I saw him resting under a tree, my tree. Or at least everyone called it my tree since the incident. But since it was being called my tree, however spitefully, I would claim it as such. So I’d say my bit and I’d kick him out from under my tree. Then, I’d watch him lumber off and I’d take a nice nap. It was a good day for a nap too, balmy and quiet. Much like the day that ruined my life. Just thinking of it made me bristle with anger. But I called upon that to fuel my speech and I scampered on over to him.
“I need to talk to you.” He slowly craned his neck to look up at me. He blinked his beady little eyes at me, and slowly, ever so slowly, opened his mouth.…
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Anyone who saw me reading Things We Lost in the Fire in public must have thought I was suffering and in deep pain. Every story in Mariana Enriquez’s debut collection had me grimacing and squirming, shifting uncomfortably in my seat. But her stories are so thoroughly transporting that I lacked the self-awareness to care. I was far away in Argentina, worried about the news of the decapitated child flashing across the television screen, and the one-armed girl who went missing in a haunted house, and on a murder tour of Buenos Aires. Enriquez’s stories all center around life in Argentina, often detailing the lives of disadvantaged youth. These stories are dark and unsettling, written so beautifully that the whole experience of reading them leaves you in a macabre trance.…
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I know the girl with the ashes in her hair,
the one with the dreams piled like logs, the one
who goes up in smoke because her daddy promised her the world
and who is gone, as fast as he came.
I know what it feels like to be those morphing feet,
those unseeding pumpkins, to return to a mouse from a stallion,
to pray and pray in someone’s locked room
that that someone, somewhere
will find you.
– Penney Knightly…
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With a gravitational sense of exhaustion, Heather puts her machine to sleep and wheels herself back from the white desk in the grey cubical. She sits shut-eyed for a moment, feels crazed, resists an urge to slam her coffee mug through the black screen.
9:11 p.m. as her head rises above the partitions separating the other cubicles, most of which are still occupied with foreheads reflecting the shine of monitors. Maree is in the adjacent box and she doesn’t notice as Heather stares down at her. Maree’s eyes are bloodshot and her mousy hair frayed and dry from the air conditioning. Her face seems barely held together by thick makeup.
“You nearly done?” says Heather.
Maree starts a little and looks up with a horrible unchanged expression of emptiness, and then her eyes blink a few times, registering the human form.…
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1
Dearest Bob,
I’m having a lovely time at Clockworld. At noon yesterday, three hundred grandfather clocks chimed at once. I had to cover my ears, it was so loud. They have clock-themed books, analog and digital clocks, and an entire room dedicated to Mickey Mouse watches. They even have pocket watches like the one your grandfather used to carry. I considered buying you one, but decided against it.
I know you forbade me to bring another clock home, but I did. I did it for me.
Love,
Margaret …
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“How long will I live?”
The doctor’s office is painted sickly green, and the fluorescents above make it only look sicker. The doctor himself has a tie with cartoons on it, lurid yellow and bright red, that draws Theo’s eyes even after he’s asked the question that has weighed on his mind for so long.
“Well.” The doctor looks up into his brain for the answer, finding only the ammunition for a dozen or so questions. “Do you smoke? Do you drink? Are you sexually active? Do you exercise? How many hours a week? Do you sleep well? Do you like yourself? Do you drive a nice car? Who are you dating? Do they have dyed hair? How much red meat do you eat every week?”…
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the sun licks brittle leaves,
golden shiver of revelation.
the lies I told myself pierce
this vale, our decayed gulf
stark yellow now.
cold resolution quickens,
birdless horizon unveiled,
shadows on clouded eyes.
breath leaves in spirals, blooming
chill tendrils along obscure paths.
flickering cressets now naked and unhooded,
blurred tales raked aside, false and fallen.
look: here
the stories of trees and stones, moss and salt;
a book of signs, sigils written with rain–
these were never hidden.
bared truth beneath a smile’s distraction;
there, waiting beside remembered footprints,
calling across the clearing between us
in the dying sunlight.
– Fritz Eifrig…
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