Let's play a little word association game. I'll start. Are you ready for the word? I'll wait.
Ready now? Okay.
Potatoes.
No, now you say something else. Let's try again.
Potatoes.
No, see, you just repeated my word again. This isn't an echo game, you're not supposed to be the Grand Canyon. Let's try again.
Potatoes.
Okay, seriously, say what comes to mind when I say the word potatoes! I know, obviously the word potatoes comes to mind, but you have to say something else. Because that's how the game works! Come on, son, you're better than this!
What's that?...
He was dancing the enchanting dance of resurrection: Resurrection of his father.
His noble father that had told him everything: how to hunt, how to dress, how to speak, how to love. He was waving his arms frantically above his head as had been told when stranded. Stranded with no food, no shelter, no companion.
He pointed towards the only thing familiar to him: a round weathered ball with the threads worn out and its surface dull. He looked pleased as he glanced towards its vicinity - almost relieved even - as if it was the only thing tying him...
Now, supposedly, if I start out a hundred meters ahead of Achilles, and Achilles is travelling five times faster than me, when he has covered that hundred meters, I will nevertheless have travelled twenty. And when he travels twenty, I will have travelled four. And when he travels that four, I will have traveled .8 meters, and so on and so forth, such that Achilles will never reach me. I win.
But Zeno, the cur, says that, eventually, Achilles overlaps me. "We know it from experience," he tells us. God damn experience! I know that if Achilles is continually arriving...
Fish meant for market was found dumped in a bin outside the school. The mother believed the rotting smell would disguise her hidden bundle beneath. Her post-birth addled brain forgetting only papers were supposed to be in that container and what she tried to dispose would be eventually found.
Margarita wasn't a bad person. She did what she thought best at the time. Took her baby to the church and left her on the steps timing so the priest would find it. The bloody towels, rags, her own clothing stuffed below the fish. She kept the umbilical cord and placenta....
"She'd have preferred the electric chair," Melanie said.
A half grin sat on her lips as she stirred the crinkle fry in the ketchup far longer than anyone stirs crinkle fries in ketchup.
"You know when they were discovering the electric chair, they would like pay kids to bring in stray dogs and cats to electrocute to get the voltage just right," Beloved said.
"That's horrible," Melanie replied and she dropped the crinkle fry. "Why would you say that?"
"They finally tested it on an elephant!" Beloved said.
"Wait, who is they?" Melanie asked. She lifted her nose in the...
She blew out the candles on her birthday cake, and the world we knew was extinguished. The next day, streamers and half-deflated balloons still taped to the walls and ceiling, Dad came home and pulled Mom into the kitchen and they spoke in whispers.
Jenny looked at me and snuck up to the television and turned down the volume, so we could hear was they were saying, but Mom knew and stuck her head in and told us to go down to Grandma's for the afternoon.
We walked down the block, turned right at the corner store, left after two...
The two of them sat there, staring at their glasses. They each had their of Johnny Walker, black for one, red for the other.
The bar tender walked by, they almost simultaneously motioned toward their glasses.
The pour seemed slow, but they paid no attention to it. Garbed in black suits, with white shirts and black ties, they hunched over their vessels, as if protecting the precious liquid from some evil darkness.
"I just can't wrap my head around it, Gabriel."
"I know Joseph."
"I mean, today was one of those days you read about, you watch in movies, man."...
The sky was blue, the grass was green and the little clouds were as fluffy as the picture in a child's reading book. All was well with the world. And on her swing, she could see above the park, above the neat hedges and the flowering bushes. She could, as she swung higher still, see over the row of terraced houses and into the street beyond. Over the flowering cherry trees and the neat gardens with their blossoming plants, over the heads of the middle class and middle aged gardeners and housewives and shoppers and busy bodies of the suburban...
She found the key on the internet.
It seemed silly, a little, to buy a physical and tangible thing like that to open up a locked trunk in a dream. But it was necessary, she was sure. She'd been trying to get into the trunk in the bedroom of the house of doors - the house she returned to over and over again in her lucid dreams - for years. For as long as she could remember.
The trunk, solid and wooden, banded with brass and locked. It was impenetrable. She'd tried peering through the keyhole, picking the lock, everything....
Pointing skyward, his finger aflame.
"Can you come here a minute?"
Trying to catch the attention of surf but drawing only seagulls, which landed on his fingertip and looked around stupidly in the low sky of November.
My whole life is a finger on fire, and wrong things coming to help. A man wearing a hat. Some flotsam. A ship in the dead of night, a drunken captain