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.…
After the shipwreck had finally been pulled onto the beach, back in March, a salvage crew kept cutting up the crab boat’s hull and cockpit. The workers had shooed her off like a small girl, even though they must have seen the trash bags she carried full of the styrofoam, fiberglass, and plastic every new tide spat at the beach. If she wanted to play, they had scolded her, she could do so farther north, past where the creek emptied into the ocean. She’d kept silent through their tirades, maybe afraid of worse consequences; the beach was officially closed. The stink of leaked diesel clung to everything she touched. Yet she couldn’t stay home and kept coming back, filling bag after bag with rope, floats, and styrofoam.…
What grace given as redemption can this grace be now? she wonders, walking past his corner again in the glassy white glare of 6 o’clock, seeing what little is left of what he gave his life to.
This was a man who worked the same job for twenty-seven years, fixing machines made by other men, machines meant to break from wear, from neglect, from war. A man who worked in a concrete box on the corner of Patterson and Main in a soiled, quarter-sleeved jumpsuit, washing away the work each night back home – chassis grease, used gear oil, human sweat.
He was a man who lived in ways people couldn’t see, a “good” man, the neighbors said, who only charged what he thought his work was worth.…
In all the horror movies I’ve ever seen, the haunted are powerless to the ghosts who do the haunting. Ghosts invariably arrive on their own terms: a quick flash of their reflection in the bathroom mirror when the victim wipes away steam; a vase that, unprovoked, falls to the floor and shatters at the living’s feet; a shiver that raises goosebumps all over a grieving lover’s body on the hottest day of the year; a disembodied moan outside a widow’s bedroom window on a windless night. So when my mother died after threatening to haunt me for eternity in her last voicemail message (which I immediately deleted) if I didn’t return her call, I expected to be haunted in all the usual ways and, knowing how creatively spiteful my mother was in life, in ways I could never imagine.…
People claim to have been crushed by love. I doubt it. Alien compression most likely, pressed for time, squeezed into a photo booth or lost in the grip of gravity. I often contemplate what 3 Gs might do to an unwary spine. But I won’t take the fall, there’s still spring in my step. Once on a field trip I gazed out the window of a trans-galactic express and immense objects appeared out of nowhere, threatening to demolish the ship. I rubbed my lucky wart and secured safe passage for saint and sinner alike. Go ahead roll your eyes or roll the dice. Matters not. When it’s your time to go well there you go. Keep your eyes wide open amigos you can be crushed by nearly everything.…
