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Maggie and I sit on our front porch at dusk. We drink ice tea and watch the sun sink. In our fifty-five years of marriage, we have rarely missed a sunset.
Today, the sun bleeds through the haze, and the horizon is apple red. Maggie rocks in her rocker, knitting a shawl. I smoke a pipe filled with Captain Black tobacco.
Every morning he takes a Post-It, records exactly what she’s wearing, and sticks it on his desk phone. Today it’s “red blouse, green pants, purple sweater.” This way he can tell the police if he has to.
His sister had suggested he contacted the TV production company that made the programme about hoarders. Those strange folks who collect things from bins, who live in houses so filled with clutter that they’ve been reduced to a small window of space in a back bedroom. Sometimes they’re rescued through a gap in the rubbish bags by the fire brigade. They argue until they’re blue in the face about the possible future utility of a broken coat hanger or a plastic duck.
I’ve been running long enough that everything in me wants to collapse and the grass is looking like an awfully good pillow. Every morsel of my body is getting back at me for those sports I never played and the exercise I never did. Just to rub it in, time slows to a caterpillar’s pace. You could solve a Rubik’s cube in the time it takes me to make one step. Slowly, I evacuate my body parts. It’s a skill I spend my gym periods perfecting. You try and imagine you don’t even have a body. I start with my legs. They still move but I just don’t feel them anymore, like an employee that keeps on coming to work even after you fired him. Then I release my kidneys, pancreas, ovaries, and all those other miscellaneous organs. Finally I reach the basketball court, light splattered liberally across it. I take a breather and check my phone, just in case she texted me back. She hasn’t.
Continue reading “Rounds Forty-Four Through Forty-Eight of a Game I Made Up by Daniel Olivieri”
On the horizon, out of the dust of the Harvest Road, comes a small trotting tribe of misfits.
Keeper’s eternal eye opens in the sleeper’s mind, and the two become a selfless one. This doesn’t mean a lack of selfishness–the meaning is literal–no sense of I is present; no sense of Other intrudes. There are no assessing thoughts affected by personal prejudice; nor questions; nor judgements; nor reactions; nor guesswork. Only a pure stream of information passes across the stage of the sleeper’s mental theatre. The players, though strangers, are known to the sleeper, and the recent past returns to its former place in the now.
Continue reading “The First Symptom is Death (Part II) By Leila Allison”
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“Attribute neither the magnificent nor the malign to the mysterious mind of a magic god as an excuse to stop thinking about what has happened.”–Czsminoothe, circa 1800 b.c.e.
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“You will remember everything.”–Eternity
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Continue reading “The First Symptom is Death (Part I) by Leila Allison”
Out there, it was a storm rioting, the type that Marion faced when arriving at the Bates Motel, and I was sitting in this stranger’s freshly vacuumed Mitsubishi with my muddy, turn-out-not-to-be-waterproof hiking boots, him telling me how he hadn’t been home in nearly two decades. That, back there, he had a wife still mourning his death. That his daughter wasn’t the little princess she used to be, but married recently and was pregnant now with two little princesses herself. His voice a warm drone against the rain that was drumming against the Mitsubishi’s metal frame. I was just happy that I was in there, and not stuck at the last lonely gas station, biding my time with overpriced Cheetos and overweight truck drivers.
Emilio is sitting across from me. I can barely understand his broken English as it mixes with his native Italian tongue. They sometimes overlap. He makes a new language of which I understand very little. He is going on about something, something about a child and a woman. He is talking fast and touching his face and tapping his mouth with his finger. I’m thinking that I am the woman that he is going on about and that he is trying to describe. The child, I do not know. Emilio is talking fast and I’m giving it my best effort.
