasurable experiences in my life is reading the morning papers. I enjoy at least three physical newspapers a day. There’s something about the tactile sensation of holding newsprint and the visual expression of the news that works better for me in print than on any screen. Also, the newspaper has many other utilitarian uses, trash can liner, fish wrapper, glass cleaner, etc.
Prod Herling believed he had been followed for weeks or months, never once seeing what he thought was there. But his history came with repeated sensations.
December 24. It began today. At the grocery store, I saw a man whose hands had disappeared seem to levitate a cantaloupe into his cart. Looked through a woman’s head in the bread aisle. Haven’t run out of SeeMe myself, so no invisibility infection yet. Going to write in my journal every day. Think it’ll help get me through this.
“I do not like Indiana. I do not like the weather or the politics or the terrain. Listen, Bubbles, when your Mom comes home we’re going to have a family council. All three of us and the only item on the agenda is, should we get the hell out of Indiana ASAP. Are you with me? Can I count on your vote? Alright! I knew you had my back.”
It all began perhaps eight or nine years earlier, in a peaceful sleep, when a thin, shoelace-like string of pressure went around his chest for the third time in a week. Sixty-two year old Max Cargo paid attention to that string. It was three o’clock in the morning and his wife Pamela stirred casually at his touch. In less than an hour they were in the Emergency Room of the local hospital.
literally stories 