About twenty-five years after the deaths of Bonnie and Clyde on a country road in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, two boys were playing gangsters in their getaway car, a broken-down ‘55 Ford Crown Vic in the driveway at 266 North Campus Avenue in the City of Upland, County of San Bernardino, State of California. Every law enforcement group of those government entities was in pursuit, including perhaps the FBI.
The fugitives were speeding along at ninety miles per hour, bouncing in their seats along a bumpy country road, leaning with the treacherous curves. Several cop cars and state troopers were closing in, bullets piercing the heavy-gauge steel of the sedan. The driver revved the old V-8 in his throat, downshifting through the guttural gears on the steering-column shift (though his feet hardly touched the pedals) to take the curves and shredding rubber around high nasal squeals.…
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Gary stepped into the bathroom and sighed. He’d been wanting to disconnect the app-deck from the bathroom mirror and delete the app, but the deck had cost him $50, not to mention $100 for the required one-year subscription. The ad popped up one evening while he was perusing the profiles on Soul Mates. Need a personal coach who will help cultivate your perfect look and help you present your best self to potential partners? With Mirror Mirror, you are just one click away from finding your ideal mate in days!
The novelty of the app and speaker for his car had worn off quickly.
Gary flipped the switch, galvanizing the insectile buzz of florescence which flooded the bathroom. He stopped and looked at his reflection from the doorway.…
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WANTING
Wanting is problematic. Maybe. Of course we all want things. I want a lot of things. But sometimes I wonder if I actually want what I want, or if the wanting is covering up something else, some kind of desire. Which I know is also wanting. Or maybe a fear, or an anxiety. If I got the thing I think I want, I might not want it at all. Or maybe I would just want something else. And maybe I am doing the grass is greener thing.
My friend just told me a funny story about her husband driving her crazy by flailing around in his sleep, and making horrible snorty snoring noises, and how she wanted to fling him out the window, or maybe smother him with a pillow, and how amazing it feels to sleep on her own.…
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When I told you how I’d
love to take a picture of you—
I was talking about you as
you were then, in motion,
eyes alight,
hair framed in a halo
of the dying sunlight,
looking, looking, looking—
at something far away,
something through the glass
and the engines, the asphalt
and the crawling things—
something far from
this wretched place,
something far from me.
I wished to capture you as
you were then, in a moment that
we would never return to.
But the memory, I suppose,
is permanent enough.
A slow-developed shot,
already murky,
like vintage film.
Someone else will have you
that way again, and it won’t be me—
But at least I can hold on to this.
I will have you
in my mind, if nowhere else,
just as you were and
will never be again.…
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We stole a gun from the safe and went out to the fields, where the moon lay like a serrated wound on the face of the night sky, and pointed the boom end at cows. Dumb sentinels of pastures overgrazed and nearing depletion. They sat on all fours like a scarecrow pushed over. My buddy held them in his sight for a long time, slowly breathing through his whole body, his skin a membrane he’d been trying to shirk off, and he said to me, almost a whisper, bang.
But that wasn’t good enough for me. When I got big I would go out to bars and sit in the corner and stare out at the shifting forms, men and women in all different kinds of couplings looped together, blended into the same silhouette, and I would try and project my own face onto theirs.…
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Almost a year has passed since I met Valerie at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City. I had been waiting for a client who wanted to meet me there and then find a place to discuss a project.
I was in my finest three-piece Brioni suit, leaning against one of the endless cosmetic counters, when two women approached me.
“Can you help us?” the older woman asked. She was over fifty and strikingly pretty. The younger woman, the spitting image of her, had to be her daughter.
“Yes, of course I can help you. I would be delighted, but you will have to pay cash.”
“Why?” the mother asked, as surprised as her daughter.
“Because I don’t work here,” I said, unable to contain a smile.…
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The wreck is a weird
symphony: the exploded
air bags rumpled as
a just-empty bed, the way
the metal bends like her
jacket that day at Brinton
Timber, the buttery smear
of the engine smashed up
to the skeleton.
There were two
dents for her knees, a cracked
plastic brassiere, and gaps
where the fine curves
of the doors won’t spoon,
and a delicate timbre when
the control knobs tumbled
from the console.
The paint
curls as paper from the book,
one window tossed to ice
cubes, one streaked like hawk
feathers, and the shattered
truss sets the hull down,
like a woman being beaten
who clings to the ground.
– Jared Pearce
Author’s Note: “What sounded” was a poem that came from my going to a wrecked car in order to retrieve any further property from it; we had been hit head-on.…
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