Brora leaned over the balcony wall, taking a slap of wet wind to her face. She held tight to the iron baluster and wondered what it would feel like to uncurl her fingers and let herself fly. The palace courtyard was two stories below and paved with rough-cut flagstone. Some weeks earlier a young servant, suspected of treachery against the Earl, had been dangled over the east tower parapet then deliberately dropped, legs first. He hadn’t died, had been sent in agony by mule cart back to his co-conspirators in Stromness.
The balcony wasn’t high enough to kill her, but it surely was high enough to kill the poison that grew in her womb. Brora didn’t know if it was Lord Patrick’s bastard or his father the Earl’s, but she knew she wished it dead.…
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It had the power to transmogrify, to survive at any depth, to breath both air and water. It could subsist on literally anything it could scavenge from the lifeless ocean, and could swallow an entire ship in one gulp. And most improbably, though most importantly as well, it could turn invisible—even intangible. For this reason, the captain insisted, we had to search for the thing while it fed. Only when its belly was full, he told me, could it be discovered by sonar. And this was our greatest challenge, too: for the Beast, when fed, was in its heaviest, and therefore most dangerous, state. It could easily outweigh our hundred-foot catamaran. But how would we know when it fed, in any case? How would we find it?…
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It was unwise to believe,
that when Colombia departed from her mother
that evidence of her existence would rot
the same way that the night fades into memory
the second the calico punctures the sun
and bleeds out onto the water.
Her charcoal braid runs into the countryside, unravelling
becomes the gravity that divorces from God
water from the oil,
sunlight from the soil.
– Amalia Danilo…
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The god perches on a throne of bricks;
Behold a man’s body with a bull’s face.
Surrender presents to the ruler.
Outstretched arms will always reach for more.
A furnace forged of copper.
Jaw gaping, eyes radiating red,
maddening in anticipation of the meal.
Seven chambers in his chest feed air to the flames.
An archway exposes an opening into his belly;
Four stomachs are his true domain;
Rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum.
Wet acidic bile traded for dry ashes and hot coals.
Greed chars the kiln.
He is never full; feed him.
He consumes all humanity,
and it still isn’t enough.
– Maxwell Bauman…
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Tommy:
12-year-old MN Domestic Shorthair, brown tabby
After hearing the triage call through the speaker system, I waited in the doctors’ area for the nurse to return from the exam room. She gave me a brief synopsis of Tommy’s situation before I ventured in. Her somber words were a pale harbinger of what I would witness in that room.
When I opened the door, the sour smell of decay instantly turned my stomach. On the examination table, splayed in a makeshift bed of soiled terrycloth in an old Coors Light cardboard box, lay an obese cat—conscious, vocal, paraplegic. His hind limbs were cold and dead. Worse, he was lucid—acutely aware of his pain, and at least to me, pleading for deliverance.
Two women accompanied him. The first had pulled up a chair to the table where she crouched over him, whispering to him and stroking his head as I entered.…
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For Freena
1.
Frank stares one-eyed down the beer’s neck: ‘Imagine, oourf, imagine you get woken’n middle of the night.’
Al, neck bent 90° back: ‘Middle of the maaawning.’
‘Shut up wog.’ Laughter behind Frank’s scorn. ‘You’re asleep’n get woken by er demon’n your chest.’
‘Hot.’ Eric leans on the table and clasps air 9cm short of the vodka. ‘You’ve, thankee James, you’ve my attention.’
‘Whichas cursed you to repeat your entire life, everything ‘cluding that moment, over and over and over, how’d you respond?’
Eric tops up a tumbler glass: ‘Izze’ demon a redhead?’
Frank tilts head right and down with annoyed smile. The sky is black-turning-blue. Three magpies begin to chorus.
James lowers his Switch and sighs through his nose: ‘It’s about time.’
Frank raises his beer in salutation, skulls it and pats his pockets.…
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August Martin’s baby momma wasn’t there.
He looked around the courtroom, the ceilings were high, the lights bring and harsh, and the thought, somewhat absurdly, that those fluorescent lights were perfecting for such a judicial setting. August took in the faces of people around him: single parents with their kids, lone adults bobbing their heads around nervously, older men and women, probably grandparents, looking stoic, or calm. He couldn’t tell. The children, he noticed, looked happy, weaving through the aisles created by the long wooden benches in the gallery. Look at them, he thought, they don’t even know.
The family court was on the third floor of the city’s courthouse. The first and second floors were reserved from criminal and traffic hearings. He’d spent too much time downstairs to ever want to be here again, but if he had to be here – and he did – he was glad to be in upstairs for once. …
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