The world isn’t real. The homelands are a trap. The tricks with which a place can lure you in. Some nimbus clouds that imprison you, a shooting star. The space so fragile, gluing every two things between you and everything else. Your mother warning you of the beasts in the woods, the chimeras that assume the shape of men. A man is a baby is a wound. A man is a world that swallows you whole, a red ant that nips at your bloodied toes. Your sleep is deeply troubled, your dreams sold to a troubled soul. This is your new life, the soul insists. This is the home you want to keep. You listen to the trees moaning at night, carry their whispers through the wind.…
Edward slid the eviction notices under the door of every apartment. Then he stuck poster-sized copies in the stairwell on each floor, where the tenants couldn’t fail to see them. Not that he thought it would do much good. Nor was tenants the right term—perhaps squatters was better, since at some point they stopped paying rent, yet refused to move out. Edward’s own neglect was largely responsible for the building’s decay, but he didn’t feel that he deserved the vexation they caused him. He never wanted or expected to become a landlord.
It had got to the stage where he dreaded setting foot in the place. On the top story, Mr. and Mrs. Zimmerman gazed at him with disappointment whenever he called. Then there was the bitter lady in 2B, who shrieked insults from behind her locked door.…
The job was easy. No cutting line, no wading swamp water with moccasins and alligators. Suburban work. Boca Raton, mouth of the rat, more rich people than most places, though how many more was, was something I didn’t know. This neighborhood was not all millionaires, but well off, complicated pension plans. We had no assets. Long haired county surveyors. We were tanned, in decent shape, young. We wore yellow safety vests, jeans, no shirts. These suburban folks were wary of us, but the logo on the truck gave us license to be there and made us seem a bit less dangerous. We liked to fuck with people now and then, so as we painted targets, a grid for aerial photos, and they’d ask what we were doing, I said the county decided this neighborhood was getting overcrowded, so they’re going to eliminate one household adjoining each of these circles.…
The accomplished feat echoes in a maze of hysteria. The stratosphere vast continuing dissonance for that attainable. A gypsy dances the midnight hour and writes until his fingers cry crimson. Dramatic realpolitik operas and spiritual indelibility; partnered atrophy and God. Lay tongue to contemporary whoa man’s dispute with universal concurrence. Doors of perception magnify relevance; our lives as spiritual beings closes near. The crimson covers the paper and trickles down the side of his arm in lengthy vibration. Sound is formed, a thick gelatinous blob of atmospheric time travel. A palate of absurdity met in recycled light. Drips from washed-out tunnels of dharma subconscious in streaks of nostalgia. The gypsy furls his legs in rainbow knots. The lotus hums. We are re-entering the universe, a path in which holiness engraves ritual.…
Rick Slickman ached from his neck to his toes, and his joints creaked louder than the wooden floor in his room, but he kept a smile on his face. At 72, every trip to the shared bathroom down the hall in the old house on Bewildered Street felt like an Olympic event.
“Hey Ron, how’s the freezer warehouse job?” They talked while taking care of business. “Nice seeing you. Well, someday, you will meet the woman of your dreams.” He advised, “Don’t get her pregnant.” The fellow was in his fifties and the son of his cousin Charley.
Rick made it back to his tiny room and dropped into the lumpy recliner. His wrecked right knee had ruined his dream of a college scholarship, but he had stubbornly refused to have it replaced.…
