Yeah, it’s a new blind, built it last week. Saturday. Out all day. Phyl made me a sandwich for dinner. Ham and swiss. Said she was tired. She gets tired a lot lately.
Yeah. I heard you stopped by.
You could have kept that longer, if you needed it. But thanks for bringing it back.
Yeah, you take something of somebody’s, you return it the way it was when you took it. I know, sometimes you can’t, but still…
This is without a shadow of a doubt the most disgusting, pig sty of a tattoo shop I have ever had the displeasure of visiting. It’s in the bathroom of an abandoned Shell station about ten miles off Highway 99 just south of Fresno. It reeks of urine and feces and is littered with used condoms and equally used sanitary napkins.
The walls are smeared with what looks like dried feces and graffiti written in the same substance. I hold my breath as I address the two thin, bearded white men in immaculate white doctor jackets with name tags reading, Alphonse and Dupree. Despite the doctor jackets, they are somewhat lacking in bedside manner.
I was baaaawwwwn. In a one way cul DE saaaaaac.
“Is that actually possible?”
“Is what possible?”
“A cul-de-sac being one way. How would you ever leave?”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly what?”
I set my beer on the bar and give Frank the look.
Jack drives and I give direction. He stops at a smaller war grave cemetery in the countryside around Ypres. Large trees grow here and there, two by the entrance. He puts his hand on one of them and looks up along the trunk. He caresses the bark and repeats it on the other tree. Once in a while a car drives by, bird song comes from the tree tops and if you listen carefully you can hear the canal behind the bunker. We pass a few graves on the way to the bunker. Despite the daylight the inside darkens quickly, after only a few meters. Four small rooms, too small for Jack to stand up. He strokes the smooth mold. I also do. He closes his eyes towards the inner wall and breathes in and out. In and out. I step outside. A small brook flows below, not deep at all and it probably risks freezing every winter. Jack still kneels in the darkness. I call for him and he gets to his feet. He stops by the bulletin board outside. In Flanders Fields. Jack reads the poem by John McCrae and stands silent in front of it for a minute. He looks out over the thousands of poppies and says:
It is an opinion held by many that there are no new stories in the world. There are merely endless variations on a set of themes. New ways of making them felt.
We reinvent. We deceive. We tell stories.
That was a person, right? That was a man.
Minka’s knee is already way too close to the steering wheel as she brakes hard. The car stops just short of a short tree. She knows that tree. Coca.
Shit.
She looks forward, not into the rear-view, because behind her is the curve. There’s no seeing around curves.
She hears thumping, dull, rhythmic. It’s her right hand smacking the map next to her, again-again, crinkling all of Colombia down into the seat cushion.
Shit.
Continue reading “You Don’t Say No to Ituango by Amanda McTigue”
“We’re really so sorry Craig. She was an amazing woman.”
“The best of the best.”
“She was so sweet, so gentle. We all loved her.”
“Amy was one of a kind, she didn’t deserve for this to…”
“I broke your pie dish.”
Things happen overnight. Objects materialise that weren’t there before, popping up like mushrooms, taking their permanent place in the world. Sometimes when I wake up, I see trees on the street and boxy civic buildings in the distance, that weren’t there the day before. At night I hear the workers on hushed coffee breaks, pretending not to be there.
Everything in life is said to be separated by so many degrees, six, or is it seven? Something or someone is in some way connected to someone or something else such that you discover Genghis Khan is inextricably linked to your Aunt Mabel.
Uncanny, isn’t it?
No it is not uncanny.
“I’m very proud of you.”
The words echoed out of me. Never from the heart but the mouth. There’s never been much of a direct connection there, not until now. They rattled around against the few walls that hadn’t yet sunk into the tequila-soaked brain before enduring an awkward birth from out the hole in the middle of it all.
literally stories 